Emusers Exclusive Bang on a Can & Cantaloupe Music Thread

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  • edited October 2016
    And here it is, released yesterday
     
    Remixes By: Jóhann Jóhannsson, Sam Pluta, Tim Hecker, Fennesz, Oneohtrix Point Never, Greg Saunier, HPRIZM/High Priest of APC, Ian Williams,  Squarepusher,
     Ikue Mori,
    Mira Calix and Hauschka

    - "When Michael Gordon’s Timber, scored for six amplified wooden 2-by-4s, premiered in 2009, it brought the physicality and endurance of percussion performance to a new level. In the liner notes for Slagwerk Den Haag’s recording of the piece, released on Cantaloupe Music in 2011, Gordon described a connection to the work of shamanist author Carlos Castaneda, whose self-imposed spirit journey in the desert could wipe the brain clean and “bring on visions.” 

    Newly recorded by Mantra Percussion and reworked by an A-list of producers and DJs, Gordon’s deep exploration into the extreme possibilities of rhythm gets the full electronic treatment on Timber Remixed. The double-CD set also includes Mantra’s live performance of Timber from the 2014 Bang on a Can Marathon."

    - Cantaloupe Music - Emusic



    Mantra Percussion

    - "Percussion is the primeval art of hitting stuff to communicate. For millennia humans have expressed themselves by striking wood with sticks, pounding on stretched animal hide with hands, and making music on metal. Percussion is likely the oldest of all musics, save the human voice and the songs of nature.

    And here we each sit in a century of technological wonder... yet there are still people beating on pieces of wood, creating coordinated sounds through primal means.

    Mantra Percussion brings this ancient art to our new century.

    Committed to honoring the deep past and expanding the far-flung future of percussion music, we bring to life new works for percussion by living composers, we collaborate with artists from diverse genres and styles, and we question what it means to communicate by making music with and on percussive objects. We devote our collective energy toward engaging new audiences by challenging the standard concert format through evening-length events that look toward a grander artistic vision. 

    We strive for each performance to be a significant moment — our mantra."

  • edited January 2017
    David Lang is kicking of the Cantaloupe 2017 season Brilliantly:
    Conducted by Alan Pierson
    Produced, edited and mixed by Donnacha Dennehy​
    Performed by Crash Ensemble
    Composed by David Lang
    Recorded at Windmill Lane Studios in Dublin, Ireland
    John Godfrey, electric guitar
    Malachy Robinson, bass
    Owen Gunnell, percussion

    Cantaloupe kicks off Bang on a Can's 30th anniversary year with the digital release of David Lang's "forced march," from his forthcoming large ensemble CD writing on water. Recorded at Windmill Lane Studios in Dublin (famous for its connection to U2's seminal ​rock ​album The Joshua Tree) and performed by the Crash Ensemble, the piece embodies a ​marauding rock sensibility within a classical framework.
    - Cantaloupe Music - Bandcamp
  • Speaking of Crash Ensemble,
    From 2012 and "name your price" at Bandcamp:
  • edited February 2017
    Fairly new (september 2016):

    Commissioned for the Kronos Quartet by the community of The Sea Ranch in celebration of the famed California seaside retreat’s 50th birthday, composer Aleksandra Vrebalov’s The Sea Ranch Songs connects with the spirit, nature, and architecture of this magical place — a grand experiment in environmental stewardship, land development and intentional community planning. 

    Featuring rare documented sounds from the Northern California coastal community and its wild surroundings, this sumptuous multimedia work is paired with a dreamlike cinematic exploration on bonus DVD by videographer Andrew Lyndon. Meditative, majestic and inspirational, The Sea Ranch Songs delves into the stunning panoramas and metaphysical geography of a unique place where people and nature are harmoniously intertwined. 

    “The Sea Ranch idea on a global scale might be utopian,” Vrebalov writes in her liner notes, “but through music, we praise its beauty and affirm its urgent relevance in our wounded world, so much in need of healing.”

