The University of Music and Performing Arts in Graz announced a three-day symposion on Bodily Expression in Electronic Music.

Speakers include Isabel Mundry, Georgina Born, Federico Celestini, Andreas Dorschel, Deniz Peters, Alva Noe, Simon Emmerson, Pauline Oliveros, Gerhard Eckel, and Kendall Walton.

LiveHereNow is a company that specialized on Instant-Recordings

This idea is intriguing. You go to a concert and at the end of the show, while you walk out of the hall, a freshly produced instant-recording of the concert is already up for sale at the merchandise stand at the exit doors.

Think of this CD as an official souvenir of the concert you just heard. The album will be avaiable only at the concert venue after the show. It is professionally produced and packaged and contains an unedited recording of the show you just heard.

Would you buy such a CD if it were available after the next concert you visit?

If you are a musician: would you like your concert to be recorded and sold this way?

Here is a short “prelisten” for you:

Harvard Group for New Music

HGNM
The Harvard Group for New Music
presents
a Concert of Contemporary Music

Come and listen to new works by Harvard Composers!
performed by
White Rabbit
ensemble-in-residence

Sabrina Schroeder// Holding Patterns (for ensemble)
Ann Cleare// Dysmorphia (for viola and cello)
Bert Van Herck// Reconnected (for alto flute and clarinet)
Hannah Lash// Draw (for violin solo)
Karola Obermueller//Einseitige Dialoge (for soprano and piano)

Saturday, November 7th
8 pm
John Knowles Paine Concert Hall
Music Building, Harvard University

FREE ADMISSION
Reception to follow

for more info
call
(617) 496 6013
or go to
www.hgnm.org

As I was doing this favor, I thought about the fact that I spend a significant amount of time hearing music but very little actually listening.  This reminded me of a comment made by musicologist Reinhold Brinkmann when I was a teaching assistant for a class he taught that examined Vienna (including, and especially, the Second Viennese School) for non-majors.  He noted that students today were so accustomed to hearing music everywhere that it was almost impossible to convince them to listen.  They would experience great difficulty staying focused in lectures when musical examples were played, almost as thought they thought it was a chance to break their concentration rather than remaining engaged.  At the time, I thought that this phenomenon was limited to non-majors.  But now I am teaching students who want to spend their lives as musicians and music educators, and I’ve seen much of the same behavior.  I am constantly amazed by how often I need to remind them to be quiet when I play an example in class.

Of course, I assumed that I wasn’t like that: I listen.  But as I took the time to focus on the Rostropovich, I realized that much of the time, I didn’t.  Music is often around: I have it on in the car, I play it in my classes, I even run through entire operas in the background while I am working on time-consuming tasks.  But the music in the car is to distract me while driving, music in class is a form of work, and the operas are to try and absorb them on almost a subconscious level (if I listen to Siegfried enough times, maybe I will finally remember it).  Actual listening, for me, happens very infrequently.  Perhaps this is a function of music’s ubiquity or the fact that it is simply too easy to listen to music with all of the devices we can use to do so today (when I am at a concert, I have far less difficulty paying attention).  My experience with the Rostropovich, though, reminded me of how listening to a wonderful interpretation of an intricate piece has no parallel.

Listen to Rostropovich play the Sarabande from Bach’s Cello Suite No. 1

Image by Bullard

So far so good. I am somewhat surprised that the petition does not address the most apparent problem that concerns *all* collecting societies alike (ASCAP, BMI, GEMA etc.)

At a time when most classical performers are trying to market themselves via websites and social networking platforms, the ability to stream their own recordings becomes crucial. After all, you want to showcase your talent, so that more and more people will take notice of you and come to your concerts. Streaming music from your website is technically no big problem anymore, but this is where the GEMAs, ASCAPs, and BMIs of this world come into play.

Say you recorded three CDs with 15 works by 3 different composers. You host your website in the US. 2 composers are registering their works with ASCAP, one is registered with BMI. In order to stream your own recordings from your own website you would have to pay annual fees in excess of $600 to ASCAP and BMI. And this is the amount you pay if you don’t make a single $ on CD sales. If you earn money, ad even if it is only a tiny amount, you will have to pay much bigger amounts!

Why that? None of the collecting societies offers licenses for individual works or for all works by one composer only. If you want to stream one work, you have to get a comprehensive license that would allow you to stream all (!!) of the works that have been registered with that collecting society. That includes millions of works: all of Van Halen, all of Frank Sinatra, all of Motörhead, all of Björk, all of Steve Reich, all of …. and also the 15 works that you wanted to stream from your website.

How crayz is that? Let me know what you think.

Here is a link to the petition again.

PS: if you are composer and you wanted to stream recordings of your own music, you would have to buy the comprehensive license, too!

PPS: I think composers should definitely get paid when their music is played, downloaded, and streamed. I am just questioning the practice of not making the purchase of licenses more flexible.

Hagen Quartet

Tonight I had the pleasure of hearing the Hagen Quartet play at the Konzerthaus (I am in Vienna and will be here for the next 2.5 months, so I am certainly looking forward to a lot of concerts!).  This ensemble is one of the premier string quartets in the world and as usual they did not disappoint — except for the fact that they did not play an encore!  The program was Beethoven op. 18/4, Bartók’s String Quartet no. 1, and Brahms’s op. 111 Quintet, also featuring Antoine Tamestit as the second viola.  Needless to say, the performance was virtually flawless and highly appreciated by the crowd (except for some patrons who seemed unimpressed by the Bartók…but this is Vienna…).

