Alex Ross's Blog, page 264

Treelessness

John Luther Adams's In a Treeless Place, Only Snow, as performed by the American Contemporary Music Ensemble. Listen to an entire JLA/Volans program at Q2.

The Rest Is Noise stadium tour

"Poetry and jazz is back!" — Steve Reich, composer

This weekend, Ethan Iverson and I will launch our globe-spanning, three-city modern-music tour, touching down in San
Francisco (rise and shine with Schoenberg at 10AM on Saturday), Ann Arbor (Sunday at 4PM), and Kalamazoo (Monday at 8PM). On his blog, Ethan has issued an exquisitely annotated playlist, with plentiful audio examples. For my part, I'm trying to perfect my Vincent Price and Jackie Kennedy impersonations. We think it will be...

Ostinatos on the Lake

It's[image error] time once again for the Northwestern University Music Marathon. This beloved Chicago-area institution begins at 8PM on April 30 and delivers what the organizers describe as "twenty-six hours of awesome." The schedule will feature, as it did last year, a wee-small-hours rendition of Terry Riley's In C by Billy Robin's Hep Cats, an ad-hoc group whose name seems inspired by Toscanini's Hep Cats, aka the New Friends of Rhythm. All proceeds will go to the People's Music School, which...

Weekend video: Hekla

In honor of Eyjafjallajökull, here is Jón Leifs's 1961 work Hekla, named after Iceland's largest active volcano. The orchestra includes nineteen percussionists, who play a fantastic battery of instruments, including anvils, stones, sirens, bells, ships' chains, a sort of tree-hammer, shotguns, and cannons.

Weekend video

Jón Leifs's Hekla, in honor of Eyjafjallajökull.

Found sound of the day

Noise on tour

I'll be making various appearances in the next week or two. On April 22, I am giving a lecture at the Art Institute of Chicago, on the topic "Wind from Another Planet: Music, Words, and Images at the Dawn of Modernism." Then I'll go on the road with Ethan Iverson, the pianist of The Bad Plus, perpetrating a words-and-music program on the theme of The Rest Is Noise. Longtime Noise readers may remember that Ethan joined me for an Evening of Spooky Modern Music back in October 2007. This will...

William Christie at BAM

Sweet Noises. The New Yorker, April 19, 2010.

Weekend videos

The great Tom Lehrer, who turned eighty-two yesterday.

Composed, performed, and filmed by seventeen-year-old Ben Meyers. (Via Molly Sheridan.)

Morty by candlelight

Issue Project Room is presenting Feldman's six-hour String Quartet (II) at its future Livingston Street home this Sunday.