Madeleine Shapiro, one of the founding members of the New Music Consort, plays on two Mode discs with that ensemble in pieces by Anne LeBaron (“Rana, Ritual & Revelations” and The Musical Railism of Anne LeBaron). Except maybe for Lamentation/Invocation on the Rana, Ritual & Revelations disc, these CDs are not something to get to hear Madeleine play. They’re nice discs, interesting collections of pieces by a composer likes to try a bit of everything. For hearing Shapiro’s technique and versatility well, Judith Kellock’s Albany CD, East Meets West, is better, as it has prominent cello parts in two pieces, Chen Yi’s As In A Dream and Lawrence Moss’ Three Chinese Poems for Cello and Soprano. And the new Naxos CD of Gen Gan-Ru’s string quartets, Fall of Baghdad. Best, of course, is Madeleine Shapiro’s solo album on Albany, electricity, six widely differing pieces for cello and electronics, and the SEAMUS disc (Vol. 18) that includes Paul Rudy’s Vastly Shrinking Space, written for Shapiro. Read more »

Asymmetry: You’ve been involved with new music since your college days. How did all that get started?

Shapiro: I was introduced to new music as an undergraduate at the State University of New York at Stony Brook by Paul Zukovsky, who was my mentor. I don’t know why he thought I would be interested, but he just said “You might want to play something new. I’ll choose and help you with it.” And he chose an amazing piece, which could have been a crazy choice but turned out, I guess, to be a brilliant choice for me. He chose the Davidovsky Synchronisms No. 3. Read more »

In 2008, the ISCM World Music Days were held in Vilnius along with that city’s Gaida Festival. In 2009, each festival was back to being its own separate thing, the ISCM in three towns in Sweden, Visby, Växjö, and Göteborg. It was interesting but probably not instructive to see that neither festival was quite as exciting separately as they had been together. To be fair, they were only together once, and the number of times I have attended each of them separately has been exactly one. (And, in the case of the 2009 Gaida, I was only able to attend a few of the concerts.)

Although the 2009 festival added the word “new” to the title, the programming tended towards the old. Not old pieces, just pieces that sounded old, as if they were from an earlier time, 1970 or 50 or even 1890 in a couple of extreme cases. This is part of what a far better critic than I has called “nostalgia music.” In her case, the reference is to younger composers of electroacoustic music reinventing the wheels of the 1950s, but it probably is even more apt applied to instrumental music, which can so easily turn old-fashioned, just because of hundreds of years of tradition rather than only decades. Winds do these kinds of things and strings do these kinds of things and the brass do these. The traditions of the instruments take over. I’d heard this in Ostrava and in Oslo weeks before the ISCM days, and would hear it again in Donaueschingen and Vilnius, as well as on dozens of the CDs I’ve purchased over the years. Read more »

The 2008 ISCM World Music Days were held in Vilnius, Lithuania in conjunction with the Gaida Festival, an annual event in that city. I was impressed with the high level of performance of new music by all the ensembles and by the size of all the crowds for all the concerts, so impressed that I was sure that the Lithuanians–who had, after all, given us a founding member of Fluxus–had really figured out that this contemporary stuff is genuinely seductive and satisfying.

It was a nice dream while it lasted. And even though I soon found out that new music does not happen all the time in Vilnius, and that the audiences were greatly augmented by people from outside Lithuania, there for the international festival, the fact remained that the crowds were there, that they did seem to be applauding enthusiastically, and that the music was performed expertly and energetically. Besides, a new music festival that draws crowds from all over the world (I was there from Oregon, USA, after all) can’t be all bad. And Lithuanians are genuinely enthusiastic about their own composers. Read more »

Francisco Meirino’s 2009 release is all about the sounds music machines make when they’re failing–minidisc players, P.A. systems, cassette recorders, and so forth. And very interesting and musical sounds they do make, to be sure. But it’s not just a lot of nice sounds that makes this album so rewarding to listen to. It’s the keen ear and musical intelligence of Francisco Meirino creating complex, cunningly layered tracks, some only seconds long but still carefully and lovingly crafted. Or are they? The phrase makes you wonder: opportunities for mistakes. Is that about the failing machines, or is that about being open as a composer for the unexpected or the unplanned? Either way, the results, for us, are nothing but delightful.

Track one is called Stress recording of distress. After some loud, high frequency bursts, it settles down to a complex wall of grit and static, with a subtle throbbing underneath it all. Various high pitched, pulsing electronic hums come in, to the front and middle of the sound stage. (The recordings are all crystal clear and the axes of height and depth come across very well, even on a modest home system.) Read more »

by Peter Karman

SEAMUS 2009 took place over three days in Sweetwater’s new LEED certified headquarters in Fort Wayne, Indiana. Not only is it a pretty, comfortable building, not only is their warehouse just on the other side of a huge doorway in the main hall (allowing me get some new toys without having to mail-order them), not only is there a cafeteria and lounge and arcade and ping pong and clean bathrooms and, and, and… there is The Theater. Designed and built onsite, with all the most high-end equipment available, it would have been a treat to hear any music there, of any quality and genre. As it was, the SEAMUS conference was showcasing some of the best of modern electro-acoustic music, and the theater at the Sweetwater campus seemed constructed for no other purpose.
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The Portland New Music Society’s March concert took place at the Taborspace coffeeshop on the corner of SE 55th and SE Belmont.

Featured were Matt Hannafin, Kelvin Pittman, and Doug Theriault in three solo sets and a trio. Matt opened with a monumental forty minute piece for amplified and electronically altered percussion.
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Cascadia Composers recently hosted the National Association of Composers conference in Portland, OR, a three day festival of music and seminars that Asymmetry managed to miss entirely. But James Bash (Northwest Reverb) attended the second evening’s concert. Here’s his review of that for the Oregon Music News.

par Beatriz Ferreyra

Introduction

Un grand nombre des livres et d’articles ont été édités depuis des décennies sur le thème de l’espace sonore, sa perception, sa configuration fixe et mobile dans la composition de la musique acousmatique et sa projection dans l’espace d’un environnement particulier.

Dans cet article, je voudrais seulement témoigner de mon expérience en tant que compositrice de musique acousmatique, fascinée par les différentes techniques de spatialisation stéréophonique et multiphonique. Read more »

by Beatriz Ferreyra
(translation by Lily Woodruff)

Introduction

A large number of books and articles have been edited over the decades on the theme of sound space, its perception, its fixed and mobile configuration in the composition of acousmatic music, and its perception in the space of a particular environment.

In this article, I would just like to testify to my experience as a composer of acousmatic music who is fascinated by the different techniques of stereophonic and multiphonic spatialization. Read more »