Genre Archives
Zosha Di Castri is looking for action
An eighty-four-foot, mixed-media triptych spans a wall at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. With three huge scrolls, each three feet high, arranged on the wall in three rows, it’s an elaborate montage on a stark, white backdrop. Photographs, texts, drawings, and lithographs make up the whole. The piece, (Untitled) 2008–2011 (the mapContinue reading “Zosha Di Castri is looking for action”
CONTACT Contemporary Music: INTERsection. Toronto, Ontario. September 1–2 2012.
Billed as a Top 20 Billboard of Contemporary Music, CONTACT Contemporary Music’s INTERsection New Music Festival rang in its sixth year on September 1. Held in part at Toronto’s Yonge-Dundas Square, the festival ran for two days and featured as headliners the Bang on a Can All-Stars from New York. The festival launched on aContinue reading “CONTACT Contemporary Music: INTERsection. Toronto, Ontario. September 1–2 2012.”
Kay Larson. Where The Heart Beats: John Cage, Zen Buddhism, and the Inner Life of Artists.
How very different the Western art world might have been—the structure of ideas, certainly, but also the structure of emotions, the hierarchy of belief—without the arrival in New York City in 1950 of a Japanese man who was “barely over five feet tall, and almost invariably wore sports jackets and slacks.” Dr. D. T. SuzukiContinue reading “Kay Larson. Where The Heart Beats: John Cage, Zen Buddhism, and the Inner Life of Artists.”
Tin Hat. The Rain Is a Handsome Animal.
The Rain Is a Handsome Animal is the first Tin Hat album to feature founding member and violinist Carla Kihlstedt as a singer. The seventeen tracks on this CD are settings of poems by E. E. Cummings. Although all four members have contributed compositions to this collection, the music carries the same careful, colourful atmosphereContinue reading “Tin Hat. The Rain Is a Handsome Animal.”
Shackle. Shackle Stick and Shackle Multiplayer Music Game.
Dutch duo Shackle has just released their USB music stick, which impresses with its high production values and design, typical of mainstream artists—Lady Gaga, for example, has produced USBs including video, music, and other enriched media. The Shackle Stick features audio and video of the duo—Anne La Berge on flute and electronics and Robert vanContinue reading “Shackle. Shackle Stick and Shackle Multiplayer Music Game.”
Pauline Oliveros’ Eightieth Birthday Releases
Pauline Oliveros. Reverberations: Tape & Electronic Music 1961–1970. Important Records IMPREC352. Pauline Oliveros. Primordial / Lift. Taiga Records 22. Deep Listening Band. Octagonal Polyphony. Important Records IMPREC358. Deep Listening Band. Great Howl at Town Haul. Important Records IMPREC359. Deep Listening Band. Needle Drop Jungle. Taiga Records 21. There has been a flurry of activity aroundContinue reading “Pauline Oliveros’ Eightieth Birthday Releases”
Winter 2012
Derek Charke
Derek Charke is irresistibly attracted to the North. In 2006 he found himself in the Yukon, dogsledding with the Kronos Quartet. For a composer with a love of the Arctic it doesn’t get better, or more surreal, than this. A few days earlier he had been in a Whitehorse hotel room where Kronos was rehearsingContinue reading “Derek Charke”
R. Murray Schafer. My Life on Earth and Elsewhere.
In his latest book, Schafer describes a composition as “a multicultural event in which we laugh at ourselves and each other.” It’s a good description for the memoir itself: its scope is vast, but its tone is irreverent, lighthearted. Schafer does nothing here to dispel his reputation as an enfant terrible. He makes cheeky, bombasticContinue reading “R. Murray Schafer. My Life on Earth and Elsewhere.”