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Tag: Joshua Rubin

2015

Saturday, January 17th

If your appetite for new music is insatiable, what better time to be alive?

Tyshawn Sorey (1980-), Quartet for Butch Morris (2012); International Contemporary Ensemble (ICE), featuring Erik Carlson (violin); Joshua Rubin (bass clarinet), Eric Lamb (flute), Cory Smythe (piano); live, New York, 2012

Six decades of listening and, until yesterday, I’d never heard this particular combination of instruments. You?

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lagniappe

art beat: yesterday at the Art Institute of Chicago

James Ensor (1860-1949), Rooftops of Ostend, 1884 (Temptation: The Demons of James Ensor, through January 25th)

1884-James-Ensor-Acoperisurile-din-Ostend-1

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reading table

Nature, the sky above us, is conducting no mean politics when it presents beauty to all, without discrimination, and nothing old and defective, but fresh and most tasty.

—Robert Walser (1878-1956), “Snowdrops,” excerpt (translated from German by Tom Whalen and Trudi Anderegg)

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2014

Thursday, September 4th

composer, n. somebody who wants to hear sounds nobody’s ever heard before.

Mario Diaz de León (1979-), Prism Path; International Contemporary Ensemble (ICE),* live, New York, 2011

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*Claire Chase, flutes; Eric Lamb, flutes; Joshua Rubin, clarinets; Cory Smythe, piano; Nathan Davis, percussion; Mario Diaz de León, electronics.

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2012

Saturday, 10/6/12

my favorite 103-year-old composer

Elliott Carter (December 11, 1908-), Esprit Rude/Esprit Doux (1985); Claire Chase (flute),* Joshua Rubin (clarinet), International Contemporary Ensemble; live, Brazil (Sao Paulo), 2012

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lagniappe

musical thoughts

The “opportunity cost” of listening to something you already know, to borrow from the dreary world of economics, is that you’re forgoing an opportunity to discover something new.

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 found words

Last night, after a concert at the University of Chicago’s Mandel Hall (Takacs Quartet), I stopped at Harold’s Chicken Shack on 53rd Street, as much for old times’ sake as anything else (Harold got me through law school), and found this at the bottom of the receipt:

REFUNDS WITHIN 24 HOURS

MUST BRING FOOD BACK

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*Winner of a 2012 MacArthur “genius grant.”

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