    - Cantaloupe Music - Emusic

    Aleksandra Vrebalov
    - "Native of the former Yugoslavia, left Serbia in 1995 and continued her education in the United States. She holds a doctorate from the University of Michigan (DMA, 2002), where she studied with Evan Chambers and Michael Daugherty, and a master’s degree from San Francisco Conservatory (MM, 1996) where her teacher was Elinor Armer. 
    In 2008 Vrebalov led Summer in Sombor (Serbia), a composition workshop that she initiated and co-founded in 2007 with the South Oxford Six composers’ collective. Vrebalov’s string quartet …hold me, neighbor, in this storm… commissioned by the Carnegie Hall Corporation was premiered by Kronos Quartet in Zankel Hall in February 2008. The Spell, written for the Sofia Music Weeks was premiered by pianists Pavlina Dokovska and Vladimir Valjarevic in June 2008. In October 2008, Vrebalov’s new work for solo violin is to be played by Ana Milosavljevic at the Times Center in New York City. Transparent Walls, written for the San Francisco Conservatory is to be premiered on November 15 by the New Music Ensemble with Nicole Paiement conducting. 
    In 2007, Vrebalov’s Orbits were performed by Belgrade Philharmonic and Peter Leonard. In NYC, Vrebalov participated in the American Lyric Theater’s composer/librettist development program, collaborating with Deborah Brevoort on Altezura, an opera scene premiered at the Symphony Space in January 2008. Her string quartet Pannonia Boundless was published by Boosey&Hawkes as part of the Kronos Edition, and was one of the signature works at the Kronos’ Carnegie Hall workshop for string quartets. Vrebalov was awarded the Charles Ives Fellowship from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Her two Bagatelles were premiered at the Mannes’ Beethoven Festival by pianist Evi Yundt in NYC in March 2007. 
    Wishing to expose students to different ways of experiencing and thinking about music, Vrebalov initiated the Summer in Sombor (Serbia) Composition Workshop in 2007, and brought the US Hip-Hop Ambassador Toni Blackman to lecture at the City College of NY in 2003. In 1997 Vrebalov created the Composers’ Forum, a weekly gathering of composition students at the Novi Sad University/Serbia, devoted to discussion of compositional process. 
    Her cross-disciplinary interests led to engagements with the Serbian Fund for an Open Society, and participation at interdisciplinary round tables, seminars, and residencies that include MacDowell Colony (NH, 2006, 2003, 1998), New Dramatists (NYC 2003), Rockefeller Bellagio Center (Italy, 2000), Moral and Mythology in Contemporary Art (Guest Artist, Novi Sad, 1995), and MultiMedeja (Lecturer, Novi Sad, 1995). 
    Vrebalov is a founding member of the South Oxford Six."
  • edited March 2017
       

    - "Performed by the NYU Percussion Ensemble under the direction of Jonathan Haas with guest appearances by So Percussion, Bobby Previte’s new work Terminals Quartets celebrates the subtle, the powerful and the serene in modern percussion-based music. 

    The piece is both a back story and a natural progression for Previte’s 2014 Cantaloupe release TERMINALS (Five Concertos for Percussion and Soloist). In that work, So Percussion played the role of a concerto orchestra behind soloists on harp, guitar, piano and saxophone; Terminals Quartets re-calibrates exclusively for percussion, and adds new music to create a work of vast space and melodic abstraction—an entirely new entity of percussive sound, with an eerie echo of its original source. 

    As such, Terminals Quartets is also testament to the teaching power of music, with the recording having been beautifully captured by Paul Geluso in New York University’s James Dolan Studio, and featuring top percussion students from NYU’s premiere Steinhardt Music and Performing Arts Program."

    - Cantaloupe Music - Emusic


    The NYU Percussion Ensemble
    - "Directed and conducted by Jonathan Haas, focuses its' repertoire on the seminal works of the 20/21st centuries. Although a relatively new art form, the percussion ensemble repertoire spans nearly 100 years. From the powerful works of iconoclast Edgar Varese to his modern day counterpart, Frank Zappa, to the cutting edge compositionalstyles of (NYU composition and Music Technology faculty) Morton Subtonick. Each year, the NYU Percussion Ensemble presents several unique performances, including CoMotion, a bringing together of percussion and physical theatre. Performances have included Stravinsky's L'Histoire du soldat, in collaboration with the Blessed Unrest Theatre Company, as well as Stockhausen's Teirkreis and Musik im Bauch, with the NYU Steinhardt Program in Dance Education."


