[The first part of this interview was made in 2006 in Montréal at a festival for the 80th anniversary of Francis Dhomont.] Asymmetry: I first heard your music on the Ex machina CD with La cloches sans vallées. The music is so ...
writing about music for people who like music
A Ludger Brümmer Miscellany
TroTropforT - 1987 TroTropforT builds slowly and then breaks off suddenly. It starts up again with similar material, then breaks off again except for some quiet stuff to which are eventually added some clangs; but it goes on mostly quite quietly, with hollow little sounds and ...
Ricardo Mandolini
Asymmetry: I noticed in the concert last night that the piece that preceded yours was a kind of compendium, a collection of all the electroacoustic tropes of the last 60 years. It was like a little history of electroacoustic music. And then yours came along, and ...
Mandolini miscellany
Cancion de madera y agua A rattle of rachets to start, morphing in and out of various other sounds, without ever losing the rachety quality, until some low frequency thumps anchor things. After a short pause, the same mechanical logic begins to ...
2010 Truax Retrospectives
Barry Truax's involvement with electroacoustics goes back to 1949, although perhaps the early seventies is a more realistic date for the beginning of his involvement as a composer. Time enough, in any case, for there to be retrospective concert of his music, starting with the ...
GAIDA festival – 2010
The Gaida festival, one of the biggest contemporary music festivals in Lithuania, took place in Vilnius from the 22nd to the 29th of October this year. An intense week of rarely performed contemporary music, Gaida featured compositions both very clearly Lithuanian and those very clearly not, both showing the change of culture over time: the festival links together different artistic circles and is clear evidence of contemporary music dispersal in Lithuania. The attempt to find coherence among these 43 pieces (21 of which were Lithuanian, 22 of which were from around the world) distinguished the individuality of Lithuanian music in the context of the festival. Indeed, the atmosphere of the festival was distinctly “Lithuanian”
Madeleine Shapiro
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 ...
Some Shapiro CDs
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 ...
2009 ISCM World New Music Days
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 ...
2008: Gaida and ISCM in Vilnius
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 ...