Alex Ross's Blog, page 93

Cosign

Letter from Death Valley

Desert Bloom. The New Yorker, Nov. 14, 2016.

An Oliveros moment

Electronic Music (1965 - 1966) by Pauline Oliveros

 The 1966 electronic masterpiece I of IV.

A J. C. (Christoph) Bach moment

Obsessions

The new-music radio channel Q2 has asked me participate in a series called "Current Obsessions," in which I select one work a week for broadcast. The first is Jürg Frey's String Quartet No. 3, which I wrote about in my Wandelweiser column. It will be heard at 1pm Eastern today and several more times through the week. To come are works by Linda Catlin Smith, Liza Lim, Agata Zubel, Michael Pisaro, Scott Worthington, Ashley Fure, and others — twelve in all, through February.

A Michelle Lou moment

Happy Halloween

See especially the bit at 10:00.

Tell at the Met

A Sudden Shadow. The New Yorker, Nov. 7, 2016.

A Telemann moment

Miscellany

Three new or newish operas can be seen in Chicago in the next week or so, as WFMT notes: Nkeiru Okoye’s Harriet Tubman, Missy Mazzoli’s Song from the Uproar, and Nico Muhly's Dark Sisters.... This weekend the Stony Brook Symphony, under Eduardo Leandro, presents an adventurous program of Berio's Sinfonia, Ligeti's Mysteries of the Macabre, and Ken Ueno's On a Sufficient Condition for the Existence of Most Specific Hypothesis, the last with the composer performing.... Xian Zhang is making her debut as the New Jersey Symphony's new music director. Michael Cooper interviews her.... A new revised version of Andrew Norman's Play has its première at the LA Phil tonight. Also of interest in LA this weekend: Jacaranda's Finnish program; Peter Sellars's staging of Lassus's Lagrime di San Pietro, with the LA Master Chorale; live performances in conjunction with Rand Steiger and Yuval Sharon's NIMBUS installation at Disney; and Matthew Aucoin's score for Murnau's Nosferatu, at LA Opera. Phelim McDermott's staging of Glass's Akhnaten arrives at LA Opera on Nov. 5, with Anthony Roth Costanzo in the lead.... MEV, the legendary electronic improvisation trio of Curran, Teitelbaum, and Rzewski, is touring the US in coming weeks, marking their fiftieth anniversary. They will be at Western Front in Vancouver on Nov. 3 and at Redcat in LA on Nov. 9. In the spring they will appear at Big Ears.... At the KQED website, Sam Lefebvre has an excellent overview of the fifty-year history of Mills College's Center for Contemporary Music. A great quotation from the late Robert Ashley: "If you're not weird, get out."