Rat­ing: 3 stars out of 5

sfSound’s lat­est con­cert on Sat­ur­day 23 Jan 2010 was head­lined by Ligeti’s well-known Cham­ber Con­certo, which closed the con­cert, and was pre­ceded by 10 shorter pre­mières by up-and-comping Bay Area com­posers, mainly stu­dents, but also includ­ing some inter­est­ing other per­spec­tives, like Deer­hoof drum­mer Greg Saunier. This con­cept has some def­i­nite advan­tages. It affords oppor­tu­ni­ties to a lot of less expe­ri­enced com­posers in a rel­a­tively eco­nom­i­cally way, while at the same time ensur­ing an audi­ence for them by pro­gram­ming a new music “hit” like Ligeti’s Cham­ber Con­certo.

How­ever, the for­mat also presents some chal­lenges to audi­ence and ensem­ble, because a lot of rel­a­tively diverse music is pre­sented in the course of an evening. (more…)

Rat­ing: 3.5 stars out of 5

George Ben­jamin was the San Fran­cisco Sym­phony’s composer-in-residence this month for this year’s instal­la­tion of their Project San Fran­cisco. Truth­fully, I was not famil­iar with Benjamin’s work, but it came highly rec­om­mended by many of my col­leagues, and so I looked for­ward to hear­ing it. I attended the SFS’s final con­cert with Ben­jamin on Sat­ur­day night (16 Jan 2010), where he con­ducted two of his pieces: Ringed by the Flat Hori­zon (1980), the piece that brought him to inter­na­tional atten­tion, and a more recent piece, Duet (2008; see YouTube video below). In gen­eral, while I found Benjamin’s pieces highly com­pe­tent works, I don’t think he lives up to the (per­haps unfairly) high stan­dard peo­ple attribute to him. (more…)

The New Year is off to a busy start, with sev­eral pre­mières com­ing up and a vari­ety of new projects in the works.

• On 25 Jan 2010, Brazilian-Canadian pianist Luciane Car­dassi pre­mières my new piece, Hockey Story, on the Hap­pen­ing 2010 New Music Fes­ti­val in Cal­gary. This piece, on the theme of hockey, is for speak­ing pianist and electronics.
• Shortly there­after, on 19 Feb 2010, I’m off to Hol­land for the pre­mière of a piece com­mis­sioned by ork­est de erepris. This piece, Elegy of Oth­ers, is a col­lage, with quo­ta­tions rang­ing from Vivaldi to R.E.M. and Anto­nio Car­los Jobim.
• Finally, Feb­ru­ary wraps up with the orches­tral read­ing (28 Feb 2010) of a sec­tion from the opera, Oksana G., that libret­tist Colleen Mur­phy and I have been devel­op­ing for sev­eral years. We con­ducted a suc­cess­ful piano-vocal work­shop with Tapes­try New Opera at the Banff Cen­tre in August and now the Cana­dian Opera Com­pany is doing a read­ing, as part of the long-term devel­op­ment process for this piece.

These events mark the cul­mi­na­tion of sev­eral projects from 2009. Sev­eral other projects, includ­ing some uncon­ven­tional ensem­bles and the use of unusual media, are under devel­op­ment for 2010. Addi­tional details will be posted when available.

I was intrigued last month when I received a mes­sage from web­site AudioMi​cro​.com ask­ing if I was inter­ested in a link exchange. They seem to be an inter­est­ing mix of a vari­ety of dif­fer­ent musi­cal “ser­vices” rolled into one, and I thought they might serve as a good model for com­posers who, like myself, are inter­ested in cre­at­ing musi­cal value online. (more…)