Take Ecstasy with Me

Look I know I haven't mentioned this before and I REALLY SHOULD HAVE but you guys kind of have to go to the Ecstatic Music Festival that Judd Greenstein is curating at Merkin. It starts tomorrow, Monday afternoon, Jan. 17 (Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, so you're off work!), and runs for freakin' MONTHS. Here's the program for tomorrow's FREE marathon, which starts at 2 and for seven hours, with lots of breaks and refreshments and whatnot so you're not being held prisoner or something:

Ne(x)tworks plays a piece by Julius Eastman (no not THAT piece, it is MLK Day, do you want to get us all in trouble)
Timo Andres plays Ives and Andres
Face the Music plays Missy Mazzoli and Christine Southworth
So Percussion plays So Percussion
Chiara String Quartet plays Jefferson Friedman
NOW Ensemble plays Greenstein
John Matthias, Adrian Corker & Andew Prior play Matthias
Julianna Barwick sings Barwick
Vicky Chow plays Daniel Wohl
Corey Dargel (w/ NOW Ensemble and Nathan Koci) sings Dargel (Other People's Love Songs, complete!)
Ashley Bathgate & Lisa Moore play Kate Moore
Ashley Bathgate plays Michael Gordon's Industry
Gabriel Kahane sings and plays Gabriel Kahane
Nadia Sirota & Nico Muhly play Muhly
and Buke & Gass collaborate with Mazzoli's Victoire on some awesome new thing.

That's just the first day! I kind of CAN'T NOT go to this.

Here's the whole page for the extended festival. I hope you'll reconize some incredibly serious names here: Dan Deacon, Darcy James Argue, Vijay Iyer, Doveman, Owen Pallett, Clogs, Sarah Kirkland Snider, John Medeski, AND MANY MORE.

Tomorrow Night in New Haven

This week's article for the New Haven Advocate was more stressful to write than usual. I think I've configured my Gmail settings in some moronic fashion such that my messages just get sucked straight into spam filters and die there, and so I found myself sending repeated, increasingly crazed emails to the composers involved (Martin Bresnick, Ted Hearne, Polina Nazaykinskaya, Andrew Norman, Naftali Schindler), culminating in a last desperate phone call to a composer's house on Sunday morning, just before this issue went to press. So, yeah, MANY thanks to all of the above for their patience. (The best part was when I wrote to another composer, bitching that I hadn't heard from him, and then discovered that he had in fact responded in time, but HIS response had been eaten by MY spam filter. Er, sorry about that.) I'm also sorry this piece is so short—the conversations I did manage to have with those involved were incredibly rich, and I wish I could have presented them in full. If you get a chance to go to the concert I wrote about, tomorrow night at 8 in Sprague Hall, it should be pretty exciting. Lisa Moore and So Percussion are playing Bresnick's recent Caprichos Enfáticos, which you can preview here. Ted Hearne wrote a piece, Eyelid Margin, for a consort of outdoor instruments (brass and double-reeds), which should be interesting to experience in an medium-sized recital hall; Polina Nazaykinskaya's presenting a trio of Blok songs for mezzo and piano; Andrew Norman will play a new piano piece, called I think Make Believe; and Naftali Schindler has written a Violin Duet, one of my secretly favorite combination of instruments—see B. Bartók, H. Górecki, D.H. Jóhnson—which claims to be influenced by both klezmer and Tuvan throat-singing, so, awesome.

The Artists Formerly Known as "Victrola"

Huh, I got word that Missy Mazzoli's bandsemble, Victrola, was asked to change their name by Sony-BMG, the company that formed when Sony Music merged with BMG, the company that bought RCA, the company that bought the Victor Talking Machine Company, which produced the Victrola record-playing machine, in 1906. It's easy to see why they would feel threatened, not because the RCA Victrola label is still active (it went kaput earlier this century), but because, dude, vinyl is making a comeback, and all those hipsters who bought the new Animal Collective LP are going to need decorative wooden cabinets to play it in. In related news, this is all starting to make me nervous about the legal status of my drag persona, Elektra Nonesuch. But ANYWAYS! The newly rechristened VICTOIRE (new myspace here) will be playing with So Percussion at Galapagos next Wed., Jan 28 at 8 pm ($10). You have to go, because So is playing Cage! And you love Cage almost as much as you love VICTOIRE.

So Percussion

They're awesome! They're coming to my town on Sunday, and I wrote about it here. Probably worth pointing out that (a) my editor deserves credit for the "kicker" (as they call it in journalism)—my draft had a pretty weak conclusion, and I ran out of town just after submitting it; and also (b) I didn't say enough here about the Meehan/Perkins duo, who are commissioning a fair chunk of repertoire in their own right and who gave great interview. Their site is here. And I hope you've already found the new So blog! Oh yeah, and here's the program for that concert, as far as I know—

So: Drumming, Pt. 1 by Steve Reich Meehan/Perkins: Once Removed by John Fitz Rogers Yale: Village Burial with Fire by James Wood;The So-Called Laws of Nature, pt. 2 (I think) by David Lang; and Threads by Paul Lansky.