    - "Bobby Previte’s first stage appearance came in 1956 at the Niagara Falls Talent Show, where, guitar in hand, and adorned in an over-sized suit, he belted out a solo rendition of Elvis Presley’s ‘Hound Dog.’

    Eight years later, thinking drumming might be a good way to get girls, he fashioned a bass drum from a rusted garbage can, a kick pedal from a wire coat hanger wedged between two pieces of linoleum and a rubber ball stuck on top, tom toms from upside-down trash bins, cymbals from aluminum pie plates suspended on plungers, and a box of loose junk for a snare – then practiced for a year in his dark basement with a lone spotlight shining on him before eventually starting a band, the “Devil’s Disciples.”  But when they finally got a job at the church he was fired for not having ‘real’ drums. Seeking revenge, he took a job as a paperboy, saved every penny, and a year later bought the Rogers kit he still uses today in concerts all over the world.

    Strolling in the East Village one bright afternoon, he peered inside a limo stuck in traffic (crosstown) and suddenly found himself face to face with Jimi Hendrix. Thinking fast, he unfurled the poster of Jimi he had fortunately just acquired, then looked on in astonishment as Hendrix smiled and flashed him the peace sign.

    All the rest, as they say, is noise."

  •   httpsf4bcbitscomimga1665748673_14jpg  

    - Free as always . . .
  •  httpsf4bcbitscomimga3709332465_14jpg 
    30th Anniversary BANG ON A CAN MARATHON
    Saturday, May 6, 2017 from 2-10pm
    8 hours of Live Music ! . . .

  • On Bandcamp Weekly:

    How Bang On A Can Rejuvenated New York’s Improvisational Spirit

    Bang On A Can

    httpsf4bcbitscomimga2463018550_14jpg

    Bang on a Can - from the Archives, Vol. 1

    This is a compilation of recordings remastered from VHS tapes, camcorders, and mixing boards during various Bang on a Can Marathons over the years, chronicling the organization's decades-long history of presenting contemporary composition and art music from diverse voices.

    In a new ongoing project by Cantaloupe Music and Bang on a Can, these historic recordings are being remastered and cataloged, and will be made available as part of our subscription platform, the Cantaloupe Club. New volumes from the Bang on a Can archives will be released throughout the year as we celebrated the storied organization's 30th anniversary.
  • edited May 2017
      
    As one of the most socially conscious young composers in contemporary classical music, Ted Hearne has drawn on a multitude of influences to create Sound from the Bench—his first project for Cantaloupe Music.

    Written for the supple, ethereal voices of Philadelphia’s world-renowned chamber choir The Crossing, the four works presented
    here tap into themes as varied as racial divides (Privilege), government secrets (Ripple), love and its dark permutations
    (Consent), and corporate personhood in the eyes of the US Supreme Court (Sound from the Bench).

    The title piece also features the edgy electric guitars of Dither’s Taylor Levine and James Moore, as well as the rhythmic flourishes of percussionist Ron Wiltrout. Taken as a whole, this is some of Hearne’s most wide-ranging and adventurous work—a siren call that resonates with unusual passion in these politically charged times.
    - Cantaloupe Music - Emusic
    More The Crossing at Emusers
    More Ted Hearne at Emusers

    This leaves The Crossing with 2 potential "album of the year 2017" and possibly one more on the way.
    - Very Impressing !
  • edited May 2017
     Out on 05.05.2017 and grabbed from the new eMu:
    - Recommended to fans of Plaistow.

     
    Composers: Brooks Frederickson, Anthony Vine, Ken Thomson, Fjóla Evans, Brendon Randall-Myers and Adrian Knight

    Bearthoven is a small ensemble that has its roots in the Bang on a Can organization's Summer Music Festival at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art—known worldwide as a mecca for emerging composers of adventurous contemporary music. Comprised of Karl Larson (piano), Pat Swoboda (upright & electric bass) and Matt Evans (percussion & drumkit), the group started in name only as a cheeky tribute to Beethoven, and quickly took on the mission of making art music more accessible to a wider range of listeners than the traditional "classical music" crowd. Trios features the work of six young composers and serves as a living blueprint of Bearthoven's support network. 

