Musicworks Issue 105 - fall 2009 musicworks

Issue 105 fall 2009

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 FEATURE ARTICLES

Extermination Music Night
By Jay Somerset

Article Summary:
No venue permits or alcohol permissions, no club managers or sound checks and an imminent feeling that it could all come crashing down at any moment—welcome to Extermination Music Night, a summertime live music series where shows take place in the most unusual of venues: abandoned buildings, under bridges and in the woods; areas not typically associated with music performance; here, audience and musician alike break the barroom template for a new concert experience. Led by two young Torontonians, EMN is all about extrapolating live music from the clutches and confines of bars and concert halls; taking it back to the cave, as it were.

Tom Zé
By Alex Molotkow

Article Summary:
Tom Zé is a musician whose musical education began in the rural backwoods of the Brazilian Northeast—the tiny town of Irara—and blossomed in Salvador, a city then swelling with culture and exchanging ideas with the international avant-garde. Emerging from the University of Bahia, once a mecca for arts and humanities students, with creative ambitions and genius to match, he learned to mix avant-garde techniques with the traditional sounds of Brazil. As his artistry grew through the 1970s, his personality came to the fore, and provided the secret ingredient for the potent mix of musical influences that would become his own sound.

James Rolfe
By Chris Paul Harman

Article Summary:
Impatient that his work was locked up in itself, and therefore un-engaging to the listener, new music and opera composer, James Rolfe began to integrate many kinds of music, including reggae, rap, pop, baroque music, and hymn tunes into his compositions. Using these musical sources and systematic techniques such as weighted probability for pitches, chords, registers, durations, his chamber music pieces of the 1990s and early 2000s chronicle the development of Rolfe’s unique musical grammar and vocabulary.

Nicole Lizée
By Richard Simas

Article Summary:
Nicole Lizée is a young contemporary classical composer who lives in Montreal. She composes music for turntables and large orchestras, solo piano, percussion, and mixed ensembles. Embarking on her second decade of compositions, her influences span the iconic film worlds of Alfred Hitchcock and Lars von Trier as well as various periods of the punk and rock scenes. In her work, Lizée layers, deconstructs, and re-contextualizes sound from sources as diverse as electronic games, rock albums, and 1960s musicals. Interested in the fallibility of media, she includes its glitches and electronic artifacts in her scores. In the modernist tradition, she seeks to make her sounds new, creating her own evocative pallet of colours and textures by re-situating musical icons in different environments. She is an ‘auteur,’ the maker of a personal and attractive music world that catches the ears of conductors, ensembles, and listeners, both here and abroad.

PROFILE

Jöelle Léandre
By Ken Waxman

Improvised music’s most peripatetic double-bass player, Paris-based Joëlle Léandre is as likely to appear at an American university campus playing with tyro musicians as in a formal concert setting at a European music festival. Her intuitive understanding of what can be accomplished with the otherwise unwieldy string giant is the result of extensive technical training. The French bassist uses this skill to subvert expected music making. Now in the midst of a particularly creative period, not only is she regularly concertizing with ensembles ranging from duos to small big bands, but there have recently been released a book on her work, consisting of her own words from interviews, and a DVD documenting performances and personal reflections. This article examines her life and art from many angles, and includes her own freely expressed opinions.

COMMENTARY

getting on with it—three visions of music’s future
part three: the critic
By John Keillor

John Keillor examines the role of the classical music critic and radio broadcaster in Classical music’s future. Arguing that critics lack the necessary vitriol to engage the reader and that Classical DJs don’t offer the listeners any meaningful commentary, he suggests that music needs more contemporary and charismatic mediators between the industry and the market in order to engage the readers and listeners of the future.

SONIC GEOGRAPHIES

Ken Waxman in Milan

VISIONS OF SOUND

Eve Egoyan and David Rokeby’s collaborative interarts work Surface Tension

CD CONTENTS

TOM ZÉ
1 | Mulher Navio Negreiro

JOËLLE LÉANDRE
2 | Bass Solo #1

NICOLE LIZÉE
3 | Excerpt from Arcadiac
4 | Excerpt from Dystopia Suite
5 | Excerpt from This Will Not Be Televised
6 | Excerpt from This Will Not Be Televised Download MP3:    (2.8MB)
7 | Excerpt from Vertigo Beach

JAMES ROLFE
8 | Excerpt from Simon and Garfunkel and the Prophets of Rage Download MP3:    (2.61MB)
9 | Excerpt from Devilled Swan

From/de And Then Grace
10 | Excerpt from And Then Grace I
11 | Excerpt from And Then Grace II
12 | Excerpt from raW

JODA CLÉMENT AND NIGEL CRAIG
13 | Cherry Beach #3

CANAILLE
14 | Good Bits Download MP3:    (7.05MB)

EVE EGOYAN AND DAVID ROKEBY
From/de Surface Tension
15 | Excerpt from / extrait tiré de Third Movement

RECORDINGS
John Butcher on Confront
Darbazi self-released
The label Empreintes DIGITALes
Miguela A. Garcia on RMO Productions
Halliwell/Patterson on Confront
The CAnette Krebs / