Fast on the heels of last week’s Symphony concert which featured only one piece, Crippled Symmetry by the composer Morton Feldman, we’re already talking with Symphony staff about the particulars for the next symphony concert on April 23rd which features four pieces:

BERIO: Sequenza V for trombone

LIGETI: Sonata for Solo Viola

BERIO: Sequenza VIII for violin

LIGETI: Poème symphonique

I think the most exciting piece will be the final work of the evening, György Ligeti’s Poème symphonique. This piece calls for 100 wind-up metronomes (which the Symphony is now in the process of trying to locate - apparently not an easy task in today’s high-tech age). I spoke with Eric Gaston from the Symphony on Friday and he called to my attention a YouTube video where the metronomes for this piece were all started with a machine. Check it out here.

Instead of using this fancy machine we are going to be using ten people who will be responsible for starting ten metronomes a piece. The goal will be to start each metronome as quickly as possible so that the least amount of time exists between when the first object is started and the last. Eric has given us at the Pulitzer the task of figuring out how to best present these metronomes for the concert. We will be taking into consideration that the setup needs to easily allow the winders (my own technical name for the people who will start the metronomes) access to each object and that they will be waiting in the wings during the other three performances. Maybe we’ll think of a really creative setup that involves different podiums of different heights interspersed around the room or maybe we’ll just setup an 8ft table and call it a day. Feel free to give us your suggestions.

I think my reasons for liking this piece the most out of the four is due its association - at least in my mind - with concepts that were explored in the visual arts. The glorification/transformation of the musical aid brings to mind Marcel Duchamp’s readymade objects.

Okay, despite this work being my obvious pre-concert favorite, there are merits and exciting elements to all of the pieces playing on April 23rd - but I think I’ll wait till a time closer to the concert to figure them all out. ‘Til then!

Next Wednesday (March 12th) is the first in our Flavin Concert Series.  It will feature one piece - Crippled Symmetry by the composer Morton Feldman.  The musicians who are performing (and how to buy tickets!) are on our website here, along with the rest of the upcoming concerts in the series.

Eddie Silva (who writes the excellent blog on the Saint Louis Symphony Orchestra’s site  - bookmark it here) sent me an article today on the piece and the composer.  It was written by John Rockwell (who also happened to have dated Feldman’s ex - interesting little twist!).  Check it out for some background info in preparation for next week’s concert.

I unfortunately missed last night’s concert, but I heard a mini-rundown this morning and apparently it was a good one.  The highly anticipated Crumb piece that included musicians in masks and amplified instruments was apparently the highlight.  Blue lighting was another requirement, which according to one of my co-workers, “created a rock-star vibe”.  If you want to hear a few of the musicians talk about performing last night’s pieces, their comments are now on our audio player here.  And hopefully we’ll be getting the recording from the concert online in the next few weeks.  If only we had a video!

Right now, the sounds of a piano are drifting up from the galleries, through the hallway, and into our offices.  The musicians from the Symphony are having their dress rehearsal for tonight’s performance. This is everyone at the Pulitzer’s first taste of the program and it’s nice — it’s like a little primer to get us in the mood.  And so far, it’s sounding really good… I might sneak into the galleries in a few to eavesdrop a little more…

A few weeks ago, we had a concert that I thought was the most interesting performance at the Pulitzer yet. Even if the music of George Crumb’s Black Angels wasn’t your cup of tea, you couldn’t stop watching the musicians jump around hitting gongs, playing water glasses, using thimbles on their string instruments, yelling, whistling and more. It was one of the most challenging and captivating concerts I think I’ve ever seen, and from what I’ve heard, one of the most challenging and captivating for the musicians who performed it as well.

Now, we have the audio of that piece online for your listening pleasure. As you listen, imagine what the musicians must have been doing to create those sounds. We’ll be posting audio from the rest of this concert soon, but this piece in particular was so amazing that I couldn’t resist putting it on the website now.

If you are a frequent blog reader you know that the concert section of our website has been doing a lot of expanding lately. We’ve added audio interviews with musicians, a slick new Flash audio player, and now *drum roll* we have launched our first performance audio track! Each concert at the Pulitzer is recorded, and each recording has to go through quality control and editing before it can be put online. What all goes into that might actually make an interesting blog post!

The first track to be uploaded is Credo in US by John Cage, which was performed at the Pulitzer a few months ago, along with Morton Feldman’s Samuel Beckett, Words and Music. You can also listen to Matthias’s introduction to the concert, hear opening remarks made by Jeremy Geffen from the Symphony, and listen to one of the musicians, John Kasica, talk about the piece that’s about to be performed. In addition to that, you can still listen to the pre-concert interviews conducted with musicians and David Robertson about the concert.

Speaking of — this Thursday is our next concert, and I just uploaded an audio file of violinist Dana Myers talking about the pieces and what it’s like to perform at the Pulitzer. Take a listen!