    "Each of their individual voices is reflected in our identity as a trio," Larson explains. "When Bearthoven began, we were determined to build a new repertoire for our instrumentation; piano-bass-percussion trios are common in jazz, for example, but pieces for this format in the modern canon were virtually non-existent. So our goal in building this repertoire wasn't to cultivate a particular sound or style, but to act as a blank page for composers and give them the chance to project their distinct voices onto our ensemble."

    - Cantaloupe Music - Emusic

    Bearthoven

    - "is a piano trio creating a new repertoire for a familiar instrumentation by commissioning works from leading young composers. Karl Larson (piano), Pat Swoboda (bass), and Matt Evans (percussion) have combined their individual voices and diverse musical backgrounds, coming together to create a versatile trio focused on frequent and innovative commissioning of up-and-coming composers. Bearthoven is rapidly building a diverse repertoire by challenging composers to apply their own voice to an instrumentation that, while common amongst jazz and pop idioms, is currently foreign in the contemporary classical world.

    Formed in 2013, Bearthoven has quickly established themselves as a forerunner in the New York City contemporary music scene. Commissioning 18 new works in their first four seasons, the trio has created its own diverse repertoire ranging from the driving, post-minimal voices of Ken Thomson, Brooks Frederickson, and Brendon Randall-Myers to the atmospheric and abstracted offerings of Fjola Evans, Adrian Knight, and Anthony Vine. Bearthoven’s commitment to collaboration and innovation has garnered both critical and peer acclaim and has led to featured performances on notable stages including the MATA Festival, the Bang On a Can Marathon, and the Music/Sound Series at EMPAC, as well an upcoming release on Cantaloupe Music. Bearthoven was recently selected as 1 of 24 ensembles to be a part of the inaugural New Music USA Impact Fund cohort (along with So Percussion, JACK Quartet, and Talea Ensemble).


    MISSION STATEMENT

    Bearthoven exists in an era where music no longer fits into discrete genre categories. Audiences have well trained ears attuned to aural cues and sonic associations, connecting pieces of music with our larger conception of culture like never before. The current generation has access to an unprecedented amount and variety of music, and these associations grow stronger and more developed with each technological development. Larson, Swoboda, and Evans believe these developments raise interesting questions about how contemporary chamber ensembles approach commissioning, programming, and marketing strategies. Through their work in Bearthoven, the musicians strive to address these questions, developing a new model for contemporary chamber groups in the 21st century.

    Bearthoven’s instrumentation, while a clear reference to jazz and pop idioms, is intended to serve as an access point for the current listener. When commissioning new works, the trio invites composers to explore their cultural relationship with the instrumentation, creating a dialogue between their compositional voice and their own associations with the piano, bass, and percussion sound palette. This approach is a provocative prompt for composers and provides the audience with a secure sonic foothold, even in the most abstract compositions.


  •   

      

    Lauded by the New York Times as a “...hypnotic and ethereally beautiful invocation of wind, sky and birdsong,” John Luther Adams’ Canticles of the Holy Wind, performed by the renowned chamber choir The Crossing, is his most technically challenging choral work, and yet the music’s mesmerizing aura of stillness encourages listening at its most elemental. The piece is composed for four choirs of eight singers each, and moves through spaces that are as fantastical (“Sky with Four Suns”) as they are serene (“The Hour of the Doves”), always with a connection to our inner world, as well as the world around us.

    “John allows us to interrupt our otherwise endlessly forward-tumbling lives,” notes Donald Nally, The Crossing’s conductor, “and experience these sounds as if we were sitting in the woods for an hour. An hour of wind and of sky and of birds. We are drawn to this music, not just for the beauty of its shimmering harmonies and the overwhelming climactic moments, but also for way it inspires a ‘hearing’ of nature, in real time, as we sing it.”

    - Cantaloupe Music - Emusic


    John Luther Adams

    - More The Crossing at Emusers upthread and here

  • edited August 2017
      

    Co-composed by Lao Luo and Bang on a Can founders Michael GordonDavid Lang, and Julia WolfeCloud River Mountain is an edgy cross-cultural collaboration between the Bang on a Can All-Stars and the extraordinary Chinese vocalist Gong Linna, whose dynamic voice covers a vast canvas of sonic colors. Linna has drawn comparisons to Björk with her adventurous range, embracing Chinese folk, pop, and avant-garde art music with a sure-footed confidence that transcends borders. 

