Almost despite itself, three movements of Wedge Miniatures will be performed at the Espace Francois Mauriac in Sevran on Friday, June 29 at 8pm (20h) More surprises!  Actually, the show begins at 8:45pm (20h45). The performers will be Samuel Andreyev (oboe) and Hyun Hwa Cho (piano). Here’s how to get there:

1. Take the RER B towards Roissy-CDG, but not the train that goes straight from Paris to the airport. Sit towards the back of the train
2. When you get out of the train, go to the back exit. Keep going straight (south). You’ll be walking along ave. Andre Toutain, which becomes ave. de Lattre de Tassigny.
3. At the end of ave. de Lattre de Tassigny, you’ll come to a T intersection with ave. du General Leclerc. On your right will be a square with a quote from de Gaulle. Cross ave. du General Leclerc, and the Espace Francois Mauriac will be the low building right in front of you.
4. The Espace Francois Mauriac claims that it is located at 51, ave du General Leclerc. However, if you put that into any online map provider, you get the wrong place. You can’t trust everything you see on the web…
5. Here’s a map of how to get from the RER station to the Espace Francois Mauriac.

While watching the dance concert, I discovered a few things:

1) I need to be more patient. I tend to start judging a piece by its first note, and that really isn’t cool. I hope people give me more than one note to decide if the rest is worth listening to…

2) I also need to pay more attention to performances if I’m going to effectively critique concerts. My inclination is always to blame the composer if a piece doesn’t work to my ears - but sometimes it’s the performance.

3) During the curtain calls, you can tell the composer from the choreographer because the choreographer knows how to walk backwards, while the composer keeps tripping.

Also, I went to another concert, on Thursday the 14th. It was called Anima and featured Garth Knox on viola and the cellist Pierre Strauch, who is apparently also the cellist for the group we can’t pay for the June 29 concert. Looking back at number 2 on the list above, I have almost nothing to say about this concert precisely because I don’t have much to say about the guys playing (more…)

I got myself into a rhetorical trap yesterday, which was good for me. I was talking to a physical theatrist about the Ballet électronique concert at IRCAM last Tuesday (June 12), and made a comment – that I’d been planning to indelibly inscribe here on the web – about how I lack a vocabulary to discuss the technical aspects, and more importantly, the emotional impact of dance, and movement in general. But then I realized that one of my big pet peeves is the idea that somehow you have to be “trained” to understand music, be it Beethoven, Berio, or the Backstreet Boys. I’m one who firmly believes that a “novice” should be able to understand at least the emotional framework of a piece of music regardless of a lack of musical vocabulary or training. I don’t expect everyone to be able to figure out complex motivic transformations, or how the large-scale harmonic plan worked, or how the two interacted to create the work’s narrative (I typically don’t get those unless I have the score, and the last could take some serious analysis!) – or even know what those things mean. But I do hope that anyone listening to a piece of mine will understand that, because of the shape that I give it and the specific musical ideas that I use, it “means” something, that it isn’t just an abstract collection of pitches and sounds.

And then I went and said, well I don’t know how to understand movement so I can’t really say anything about it. Bullshit. (more…)

At about the same time I learned that the concert that had been scheduled for June 29th had not been funded by the city of Sevran government, I noticed the mythical Darcy James Argue’s post about the problems with a purely market-based to funding new/experimental music of all sorts. His springboard is Marc Ribot’s recent article in All About Jazz.

Without directly addressing all this stuff, I’m going to relate a cautionary tale about putting your eggs in the government’s basket. I promised myself I wouldn’t get into politics on the blog, but I figure this has to do with a little town in the Parisian suburbs, and it applies to my life as a composer, so why not? (more…)

I’ve been feeling a bit envious of New Yorkers of late - they get things like a 27-hour Bang On A Can marathon (I can’t say I’m exactly envious of Darcy James Argue and Steve Smith, both of whom sat through the whole thing, but I can live vicariously through them) (I’m going to get myself in trouble here, but, um, is Darcy James Argue real? I mean, obviously he exists, but it’s, like, a pseudonym, right? I mean, how did he get that last name? And why does his name have such the same ring to it as Corey Dargel’s? And his band is called Secret Society? It all seems fishy to me.) And all the stuff on Alex Ross’s constant calendars (though my wistful credibility is shattered because it’s not like I ever went to anything he mentioned while I lived in New York). And the first Make Music New York on June 21. Now admittedly, I get to hang out at the original MMNY here in Paris, but after a couple of Fete de la musiques, you can get a little jaded, and I wish I could be in New York for the beginning of something. [full disclosure here, my friend Aaron well maybe didn’t think up the idea of doing a fete de la musique in New York, but while the rest of us made excuses about how it couldn’t be done in New York - the city is too big, too many people would complain, people would be mean, the streets’d get too dirty so the city would never let you do it, you’d need permits for everything - he went out and made something happen. Hopefully things’ll hold out for him for another 2 weeks…]

So I went and bought myself a “pass” to IRCAM’s Agora festival, which means I have a date with 4 new-music concerts in the next month, including, among others, an opera by Jonathan Harvey about Wagner dying, and something called “le ballet electronique,” which alas does not include Varese’s poeme. That was tonight, and I was too busy editing a 7-year-old orchestral score for a contest, because I have to enter contests damnit and if I didn’t finish the score today, it was never going to happen. Personally, I want to write a ballet metallique someday.

So, over the next few weeks, I’ll try to write down some thoughts about all these shows I’m attending.

I was just on vacation for a week… and before that, I had to deal with the time-honored tradition of meeting a compositional deadline - 6 of my 9 Wedge Miniatures on the computer, as pretty as possible, and with a separate oboe part for the longer ones, printed and mailed to the ensemble Multilaterale all by the amorphous “debut juin” - while I was on vacation, so really, for Nissim, the end of May. Concert is June 29, if the city funds us…

Well, it’s done at least, and vacation was a blast.

So, I got to do one of the odder exercises I’ve yet endeavored during that last week o’ madness. The first movement is called “Here’s the Wedge.” It’s for English horn and piano. In conception, it’s pretty much mechanical. I take my wedge - so called because when written on the page, it looks sort of like a wedge, it goes up in the top voice and down in the bottom so there’s a closed point at one end and a wide opening at the other - and expand it step by step in both directions, mechanically. Then the process stops, the English horn plays a short interlude, and then everything starts over again, expanding farther each time until, in one draft, the pianist was to play 26 notes simultaneously. (it was recognized that this is impossible, and contingencies were instructed, but in the end, it was thought that 26 notes, even with contingency, was untenable) Because of the mechanical nature of all this, and the number of notes involved, and the time constraints, I didn’t write this movement out on paper before entering into the computer. I just put it straight into Sibelius. (more…)