Eddie, who writes the Symphony’s fantastic blog, made a good point about tonight’s concert — it isn’t what you’d expect to hear on Valentine’s Day. In fact, it might be more of an Anti-Valentine’s concert. Lets just say it’s not exactly a lovey dovey program. It does, however, sound like it will be one of the most interesting concerts we’ve ever had — yesterday, I saw them set up huge gongs underneath Blue Black, and we hear there will also be a sound board and sound technician involved in both pieces. Plus, the last concert we had of Steve Reich’s work was one of my all-time favorites. For some more tidbits on tonight’s pieces, click here to read Eddie’s post about listening to the rehearsals at work.

So whether you’re anti or pro V-Day, this concert is shaping up as a not-to-be-missed experience.

If you read this blog frequently, you know that I’ve been writing quite a bit lately about our online concert section and how we’d like to include audio from live performances at the Pulitzer.

One museum which does this really well is the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston. Their podcasts, called “The Concert”, feature recordings of live performances at the museum and can be downloaded for free every two weeks. The other day I came across this post on Geoff Edger’s blog for the Boston Globe — the Gardner podcasts have hit 100,000 downloads, and cracked the top 40 on iTunes! That’s really incredible. Click here for a great article on how successful the program has become.

Though our music will be streamed instead of downloaded, this is definitely inspiring as we continue to work on our own multimedia section. Right now, we’re acquiring the rights to some of the concerts we’ve already recorded — I’ll keep you posted!

A few posts ago I mentioned an upcoming concert at the Pulitzer that will feature musicians playing 20 crystal wine glasses. Well, things just got even more interesting when I found out what else will be “played”. In addition to glasses, George Crumb’s piece Black Angels “draws from an arsenal of sounds including shouting, chanting, whistling, whispering, gongs and maracas.”

Not only that, but I just listened to an interview with musician Peter Otto, who gives even more of a glimpse into the piece: “I get to do very strange things like everyone in the group. I get to whistle….we get to use things that are not even considered instruments like glass rods that were specially made for us and with which we hit the string, and we pluck with a paper clip, we have thimbles on our fingers at one point….”

If you want to hear the full interview, it’s now on our website (along with a few other interviews about the concert). If you’re curious what maracas, thimbles, and crystal glasses will sound like (as I am), come check it out for yourself next week.

As promised, here’s Matt’s review of last night’s concert:

Listening to “Words and Music” last night, I was struck most powerfully by how
the sounds interacted with the space. A piece intended as a radio play
already brings up fascinating ideas of imagined space: where are these
characters located? What kind of creature is this Bob, who speaks in music?
How does he exist in space? Part of this disembodied imaginary space carried
over into the performance last night–the speakers playing Croak and Joe were
not visible on stage, and their voices emanated from speakers located at
various points around the audience. This allowed one to imagine them
anywhere and everywhere. Even my conjured-up image of Bob himself didn’t
seem confined to the actual stage where the actual musicians playing his
lines were located.The physical setup of the room enhanced this feeling.
The stage is at the bottom of a series of seating terraces, and the sounds
seemed to rise up like some sort of reverse slinky up a staircase. During
the two sprechstimme “arias” of the piece, the space seemed to
correspond uncannily with the musical action. These sections feature a
rising six-note scale, played out by different instrument groups not quite
in step with one another. Each group started on a note, and gradually
rose through the scale to the top, but the groups were staggered
in unpredictable ways on their upward journey. It was easy to imagine
the sound waves themselves replicating this journey, one terrace at a
time until they hit the larger chamber at the top of the room.

Another
strong correspondence I noticed involved a prominent musical theme in which
one instrument oscillated between two widely separated notes over a lush,
subtly evolving harmonic bed. Here my musical attention was on how each note
of this oscillation rubbed up against its counterpart as well as the soft
background chord. As I listened, I was struck by the similarity between this
sort of hearing and a way of seeing the giant Ellsworth Kelly sculpture above
the stage, the interface between the blue and black fields and the whitish
background of the wall. My own perceptual back-and-forth between seeing a
field now as figure, now as ground, seemed to be paced by Feldman’s
music.

There’s a lot more I could say here–the water channel to my right
as counterpart to the great masses of “vibrating stasis” (an apt
Feldmanism) that inhabit the soundscapes of the piece, the way the sounds and
the Ando concrete alike seem flat and perfect from a distance
but kaleidoscopic and unpredictable up close, and even the
paradoxically muffled yet amplified nature of the room’s acoustics going hand
in hand with a building at once massive and square but saturated by a
pervasive aura of haze and softness. I’m grateful that from now on this
piece will forever be intertwined with this place for me, and I look forward
to the next opportunity for such a musico-spatial experience (Reich and
Crumb, on Valentine’s Day no less!).(Matt)