Morton Feldman (1926-1987), Why Patterns?; California EAR Unit (Dorothy Stone, flute; Arthur Jarvinen, glockenspiel; Gaylord Mowrey, piano), 1991
His music makes so much use of space it seems to keep going even after the sounds have stopped.
Henry Theadgill’s Zooid,* live, New York (Roulette), 2012
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lagniappe
radio
Today WKCR-FM (Columbia University) is featuring Threadgill and a host of other musicians who came out of Chicago in the ’60s and ’70s.
In May of 1977, members of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM) collaborated with students at WKCR to present “Chicago Comes to New York,” a four-day music festival at Columbia University’s Wollman Auditorium. Join us starting midnight on January 7, 2014 as we revisit this momentous event with a 24-hour marathon broadcast featuring music and interviews by the AACM.
Thirty members of the AACM came to New York with their families and friends for the festival, many for the first time. The festival also included an on-air component in the form of a ninety-hour broadcast of music and interviews with AACM artists. Over the last year, two recent WKCR alums restored and digitized the entire collection of reel-to-reel tapes from the festival, hearing the music for the first time since it was recorded.
Celebrate the incredibly important work that members of the AACM have been doing to promote artistic freedom and self-determination for nearly half a century. Help us revitalize and share these unique pieces of recorded history that WKCR is so privileged to have regained access to.
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*Henry Threadgill (alto saxophone, flute), Liberty Ellman (acoustic guitar), Jose Davila (tuba), Elliot Humberto Kavee (drums), Zachary Lober (bass), Christopher Hoffman (cello), Ben Gerstein (trombone), Jacob Garchik (trombone), Stephanie Richards (trumpet), Jonathan Finlayson (trumpet).
Feel like floating?
Morton Feldman (1926-1987), For Philip Guston (1984)
S.E.M. Ensemble, 2000
Only a world this noisy could produce music this quiet.
Evan Parker (soprano saxophone), et al.,* live, London (Freedom of the City festival), 2011
*Heledd Francis Wright (flute), John Russell (guitar), Augusti Fernandez (piano), Adam Linson (bass), Toma Gouband (percussion), Lawrence Casserley (electronics), Matt Wright (electronics).
one thing after
another after another
after another after another after . . .
John Cage (1912-1992), Concert for Piano and Orchestra (1958); Variable Geometry (Jean-Phillippe Calvin, director), live, London, 2011
A performance like this can go wrong in so many ways. This one, to these ears, works wonderfully. Momentum, tautness, immediacy—it has them all.
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lagniappe
musical thoughts
Everything we do is music.
The other night, as Mitsuko Uchida was performing two of Mozart’s piano concertos (17, 27) with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, there were moments so pure, so open, I would have liked nothing more than to disappear into one of the spaces between the notes and stay there.
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Piano Concerto No. 20 in D minor, KV. 466; Mitsuko Uchida (piano and conducting), Camerata Salzburg, live, Germany (Salzburg), 2001
alone
John Cage, Solo for flute, from Concert for Piano (1958); Eric Lamb, flute (International Contemporary Ensemble); Chicago, 2012
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lagniappe
musical thoughts
Music is theater for the ear. Take this performance. The phrasing, the interplay between sound and silence—this unfolds like something by Samuel Beckett.
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taking a(nother) break
Back in a while.
Toru Takemitsu (1930-1996), And then I knew ’twas wind (1992)
Aureole Trio, New Hampshire (Monadnock Music), 2011
My life sometimes seems to consist of a series of trips, back and forth, between the sublime and the wretched. Yesterday afternoon, for instance, I stumbled upon this—a piece I’d never heard before—during a break from work. What was I working on? An oral argument I’ll be presenting this morning before a three-judge panel of the federal court of appeals in Chicago, on behalf of a guy, now in his mid-50s, who spends each day, as he has for decades, in a cell about 45 miles southwest of the city, where he’s serving a sentence of “natural life.”
refuge from the storm
Hariprasad Chaurasia, bansuri (bamboo flute)
Raag Shivanjali, live, Germany (Stuttgart), 1995
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lagniappe
art beat: more from Friday’s stop at the Art Institute of Chicago
Utagawa Hiroshige, Sparrows and Camellia in Snow, c. 1831-33
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reading table
singing in the tree
are you a widower, Crow
Milky Way above—Kobayashi Issa, 1804 (translated from Japanese by David G. Lanoue)
alone
Tristan Murail (1947-), “Unanswered Questions,” 1995
Erin Lesser, flute (Winter Fragments, Argento Chamber Ensemble, 2007)
music clip of the day 