    On Cloud River Mountain, she sings in both Mandarin and English over the groove-driven melodies and lush soundscapes of the All-Stars, weaving ancient Chinese storytelling together with Western songwriting in a raucous musical mix. Inspired by the verses of classical Chinese poet Qu Yuan, these seven songs channel the mystical stories of the past and merge them with the churning, clanging sounds of the future.

    - Cantaloupe Music

     

    - And here's a Tweet from @Nereffid :

  • edited October 2017
     
    Live performance by the Bang on a Can All-Stars
    https://evbvd.com/bookofdays/texts/0822/
  • edited September 2017

    Next Tuesday! Big Bang Benefit Celebrating 30 YEARS!!

    It's true. We're 30!

    Next Tuesday September 26, at BAM's Lepercq Space, we're throwing a rip roaring party, concert and benefit, honoring musical powerhouse Francisco Núñez, founder and director of Young People's Chorus of NYC. Francisco is a hero to new music, an incredible choir director and conductor, truly a force of nature. Through his own determination and skill, Francisco forged one of the world's best youth choirs, and the remarkable diversity and charisma of the talented singers of YPC can take your breath away. They'll be performing at the Benefit, as well as our own legendary Bang on a Can All-Stars. Help us salute Francisco with an ad, a gift, a ticket or a table! All the details are on the invitation at the bottom of this email. Any gift of ANY size appreciated. We got to 30 because of you, and we never stop being grateful.

    And while we have you, we want to make sure you know all about our big, big, big new show...Road Trip! A new piece from Michael, David & Julia for the Bang on a Can All-Stars with wildly inventive visuals and direction. Road Trip will be at BAM's Next Wave October 27-28. Below you can click on the trailer for the show - it's going to be spectacular! Come to the gig, come to the benefit, come sing Happy Birthday to us!

     
  • edited February 2018
    Out today and on repeat chez moir:

    When Michael Gordon was approached to compose his epic, inspirational work Natural History, he had one question to answer: If Oregon’s Crater Lake National Park were a symphony, what would it sound like? Conducted by Teddy Abrams and performed by the Britt Orchestra with members of the Klamath Tribe’s percussion group Steiger Butte Drum and Singers, Natural History stands tall as a celebration of the park’s natural wonders, as well as a conduit to the spiritual history of the surrounding community. 

    Natural History was commissioned by the Britt Music & Arts Festival to commemorate the centennial of the National Parks Service, and was performed on August 20, 2016 at the Britt Pavilion in Jacksonville, Oregon. As Gordon describes it in the short documentary film Symphony for Nature (directed by Anne Flatté and airing on select PBS stations): “Originally it was for an orchestra of 40 musicians, which is already a lot of people, but the plans for the piece kept growing. We added a chorus, and then [Britt] put me in touch with the Klamath Tribe, so now we have this project with a lot of forces working together.”

    - Cantaloupe Music

    Steiger Butte Singers
    pictured here with Composer Michael Gordon and Music Director, Teddy Abrams
    .
    The group’s name, Steiger Butte, originates from a vision quest site west of Chiloquin traditionally used by tribal people. The Steiger Butte Drum, which has been in existence since the 1950s, is a family group that travels the United States and the Pacific Northwest. Now in their third generation of singers, Steiger Butte includes fathers, mothers, brothers, sisters, uncles, aunts, nephews and nieces. Tupper describes Steiger Butte as a Northern style pow wow drum and notes the group has previously performed at the Britt Festival and for the “Crater Lake — Mirror of Heaven,” documentary. To learn more about the Steiger Butte Drum players and their history.
  • Out today and on repeat chez moir:

    Natural History was commissioned by the Britt Music & Arts Festival to commemorate the centennial of the National Parks Service, and was performed on August 20, 2016 at the Britt Pavilion in Jacksonville, Oregon. As Gordon describes it in the short documentary film Symphony for Nature (directed by Anne Flatté and airing on select PBS stations): “Originally it was for an orchestra of 40 musicians, which is already a lot of people, but the plans for the piece kept growing. We added a chorus, and then [Britt] put me in touch with the Klamath Tribe, so now we have this project with a lot of forces working together.”

