Miscellany

Michael Pisaro playing Pauline Oliveros's Bye Bye Butterfly.

On Nov. 30, the Talea Ensemble will come to the Italian Academy in NYC to give the American première of FACE, a major new seventy-minute voice-and-ensemble work by Pierluigi Billone, one of the more original composers on the world stage. Talea will bring the piece to Los Angeles's venerable Monday Evening Concerts on Dec. 4, where they will share the bill with Ensemble Vocatrix singing selections from Hildegard von Bingen's Ordo virtutum.... The Renaissance ensemble Sonnambula is focusing this season on Women's Voices. At the Academy of Arts and Letters on Dec. 21, it will devote a program to Leonora Duarte, a Jewish Converso who lived in Antwerp and wrote seven Sinfonias for viol consort. A recording will follow.... The UnCaged toy piano festival will unfold at various venues in NYC from Dec. 8 to 14. Among the highlights is an all-toy-piano version of Terry Riley's In C.... On Dec. 2, Yarn/Wire will give world premières of Klaus Lang's molten trees and Michelle Lou's Different Furs.... Tom Morris will complete his tenure as the artistic director of the Ojai Festival in 2019. He deserves warmest congratulations for his superb stewardship of one of the world's major new-music festivals.... I will give two talks at Johns Hopkins next week: on Dec. 5 at 6pm, at Gilman Hall, “Wagner’s Shadow: Music, Literature, and the Birth of the Modern”; and on Dec. 6 at noon, at Peabody, “Composers, Critics, and the Weight of the Past.”