I very much enjoyed their rendition of op. 18/4, the only minor quartet of Beethoven’s early works in this genre.  Instead of maximizing the Sturm und Drang to open the first movement, they downplayed the drama, giving the melody almost a light texture.  The Hagen Quartet is very skilled all around, but it would be hard to overstate how effectively they can play in the quieter ranges.  In the Beethoven, this ability led to an almost delicate rendition of the initial theme.  When it returned in the recapitulation, they then exploited its full dramatic potential, lending a cohesive narrative to the form and an inspired interpretation.

The Bartók is one of my favorites from his string quartets so I was very pleased to be able to hear the Hagen version.  I have to say that I wanted more of a ’seek and destroy’ sound in the last movement — one of my favorite memories of them was hearing them play the complete late Beethoven quartets over the course of a weekend, particularly their ’seek and destroy’ approach to the Große Fuge.  However, the lines were remarkably lucid, even the lowest parts in the viola and cello which normally sound like a vicious growl.  This piece is fascinating because of its reliance on minor seconds: at first, they are not apparent, particularly because the opening stresses large intervals in the two violins, but what joins these bigger leaps are minor seconds.  By the third (and final) movement, these minor seconds are almost unavoidable.  One of Bartók’s most effective timbres is created by having one of the violins play the open E string simultaneously with a covered E on the neighboring A string.  This piercing sound is then modified with minor seconds above and below it, creating tension that does not dissipate throughout the movement.  The theme that appears after this effect also stresses minor seconds, as do many of the melodies, except for one of the most prominent.  At two points, the music comes to a sudden stop (I felt that the Hagen Quartet could have stopped a little more suddenly, but this is a small quibble) with a lyrical, four-note melody in the first violin floating over the other parts.  Unlike so much of the movement, the minor seconds suddenly disappear: the melody outlines a descending perfect fifth with whole step to a minor third then another whole step.  However, the lyricism is thwarted by the anchoring accompaniment, which leaps up a tritone.  While the intervals it forms with the melody are mostly consonant (starting with a minor third and ending on a major third), the tritone is jarring and unavoidable.  One of my favorite characteristics of music from this era is precisely this tension between consonance and dissonance: the rules of traditional harmony are fading but not absent.  In tonight’s concert, the Hagen Quartet produced an exquisite sound when after the first iteration, this theme was repeated at an astoundingly quiet dynamic.

The Brahms was also wonderful, although I prefer some of the composer’s other chamber works.  Particularly during the second theme of the first movement the warm tone of the Hagen Quartet (with Tamestit) shone through.  All in all, it was a wonderful concert experience and I was thrilled to have the opportunity to hear them live again.

Kent Nagano and Guy Lafleur

For those of you who think that classical music is dead, or that classical music cannot appeal to a mass audience, or even that the funding of classical music organizations is doomed to be perennially on the brink, you clearly did not attend the Montreal Symphony’s presentation at the Bell Centre on 2 April 2009.  The concert was called the ‘Meeting of the Century’ and combined anniversaries of two of the city’s organizations: the centennial of the Montreal Canadiens — arguably the most successful hockey franchise in the National Hockey League — and the 75th anniversary of the Montreal Symphony.  Linking these two organizations together may seem gimmicky or spurious, but in fact the combination represents Nagano’s keen observations about Montreal culture.  Furthermore the program — while it did feature pieces to do with hockey — was not limited to pops highlights: indeed, the 12 000 attendees were equally enthralled with excerpts from Beethoven, Respighi, and Holst.  A sold-out arena concert is generally in the ambit of a Britney Spears, not a symphony orchestra, so it is worth considering how the OSM presented such a successful show — and benefited from the results, since the funds will assist the orchestra to tour Europe next year.

One of the main features of this concert was a performance of Les Glorieux, a work commissioned last year by the OSM.  The piece was so popular that the concert and rehearsals sold out, leading the OSM to develop the Bell Centre idea for this year.  Les Glorieux is a nickname for the Montreal Canadiens and pays tribute to the historical legacy between the city and its hockey team.  Hockey in Montreal is like baseball in Boston or football in Texas: the city’s natives follow events with a close and critical eye.  Not only is the team important today, it also has an enviable legacy with the most Stanley Cup wins of any hockey team and the second-most championships of any professional sports team in North America (the Yankees have the distinction of 26 to the Canadiens’ 24).  Nagano’s decision to commission the piece shows his understanding of Montreal’s culture and the reverence that hockey has.  Not only did the orchestra perform the work, they also invited several of the legendary players from the team to join them on stage: Guy Lafleur, Elmer Lach, Jean Béliveau, Henri Richard just to name a few.

What was impressive, though, was that Nagano did not allow this event to be only about hockey.  The OSM presented a program primarily of 20th-century pieces and Beethoven.  While several, such as Copland’s Fanfare for the Common Man and ‘Mars: Bringer of War’ from Holst’s The Planets, can be viewed as appropriate for the pop repertoire, the OSM also played the first movement of Beethoven’s 5th Symphony and the final movement from the ‘recapitulation’ (entrance of the voices) from Beethoven’s 9th, accompanied by a choir of 1500.  Certainly these pieces are not difficult listening, but I would defy any conductor to present, say, Webern in a hockey arena and capture the subtleties.  The audience, however, was very appreciative of all the works, not just the hockey piece but of the program as a whole.  Imagine an arena filled with people cheering a performance of Beethoven’s ‘Ode to Joy’ or the last movement of Respighi’s Pines of Rome with an entire additional brass band.  Purists may see this event as little more than a gimmick, but if it brings classical music to 12 000 people while providing much needed support to arts organizations , I think that they should be encouraged.

Keynote by Jonathan Sterne from McGill University: “Is Music a Thing?”

Composers’s Roundtable with Lou Bunk (Brandeis University), Maxwell Dulaney (Brandeis University), Davide Ianni (Boston University), and Adam Roberts (Harvard University). Moderated by Jean-Francois Charles.

Details at http://www.hcs.harvard.edu/gradmus/program.php