Miscellany

The Earle Brown Foundation is bringing its Time Spans Festival to New York Aug. 1-5. It's a fantastic lineup both of ensembles — Talea, Bozzini Quartet, JACK Quartet — and of repertory: recent works of Chaya Czernowin, Steven Takasugi, Jürg Frey, John Luther Adams, Georg Friedrich Haas, and several composers I don't know but intend to explore. The one unmissable event, I feel, will be the Bozzini's renditions of quartets by Frey.... Starting tomorrow in San Francisco, a major festival of works by the happily inescapable JLA, at SF Jazz. In August, Adams will also oversee the inauguration of The Wind Garden, an installation at the Stuart Collection in San Diego.... On Aug 4, the adventurous pianist Adam Tendler, who toured all fifty states for his 88x50 project, will perform a Cage program at the Rubin Museum in NYC: the prepared-piano pieces 31’57.9864" and 34’46.776” will be heard alongside Cage's recording of 45’ for a speaker.... The program for the 2018 Prototype Festival has been announced. Of particular interest: the New York première of Gregory Spears's gorgeous, haunting Fellow Travelers, which was a finalist for the Music Critics Association of North America's freshly inaugurated Best New Opera award. Missy Mazzoli's Breaking the Waves was the winner; David Lang's anatomy theater was the other finalist.... David Allen profiles the brilliant Yuval Sharon, mastermind of Hopscotch, in the New York Times. Sharon's eagerly anticipated beachside production of Brecht's Galileo has been postponed until next spring, but his theatricalization of Orson Welles's The War of the Worlds, with music by Annie Gosfield, comes to the LA Phil in the fall, and next summer he will become, amazingly, the first American ever to direct at the Bayreuth Festival, in a new production of Lohengrin.... For NewMusicBox, Donna Arnold has written a remarkable account of the remarkable life of Dika Newlin, teenaged Schoenberg pupil turned punk-rock grande dame.