    - Cantaloupe Music

    Out today and on repeat chez moir:


    - Cantaloupe Music
    This is one of those curious cases of odd pricing.  It's a single 24 minute track "album" priced for $10 on Bandcamp,  $8.99 on Amazon, $6.99 on eMusic/US, and $0.49 on eMusic/Europe.

    I would argue that $10 or $8.99  is too much for a single 24 minute track (though I fully respect an artist or label charging whatever they choose, understanding that volume of sales may be affected by price), and that $0.49 is probably too inexpensive.    What's reasonable?  $2.00?  $4.00?   Even the $6.99 eMusic/US price seems a bit high (but not outrageous) for what amounts to a fairly short "EP-length" release.

    The world is solving much more complicated problems than album pricing.  Why does the music industry continue to shoot itself in the foot and then whine about it?


  • The Unchanging Sea: interview with Michael Gordon & Bill Morrison
    https://michaelgordonmusic.bandcamp.com/album/the-unchanging-sea
  •  
     released August 13, 2018
  • edited August 2018
    Brighternow said: on august 3.

    The Unchanging Sea: interview with Michael Gordon & Bill Morrison
    https://michaelgordonmusic.bandcamp.com/album/the-unchanging-sea
     
     - The Unchanging Sea is the latest collaboration in a long-running partnership between composer Michael Gordon and filmmaker Bill Morrison. This is their fifth work for orchestra over the course of nearly two decades; starting with Decasia in 2001, the two developed a style that combined Gordon’s haunting, hypnotic music with Morrison’s artful manipulations of old, deteriorating film reels to craft a dreamlike experience that’s by turns whimsical, nostalgic and inspiring.

    Co-commissioned and performed by the Seattle Symphony and featuring piano soloist Tomoko MukaiyamaThe Unchanging Sea flows from Gordon’s fascination with our connection to our watery source, in all its turbulence, majesty and mystery. While the title and visual material originate with a 1910 short film by silent era director D.W. Griffith, Morrison’s film sources 17 obscure or lost titles dealing with sea travel, including footage shot in Seattle in 1897, when the S.S. Willamette sailed out of Puget Sound at the height of the gold rush.

    The Unchanging Sea
     is a double-disc CD + DVD package. The CD includes the companion piece Beijing Harmony, also performed by the Seattle Symphony. Inspired by a visit to the Echo Wall at Beijing’s Temple of Heaven, Gordon “imagined that the sound would bounce off the stone floors and buildings to create a fanfare of echoes — an acoustical rebounding and ringing that would slowly grow in zeal and fierceness.” 

    - Cantaloupe Music - Emusic

  • edited February 2019
    - Along with subscribing to Cantaloupe Music on Bandcamp, comes some newsletters.
    - Here's the first one in 2019:

  • edited February 2019
    released February 8, 2019

     
    Bearthoven (Karl Larson, piano; Pat Swoboda, double bass; and Matt Evans, percussion) releases its second album, "American Dream", featuring the works of composer Scott Wollschleger, including his "Gas Station Canon Song", "American Dream", and "We See Things That Are Not There".

    Karl Larson describes American Dream as “a reflection of the contemporary American state of mind.” Rather than making a direct political statement, the works on the album reflect the paradoxical nature of the “American Dream” in our current socio-economic climate. Wollschleger says, “This music expresses the strongest sense of urgency I've experienced in my entire life, channeling feelings of doom, optimism, hopelessness, and the sublime. Much like a dream, these pieces weave an interconnected musical fabric of contradictory worlds. . . . .”                  


