KUAN » Sun Aug 25, 2013 6:28 am wrote:Been meaning to listen to ‘The Village Vanguard sessions’, Allegro, so ‘tis on order from library.
Great! If you can, keep’em! Forever .
^ David Virelles, pianoI went off on a tangent this morning by finding David Virelles at NPR music, which took me to the NYT article, below. Even jazz has the markings of going where no one has gone before, and that’s the same adventurism inherent in classical music, or post-classical music, or just Concert Music. There. For the moment, Concert Music will have to cover just about every kind of composition scored and performed today, or not written down yet performed, as the case may be .
Here are the first three paragraphs of a performance critique or summarization, if you will, of Mr. Virelles’s music.
You might have to contain your need for immediate comprehension when you hear David Virelles’s music at the Village Vanguard this week. It won’t slot easily into what you know.
There’s much in it that is composed and precise, but it comes in episodes that aren’t clearly marked or forecast, in great, shifting stacks of musical language. It’s got roots in the open-ended jazz of Andrew Hill and Cecil Taylor, in Afro-Cuban rumba, and, in bits and pieces, contemporary classical music; maybe even Bill Evans too.
But cumulatively it sounds apart from all of that. It’s not free jazz, but it roams all over the place.
^ Intro to Imani Winds | YOUTUBE NOTES. This video was recorded by the folks at Carnegie Hall for the premier of Daniel Bernard Roumain’s work: 5 Chairs and 1 Table. Uploaded on Apr 23, 2009.
^ Imani Winds & Boston Brass Tackle Gil Evans & Miles Davis
Art will be the last bastion when all else fades away. ~ Timothy White (b 1952), American rock music journalist _________________
^ YOUTUBE NOTES. Documentary segment discussing the late Robert Abel's pioneering use of [the female body in] computer graphics in a 1984 television commercial for the canned food industry.
^ YOUTUBE NOTES. Slightly higher res version of the classic Robert Abel & Associates [7-up] commercial, directed by Robert Taylor of Tron fame.
Art will be the last bastion when all else fades away. ~ Timothy White (b 1952), American rock music journalist _________________
^ Funny, you should say that. Even the words Collaboration and Planetarium stand the test. I don’t know what that means, but there you have it . _________________
^ The Planetarium | Collaboration between Sufjan Stevens, Bryce Dessner and Nico Muhly, featuring James McAlister on drums, the Navarra string quartet and the New Trombone Collective. Uploaded April, 2012.
_________________ The audio and visuals in that play list above are pretty bad. Without them, you wouldn’t hear or imagine you’re hearing some good music. So, it would seem that traditional, Western classical compositional structure and techniques have been abandoned—yet not entirely—as evident to some listeners.
Honestly, anymore, it’s not easy to categorize or name another musical genre, because traditional compositional devices with quasi-classic chordal progressions, noise complexes, prolonged dissonances with blends of multi-layered synthesized sounds styled with pop influences, and lyrics to comprehend when one is able to understand them in spite of technologically modulated singing during performances—are presenting almost no limits for music composition in what we might call post-classical while pumped-up CEOs and producers must top stated goals, percentages and quotas , in a given reporting period for Pete’s sake.
None of the three musicians at the Barbican tonight are strangers to the grand cosmic scheme. The National’s guitarist Bryce Dessner was in this very hall in February performing his audiovisual Mayan dream-hymn The Long Count. Nico Muhly has composed more than 100 contemporary classical works since 2001, including an opera about an internet death pact. And psych-folk wunderkind Sufjan Stevens aborted plans to record an album about every American state when he realised he’d be around 286 when he finished it. So who better to collaborate on Planetarium, a “work in progress” suite of songs celebrating our solar system – except, perhaps, Sun Ra, Muse and Dr Brian Cox?
After a first half during which the Navarra String Quartet showcase each of the collaborators’ classical endeavours, a huge black orb overhead lights up with the colours of each celestial body in turn, while Stevens guides us through the cosmos song by song, dropping in astronomical detail and making sly references to Uranus’s ring.
A song cycle merging the National’s honeyed scree, Muhly’s disjointed pomp and Stevens’s electronics and modernist folk tendencies alike, Planetarium adroitly captures the essence of each dancing sphere. Neptune is icy and graceful, Venus a vocoder-voiced sci-fi romance. Saturn is a colourful blaze of grimetronica that evokes Tinie Tempah doing the robot around the rings, and Jupiter (“the loneliest planet”) an imposing electro throb that expands into a violent storm of techno clatter and symphonic bombast, like a Björk opera.
The sun gets short shrift, with a few waves of warm brass from the New Trombone Collective. There’s more sympathy for the celestial underdogs: Pluto gets a sublime blues ballad of disownment and Mercury the best tune of the set, an aching lament played on muted molten horns. And good old Earth? A maelstrom of inhuman religious slogans, warlike trombones and MIA-style afrobeat mania, then it blows itself up. Heavenly.
Art will be the last bastion when all else fades away. ~ Timothy White (b 1952), American rock music journalist _________________
^ At mark 15.00, the following quoted description was the intro to the performers’ conversation: “A ‘goat rodeo’ is defined as a chaotic situation where a multitude of disparate factors are required to converge in great precision… or else it all falls part.” The instrumentalists were Yo-Yo Ma, Stuart Duncan, Edgar Meyer, Chris Thile. The female vocalist was Aoife O’Donovan.
During the conversation, a part of which has been personally transcribed, Yo-Yo Ma explains how today’s composers are writing works.
“One of the things we talked about today was the etch[?] effect. Many of you know is when two ecosystems meet, you know, forest, savannah, the kinds of life forms you have, you have the least density of life forms, but you actually have the most variety of new life forms. Edgar likes to talk about going to the edge of the cliff [musically speaking], you know, the risk factor… he wants to look over the edge. But on the other hand, he really only favors giving people something [musically] that they know, that’s familiar, and then you could go on an adventure [by composing unfamiliar music within that same piece].
“So, we all probably as a group enjoy going to the edge, because it’s thrilling to discover new life forms. It’s thrilling [as a performance group] to take from what you know, and try something that hasn’t quite happened in the same way before, which, by the way, seems to be the right environment that we’re in to do this kind of thing, because that’s what you all are doing. I think that’s one of the best ways to define creativity. … [Out of] Every art form you can remake a certain number of frames that actually make sense to each life form that you stem from. So, it’s an organic process in that it’s recognizable in at least two places.”
Art will be the last bastion when all else fades away. ~ Timothy White (b 1952), American rock music journalist _________________
by Allegro » Sun Aug 25, 2013 2:38 am 
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, in a given reporting period for Pete’s sake. 
