Classical Music News

BBC News
Southern Pro Musica set to provide classical music in Guildford
BBC News
A £60,000 grant for a freelance chamber orchestra to provide classical music in Guildford is set to be approved on Thursday. It comes after the borough council decided to stop Guildford Philharmonic Orchestra's £190,000 grant last year. The authority ...
Guildford Council may fund classical music provision with £60k grantEagle Radio

all 3 news articles »

Jamaica Gleaner
Music research project secures funding
Jamaica Gleaner
She was speaking during a signing of a contract between Music Unites Foundation and the JN Foundation to do extensive classical music research, at the Jamaica National Building Society (JNBS) chief office in Half Way-Tree, St Andrew, recently. "Jamaica ...

Kate Miller-Heidke's slow-lane to Damascus
Limelight Magazine
Classical music wasn't my passion – it seemed too foreign and old- fashioned. As a lifelong lover of classical music, my mother did her best to encourage me. She had subscribed to the ABC Red Concert Series from the age of ten, and started going on ...

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New York Times
The Classical Music Network
ConcertoNet
One shouldn't call this a contemporary version of the Second Coming. But the apprehension, whispers, rumors and joy before James Levine made his return to the stage of Carnegie Hall after two years was more than palpable. Since Mr. Levine is ...
Why are Opera Fans so Fascinated with James Levine?WQXR Radio (blog)

all 20 news articles »

The Guardian (blog)
Contemporary classical music guide round-up
The Guardian (blog)
Well, it was never going to be possible to be comprehensive. Comprehensible, hopefully, but all-encompassing? Impossible. With only 50 weeks to accommodate a representative selection of the creators of the thing we call contemporary classical music ...

Arthur Goodridge performs jazz, classical and world music in Medford
Wickedlocal-Med Ford
But I was also studying classical music and was interested in the French composers, Ravel, Debussy and Satie. Other influences were Chopin, Spanish guitar and later some of the turbulent Russian pianist/composers like Rachmaninoff and Prokofiev.

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Get Out: Big Parade Los Angeles, Long Beach LGBT Pride & Classical Music
LAist
Get Out: Big Parade Los Angeles, Long Beach LGBT Pride & Classical Music. music_box_stairs.jpg. Music Box Stairs (Photo by Non Paratus via the LAist Featured Photos pool). STAIRS: So The Big Parade Los Angeles already kicked off its punishing route ...

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Love of footy is no bar to music
The Australian
No one can write about classical music having "no social worth" and say "most footy fans would rather cut off their fingers than swap their jerseys and scarves for a seat at the SSO" without expecting someone to hold them to account. Digital Pass $1 ...

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Charles Gayle in 'Rising Tones Cross'

Jazziz
July 1999

The early 1980s were a period of transition for the avant-garde fringe in New York. The loft scene – the days in which Ornette Coleman's hom on Prince Street and Sam Rivers' Studio Rivbea provided workshops for experimenters to develop their art –was drawing to a close, and the arrival of the Knitting Factory and its explosive impact on the Downtown scene was still a few years away, it fell to the artists themselves to create new opportunities.

As chronicled in Ebba Jahn's 1984 [sic – 1985, actually] documentary, Rising Tones Cross (just released on video), two such motivated visionaries were bassist William Parker and dancer Patricia Nicholson. The film centers around the Sound Unity Festival, a precursor to the couple's current Lower East Side bash, the now four-year-old Vision Festival.

It was German bassist Peter Kowald, on an extended sojourn in New York that included a hefty formative role in Sound Unity, who convinced Jahn to make a film about the upstart festival. "It was clear to me that I wanted to have a German protagonist and an American protagonist," Jahn says. Her friend Kowald was the German of choice, naturally, but America's representative had yet to be confirmed. "Originally, I had thought of Ornette Coleman. But on the day I arrived, first thing in the morning I met Charles Gayle, the most un-famous saxophonist at the time in New York City." That meeting, combined with a choice encounter with a cameraman who was working on Shirley Clark's Coleman documentary, Made in America, led Jahn to shift her focus "from the most famous avant-garde saxophonist to the most un-famous."

