Quick News, Links, Bits: (1) Ike Turner, the rock’n’soul legend who will forever be remembered as Tina Turner’s abusive husband, passed away earlier this week (November 5, 1931 – December 12, 2007). I’ll never forget standing in the refurbished Sun Studio in Memphis, Tennessee, and being told the story of the chance damage to a […]
This site was upgraded expertly by Nathan Swartz of clicknathan.com from my decade-old handcoded HTML to a proper WordPress install on July 26, 2007. Left lingering for me to take care of was a relatively small proportion of back articles, mostly from the “interviews” and “reports/essays” sections.
Just today I’ve uploaded five more of the backdated […]
News, Quick Links, Good Reads: (1) One of the most formidable figures in 20th-century music has died. Karlheinz Stockkhausen, born August 22, 1928, passed away on December 5, 2007 (washingtonpost.com, washingtonpost.com, therestisnoise.com, nytimes.com, guardian.co.uk, guardian.co.uk). The obituary from the news service bloomberg.com seems particularly unfriendly. It poses the following as a kind of question, though […]
The Other Minds catalog of recordings housed at the Internet Archive (aka archive.org) contains decades of recordings, an ongoing history of 20th- (and, now, 21st-) century classical music. And it’s updated regularly.
Perhaps setting its own record for the shortest period from performance to broadcast, just two days ago it posted the live performance from November […]
News, Quick Links, Good Reads: (1) Generative music-maker Kenneth Kirschner is the subject of a new interview up at tokafi.com: “[Q:] Your music is electronically processed to a large extent. Why then, are you still interested in the piano as a basis? [A:] I think piano is often for me the clearest and most direct […]
The pews were close to full at St. John’s Presbyterian Church in Berkeley, California, on Friday, November 2. The evening’s text was no liturgical standard. We’d gathered to view a performance — strike that, a thorough extrapolation (a “realization,” the program notes read) of material that composer John Cage penned almost forty years ago: 18 […]
Two weeks ago in Berkeley, the Italian vocalist Amelia Cuni performed John Cage’s 18 Microtonal Ragas with support of two percussionists, Raymond Kaczynski and Federico Sansei, and Werner Durand on, as he was credited in the night’s program, “drones and electronics.” Tomorrow I’ll be posting some impressions of the piece, along with related photos. In […]
Nearly 25 years ago over the course of three days, in April 1973, reportedly some 60 musicians on “no less than ten synthesizers” and various other instruments filled six acres of the San Bernardino National Forest in California with music. Other Minds guru Charles Amirkhanian was there at the time, interviewing the involved composers and […]
Last night in San Francisco at the Herbst Theater, Kronos Quartet performed two sets of pieces arranged or composed for them, including several with electronic, prerecorded backing tracks. The concert, the second of two nights, was part of the San Francisco Jazz Festival’s 25th anniversary.
The evening opened with “Bloodstone” by the great drum’n’bass/breakbeat figure Amon […]
Up at the website of Bad Plus pianist Ethan Iverson (well, mostly Iverson, with the other members occasionally joining in — thebadplus.typepad.com): a sort of remix of work by 20th-century classical composer Milton Babbitt.
It’s just over a minute long, but Iverson has taken the jazzy inflections of Babbitt’s 12-tone original, “Semi-Simple Variations,” heard here with […]