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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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.

There were plenty of concerts in Portland in October, too, and in September and August, but Asymmetry was in Europe then, haring after festivals (nine of them) and hobnobbing with some of the greats and near greats of new music, reports on those forthcoming. And as soon as I got back to Portland, there were [...]

Anyone who has listened to a lot of new music has heard a lot of saxophone playing. A lot of players have been interested in exploring new territory and a lot of composers have been attracted by the variety of wild noises one can get from that instrument. So when I heard of the latest [...]

The SEAMUS 2008 review has just been updated with clips, including one of Jason Bolte’s Change in the Summation, mention of which was unaccountably left out of the original review.  Take a look here.

SEAMUS 2008 took place in the dramatic setting of the University of Utah, surrounded by the Wasatch, Oquirrhs, and Traverse mountain ranges. Spectacular scenery outside, spectacular music inside. Thirteen concerts in three days may seem a trifle too spectacular, but there were plenty of gaps in between, filled with eating and drinking, talking and laughing; [...]

On April 4, 2009, SFU Contemporary Arts put on a show of electroacoustic music that included a new piece by Barry Truax, Chalice Well, three pieces for flute and “tape” played by visiting flautist Mark McGregor, a live laptop piece, and several other treats by SFU faculty and students.
Prominent in many pieces were water sounds—rain, [...]

The concert on Thursday evening the 5th of March was a special one for me, its being the first time I’d heard Doug Theriault live. From the first CD of his I owned, Unidentified, I have been enormously taken by the music of this enormously talented Portlander. What’s more, the first set of the evening [...]