  • Composers: Michael Gordon, Julia Wolfe, Anna Clyne,
    David Lang, Philip Glass etc. . .
    Bang on a Can at University of Denver - Michael Gordon's Big Space
    Friday, April 12, Newman Center at University of Denver, Denver, CO
    Anthracite Fields in Dallas - Soluna Festival

    Monday, April 15, Dallas Symphony - Moody Performance Hall, Dallas, TX
    Field Recordings on the Festival International de Musique Actuelle de Victoriaville

     Thursday, May 16, Festival International de Musique Actuelle de Victoriaville, Victoriaville, QC, Canada

     Bang on a Can's LOUD Weekend
    Friday, August 2–4, MASS MoCA, North Adams, MA
    bangonacan.org/events
    - Free, released April 4, 2019


  • Featuring edgy, raucous performances by the Bang on a Can All-Stars and the New York-based large Ensemble Contemporaneous (conducted by David Bloom)
    As a longtime friend of Bang on a Can’s founding composers and a creative firebrand in his own right, Jeffrey Brooks makes music that shimmers with bold intensity and an enveloping warmth. Big expressive gestures, heavy basslines, echoes of pop and rock, jagged dissonance and New York-style “downtown” noise are all signatures of his vibrant and electric sound.

    He first met Michael Gordon, David Lang and Julia Wolfe while a student at Yale in the mid-1980s, eventually returning to his home state of Minnesota and taking up residence in Minneapolis, where he was artistic director of the American Composers Forum from 1990 to 1995. Brooks might be best known for his wind ensemble work Dreadnought (1996), but perhaps just as significantly, he is one of the few modern classical composers with a penchant for chasing rhythm in a way that even dancefloor DJs can understand.

    “I think there’s music that you can really get your head around intellectually,” Brooks observes, “and there’s music that you can get your head around emotionally one way or another, and then there’s music that you can just experience physically, with the subwoofers going through your body—like dance music. And the music I try to write has all three of those things.” 
  •  
    New message from Cantaloupe Music.
    It’s almost time for one of our most widely-anticipated releases of 2019: the Seattle Symphony’s crystalline recording of John Luther Adams’ epic work BECOME DESERT! The third in a trilogy, alongside 2014’s Grammy award winning Become Ocean, and the yet-to-be-recorded Become River, Become Desert finished JLA’s metaphorical journey upstream in this creative partnership with conductor Ludovic Morlot. In his 2018 essay for the New York Times, Adams prepares us for listening to Become Desert with a map, of sorts, to help us find the state of “swimming in light” that the music is meant to convey. Along the way, “You begin to feel that this music you had thought was suspended in time is slowly leading you somewhere, pulling you somewhere. It continues upward, rising with inevitable force, like the wind or the light.” 

    The second disc in this 2-disc set is a DVD which includes a 5.1 surround mix of the recording, as well as a slideshow of desert images (all still photography by John Luther Adams). And as further testament to the technical sophistication of the recording process itself, the production team behind Become Desert has partnered with Dolby Laboratories to create a Dolby Atmos mix—a first for a Cantaloupe Music release, available via Acoustic Sounds and other HD retailers on June 14.


  • edited July 2019
    releases July 19, 2019:

    httpsf4bcbitscomimga1347807947_14jpg
     An homage to the campy and spine-chilling horror films of the 1940s, the stage version of Acquanetta combines theater, opera and film to explore the world of a real-life B-movie star with a mysterious past. Known for her exotic beauty, Acquanetta—aka Mildred Davenport—was the star of such cult films as Captive Wild Woman, Jungle Woman, The Sword of Monte Cristo and Tarzan and the Leopard Woman, before she disappeared from public life.

    Michael Gordon's soaring and often comic score, with text by librettist Deborah Artman, is a vivid metaphor for the ways in which the movie camera manipulates how we see and are seen. The cast of characters, featuring Mikaela Bennett (Acquanetta), Amelia Watkins (Brainy Woman), Eliza Bagg (Ape), Matt Boehler (Director) and Timur (Doctor), reveals inner longings and emotional shadows in a spooky meditation on identity, transformation, stereotypes and typecasting, set in the heyday of Hollywood glamour.

    The official studio recording of Acquanetta also features the Bang on a Can Opera Ensemble, with Courtney Orlando (violin), Caleb Burhans (violin and viola), Ashley Bathgate (cello), Taylor Levine (electric guitar and bass), Greg Chudzik (double and electric bass) and Red Wierenga (keyboard and electronics). The chorus is comprised of members of the Choir of Trinity Wall Street.
    6/11/19: Catskill resident and writer/librettist Deborah Artman will discuss the upcoming performances of the opera "Acquanetta" at Bard SummerScape in July, as the "WGXC Morning Show" is live from HiLo in Catskill, NY.

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