by Kirk Udvardi, contributing editor

Surprised by Beauty: Minimalism in Choral Music is the second studio recording by the remarkable choral ensemble, Boston Secession. They have been under the direction of Jane Ring Frank since 1996 offering uniquely themed programs filled with diverse repertoire from the 12^th century to the present. Personally, as a fan of recent music, when I see names on their recordings like Edwin London, Gavin Bryars and William Duckworth and an upcoming concert featuring the music of J. S. Bach and Alfred Schnittke, I’m instantly interested. Read more »

When I visited Bourges in 2006 for the annual international festival of electroacoustic music, both Françoise Barrière and Christian Clozier, the festival’s founders, took time out of their busy schedules not only to give interviews to Asymmetry Music Magazine but to show me around the studios of IMEB. I’d like to thank both of them for their hospitality and generosity and to apologize for taking so long to publish the interviews and the reports on the 2006 and 2007 festivals.

Asymmetry: What did you listen to early in your life?

Barrière: Have you listened to Dessus la mer? That’s a long piece, 26 minutes, which I composed from ’95 to ‘97 or ’98. I began from a text by Rabelais, and the subject was exactly that: to expose in this piece the music that I preferred in my youth. Not all of it, of course. But some. And not always immediately recognizable, but as if the sound were ice, were frozen, and then becoming enlivened. The music developed after into something more. I thought classical music was in danger in this world where popular music is so much to the fore. And not only music, but nature, which I also love, and which I saw also as in danger. So I mixed nature in danger and music in danger. Read more »

At first hearing, this CD may seem stylistically all over the place. The first two pieces, the four movement Par temps calme et ensoleille for piano and tape and the one movement Par temps calme et ensoleille for cello and tape seem hardly to warrant the same name, and neither are anything like Musique pour le temps noël or Ajourd’hui, which are sort of like each other. But a few listens will soon dispel that early impression. Without taking anything away from the unique nature of each piece, these four are clearly by the same person. Read more »

This album, unlike Barrière’s first, is stylistically varied at any hearing, the first or the hundred and first. Indeed, the first piece itself, Dessus la mer, is all over the place, as befits a piece that attempts (among other things) to present the musics the composer enjoyed growing up. It is an endlessly fascinating piece; in its quiet way more wild—full of sudden shifts and unusual juxtapositions—than any non live improv piece has any business being.

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At the end of this month begins the 38th Festival of Electroacoustic music in Bourges, and at long last Asymmetry presents the reports and interviews from the past two festivals there, the only two so far that Asymmetry has attended. Click the link above or check the sidebar under Upcoming Events for details about this year’s festival.

I first visited Bourges in 2005, thirty-five years after Françoise Barrière and Christian Clozier founded the Groupe de Musique Experimentale Bourges there, fresh from their studies at the GRM in Paris. I had been collecting their festival’s Cultures Electroniques CDs for a dozen or more years, those distinctive covers with various views of the globe making them easy to spot in stores, and the consistently high quality of the very varied repertoire making them easy to listen to at home.

I first attended the Synthèse festival in 2006, where I met Beatriz Ferreyra, whose interview has appeared in Asymmetry, and Iancu Dumitrescu and Ana-Maria Avram, who invited me to the first annual Spectrum XXI festival in Paris that November. And, of course, the festival organizers, Françoise and Christian, who both took time out of their busy schedules to talk to me about their music and the Institute and their busy schedules. Read more »

I first met Paul Rudy at the Bourges festival in the spring of 2007. When I attended the EMM festival that October, Paul kindly took some time out to sit down and chat with me about music and life and whether or not I had a plan for this interview.

Asymmetry: You can talk about whatever you want.

Rudy: Well, let me ask you, “What are you curious about?”

Asymmetry: I’m interested just to listen to you talk.

Rudy: Well that backfired, didn’t it! But that’s the teacher in me. I don’t want to just tell you something; I want to draw you out.

Asymmetry: Well, an interview is a complete fake, anyway. What will appear in the magazine will be something I’ve manufactured out of this raw material we’re producing.

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The Electrogals show at Portland’s Holocene on the 10th of April, co-curated by Heather Perkins and Mary Wright, opened with a short set by Heather herself, filling in for the absent Marianne Messina. Heather’s set was loud, lively, energetic stuff. Starting with high, bright sounds, it went through some complex gyrations until settling into a regular rhythm for a bit. But only a bit. Without entirely losing the dance beat, Perkins’ set went back to and ended with the gyrating complexities.

Next up was what is fast becoming the most often requested piece of Bonnie Miksch: Solstice for voice, didgeridoo, and computer. It’s a stunner, for sure. Lots of really interesting electronics (including processed voice and didgeridoo sounds), lots of variety, from extremely synthetic sounds to concrète, all moving slowly past the live stuff, all wildly gorgeous.

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Portland New Music Society’s second concert at Jáce Gáce (on April 9) featured the composed music of Scott Stobbe and the free improv of Fiasco.

William McGlothlan, oboe–Scott Stobbe, electric guitar–Becca Schultz, toy piano–Mary Sutton, violin and accordion–Shawn Sheff, trombone

Scott and a few friends played a set of his short pieces, strung together without break. While Scott’s music covers a fair range stylistically, there was one common goal this evening—to play interesting music and then go off the rails with pretty tunes and coordinated lines and then get back on track with more of the uncoordinated, nontonal, various music. You might think, as I found myself thinking—and fearing—that one schtick would get pretty old pretty quickly. Read more »

Composers Adam Reese and Matt Marble offered up two recent projects for our delectation Sunday evening, the 9^th of March, at Gallery Homeland in Portland’s Ford Building. Both used the same basic setup, a drummer in the center of the room surrounded by other musicians, but they couldn’t have been more different otherwise. Adam’s set featured a handful of harmonicas, each modified to play only one tone in a microtonal scale of Adam’s own devising, seated around a drummer (inspired by Banda Linda horn polyphony). Like his melodica set from several weeks before, this was excellent theatrical minimalism.

Matt’s set was a little more elaborate, consisting of several circles around the central drummer, with woodwinds and laptops and guitars and other drums and aluminum foil and metal bowls with gravel. The central drummer supplied the material for everyone else’s contributions, so that one could hear and see the licks move through the circles from center to perimeter. The most intriguing sound for me was the sleigh bells slammed against the concrete floor. Very nice use of space for both our eyes and our ears.

On March 12, Portland New Music Society presented Peter Karman, Matt Hannafin & Abusive Delay (Jason Morales), and the duo of Ben Kates & Seth Brown. The concert opened with Peter Karman’s new laptop set, a mostly already composed piece (If it hath not yet pleased him) that falls into two parts, each containing a frenetic quickcut section (short snippets of just about everything) followed by a more relaxed and ostinato section of softer dynamics and longer lines. The music is wild and wildly various, but the form makes everything seem unified and even inevitable. Read more »