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 […]
Composer-pianist Michael Harrison’s new album on the Cantaloupe label, titled Revelation, is an extensive exercise in just intonation, the ancient tuning that applies whole number ratios to the spaces between notes, in contrast with the adjustments (compromises, some would say) that resulted in the tuning common in Western music today.
The album is a single piece […]
News, Quick Links, Good Reads: (1) Art by Orb/KLF member James Cauty was removed by municipal workers in Brighton, England, when it was mistaken for graffiti (nytimes.com, ink-d.co.uk). … (2) The Guardian on noise abatement and urban soundscapes: “Visual aesthetics are a major part of the planning system with strong guidelines determining what is acceptable […]
These are only excerpts, not full pieces, but any survey of the experimental music of World War II (the subject of all five Disquiet Downstream entries this week) would not be complete without mention of Olivier Messiaen’s Quatuor pour la fin du temps, or Quartet for the End of Time. Messiaen composed the eight-movement work […]