Instead of simply a compilation of festival footage – though performances by musicians like Jemeel Moondoc, Don Cherry, and Peter Brötzmann abound in the film – Rising Tones Cross was intended to be a tool for music education. "For many people who saw the film in Germany, it was the first time they ever heard this type of music," she says. "They said in the beginning they had difficulty. But after a while, they could, all of a sudden, hear it 'click' in their ears, and something opened up."

To help facilitate this reaction, Jahn put the most difficult music at the end of the film, easing the audience into it gradually. She also included a number of scenes intended to dispel common myths about free jazz. For example, when Brötzmann's strapping 11-piece ensemble – boasting a tenor phalanx comprised of the leader, Gayle, David S. Ware, and Frank Wright – seems to be blowing chaotically onstage, Jahn's camera pans across Brötzmann's diagrammatic score to reveal an extraordinary amount of careful detail, planning, and scripting – the architecture girding the maelstrom.

And having overcome an initial distrust and some reluctance to take part in the film, the enigmatic Gayle is revealed to be affable, erudite, and quite well-versed in jazz history, a far cry from his dark public persona and stage presence. "He was perceived as a philosopher in Germany," says Jahn.

Now that the film is available on video – through Jahn's Website (http://members.aol.com/FilmPals/store.htm) and through NorthCountry Distribution – Jahn looks forward to her film reaching new viewers. "I would like it to be in colleges," she says, "where people learn about jazz. I think it's a good tool for people wanting to learn a little bit about this music. Nobody else has made a film about this music. And at the end of the century, the time is probably right for it."

=====

The Vision Festival, now in its 18th season, will be held June 12-16 at Roulette. Rising Tones Cross was issued on DVD by the FMP label in 2005; I have no idea whether it's still available, but you can watch the first 26 minutes of it here. Below, the Peter Brötzmann scene I described in the article, mistakenly labeled as the Vision Festival (which was launched in 1996).

Sheffield Telegraph
Chamber music champions land classical 'Oscar'
Sheffield Telegraph
Artistic Director Angus Smith and Education and Outreach Manager Polly Ives accepted the award from Dame Janet Baker at the annual event - regarded as the Oscars of the British classical music industry - at the Dorchester Hotel. Music in the Round, ...

Mount Tabor violist carries on tradition of classical music in Mountain Lakes
Dailyrecord.com
Roberts, a violist, became president of the MacDowell Club in Mountain Lakes, one of Morris County's oldest classical music clubs, after she attended a club-sponsored recital by violinist Jorge Avila at the St. Francis Residential Community Recital ...

John Shiurba

Jazziz
May 1999

Bay Area guitarist and free-improvisor John Shiurba hit upon the idea of his new Limited Sedition record label soon after buying a CD burner last year: "I just wanted to put out CDs of my music, and music that I think is worthy," he explains. "But the idea of shopping tapes of this kind of music to labels seemed like a dead end. When the CD writer opened the door to small editions, it just occurred to me that here was the perfect medium for improvised music. If you have an audience of five people, then you can make five CDs and not have a closet full of aluminum coasters."

Free improvisation and the recording industry have endured a troubled union from the beginning. Improvisation is a fleeting mode of musical communication, felt by many to exist purely in the moment of creation, and to be resistant to documentation. And the audience for the music is so comparatively small that it renders recording improv too costly for most record companies, anyway.

But the falling cost of home-recording technologies has enabled less marketable musicians to document their work and to sell it to enthusiasts in a creative and cost-effective way. Shiurba's Limited Sedition (www.sfo.com/~shiurba/sedition.html), for instance, documents his own music and that of his fellow Bay Area improvisors with extremely limited-edition runs on recordable CD (or CD-R).

Such a D.I.Y. approach is not without precedent. In 1973, British guitarist Derek Bailey released a series of four solo-guitar recordings on reel-to-reel tape, making individual custom copies to order. (These rare recordings were issued on CD as Incus Taps on the Organ of Corti label in 1996.) But Shiurba is among the first to devote an entire record label of strictly limited, numbered editions of well under 100 copies that will never be re-pressed. He has released eight hand-designed recordings since founding Limited Sedition last July. His production costs average around four dollars per disc. This, coupled with grassroots promotion via the Internet, helps him turn modest profits into new recordings quickly in order to keep pace with the rapid evolution of the music and its creators.

Already, Shiurba is not alone. Saxophonist David Gross has begun to release limited-edition CD-Rs of music recorded live at the Zeitgeist Gallery in Cambridge, Massachusetts on his Tautology label (members.aol.com/Tautology3). And Splatter Trio percussionist Gino Robair, who runs the more conventional Rastascan label (www.rastascan.com), has taken the notion a step further, creating individual "private concert" releases on CD-R. "They're more than just a live improv," Robair explains. "I do a bit of digital hacking on the material before burning a CD-R. They're one of a kind, and I've made them to order. I think this is the way that many improvisors will be working very soon."

Beyond the obvious benefit of low overhead, this approach to recording allows an artist to explore even the most unlikely creative impulse. Saxophonist Dan Plonsey gave Shiurba a whimsical solo-oboe recording made on the day he purchased the instrument. And Robair, who has played on two Limited Sedition releases and compiled a disc of Splatter Trio rarities for the label as well, has plans for an album of music performed entirely on…Styrofoam? "A handful of Styrofoam and a bow and that's it," says Robair. "You can see why we need a label like Limited Sedition."

Kenny Kirkland  

Jazziz
February 1999

Word leaked over the Internet before any official sources were heard. But in the end, the stories were the same: Pianist Kenny Kirkland was found dead in his Queens home on Friday, November 13. He was 43. At press time, no apparent cause of death was revealed.*

Kirkland came of age in the 1980s in Wynton Marsalis' band. He played on Marsalis's first four albums, up through the electrifying Black Codes from the Underground, an album that powerfully evokes the storm with which Marsalis and his bandmates took the jazz world. Black Codes set the popular standard for mainstream jazz in the mid-’80s, and Kirkland's contributions as pianist and composer were sizable and eloquent.

"When I first got to Juilliard," Marsalis remembers, "vibraphonist Mark Sherman played these really difficult chords for me, these complex bi-tonal chords. I was about 17 at the time. He said, 'You dig these chords? These are Kirkland's chords. You've got to hear Kirkland.' So when I met Kenny later, I already knew I wanted to play with him. We would rehearse at his house. He had great ears, he could really hear. And he had a truly deep grasp of theoretical knowledge, a great sense of harmony, a sophisticated sense of rhythm. You only had to play something for him one time and he got it right away. And he was the best soloist in the band; each note had a vector, its own direction, all leading somewhere, and everything swinging. We learned a lot from him, my brother and I."

Kirkland recorded and toured with Branford Marsalis throughout the ’80s. When the saxophonist joined Sting for his Dream of the Blue Turtles album in 1985, Kirkland accompanied him and went on to continue working with Sting for some eight years and four further albums.

Kirkland made only one album as a leader, an eponymously titled release for GRP in 1991. It was as a versatile and dependable sideman that he left his mark on music. When Branford became musical director of the Tonight Show in 1992, Kirkland joined the band. In 1997, he returned to Branford's quartet (with drummer Jeff Watts and bassist Eric Revis) for well-received live performances and for the recording of Branford's next album, due for release in March.**

Tonight Show bandmate and current musical director Kevin Eubanks summed up the esteem in which Kirkland was held by his peers: "In my heart, I've always felt that Kenny Kirkland really embodied the essence of a generation of musicians, bridging the past and the future while taking no bows. He always left us wanting more."

=====

My first article for Jazziz, from 1999. Not the most pleasant subject with which to start a new career path, but a serious assignment – and the only time to date that I've interviewed Wynton Marsalis. The official cause of Kenny Kirkland's death was congestive heart failure, though some obituaries reported that drug paraphernalia was found when his body was discovered. Requiem, the final Branford Marsalis album to feature Kirkland, came out in March 1999.

Sometimes the road ahead is simply a matter of being in the right place at the right time…and knowing the right people. Back in the spring of 2000, with my illustrious public-relations career at an impasse after BMG Classics eliminated almost everyone in the department, I got an interesting offer from Larry Blumenfeld, then the editor in chief of Jazziz magazine.

Jazziz was and is based in Palm Beach County, Florida, but Larry worked from New York City, coordinating his labor with another editor, R. Dante Sawyer, down at the home office. The magazine, which started out as a smooth-jazz-friendly vehicle and always retained a place for commercial sounds, flourished under Blumenfeld and Sawyer. Major articles on artists like John Zorn, David S. Ware and Dave Douglas became newly prominent under their watch.

The reason Larry approached me in 2000 was that Dante was leaving Jazziz, en route to India and a spiritual trek. Would I be interested in taking on his position as associate editor of Jazziz, with the understanding that Larry himself would be leaving the company in four months' time?

The answer, of course, was yes. Not just any magazine editor would have taken a former publicist on board as an editor. But Larry, who'd done P.R. work himself in the past, had been assigning me freelance pieces for some years by the time he hired me outright, and trusted my objectivity. Having been laid off by BMG, I was unemployed only for a single weekend.

This, then, was my bridge back to journalism, from which I'd stepped away in 1993 for the sole reason of finding my way to and in New York City. Larry was a terrific colleague and guide, and I got to work with some extraordinary writers: among them Neil Tesser, Steve Dollar, Harvey Pekar, Ed Hazell, Steve Futterman, Lee Jeske and a new face on the scene, Lara Pellegrinelli.

Larry reasoned that when his time to depart arrived, Jazziz might invite me to stay on and perhaps even replace him. An invitation like that did actually come, with the stipulation that I'd have to relocate to Florida to take it. The notion was tempting, but I'd worked far too long and hard to get to New York in the first place; leaving after seven years didn't feel like a viable option. Happily, Billboard magazine came calling, and with it, a return to classical music after a five-year hiatus.

I bring all of this up not only as a wallow in pleasant nostalgia, but also because Lara and I are digging through piles of Jazziz back issues retrieved from an emptied-out storage unit, and I'm about to start posting some of my old odds and ends here for safe keeping and convenient retrieval.

Thanks for everything, Larry. And hey, does anyone know what became of Dante?

The Classical Music Network
ConcertoNet
Quietly sitting inside the cradle of mature Verdi works sits Simon Boccanegra with its rather convoluted plot and riveted emotional drama. Giorgio Ballione's staging is grounded with a stunning mosaic floor that nicely integrates with geometrically and ...

The Philadelphia Orchestra, Sir Simon Rattle (Conductor)
ConcertoNet
The Classical Music Network. New York. Europe : Paris, Londn, Zurich, Geneva, Strasbourg, Bruxelles, Gent America : New York, San Francisco, Montreal WORLD. Newsletter Your email : Back. Mr. Thoreau? Meet Mr. Beethoven. New York Isaac Stern ...

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VATICAN CITY (AP) — German Chancellor Angela Merkel, mindful of the weight of Christian voters in September elections, made a quick trip to Rome Saturday for a private meeting with Pope Francis, focusing on how Europe's struggling economy should be at the service of the people.

Matching Music To Color: UC Berkeley Researchers Explain How Humans ...
Huffington Post
This 1997 sci-fi favorite has one of the greatest opera/classical music moments on screen of all time. In the associated clip, the alien diva Plavalaguna (voiced by the Albanian soprano Inva Mula and played in the film by French actress Mainwenn Le ...

Shanghai (China Daily/ANN) - It could be a jazz piano solo, a classical sonata or traditional Chinese bamboo flute music.

Shanghai (China Daily/ANN) - It could be a jazz piano solo, a classical sonata or traditional Chinese bamboo flute music.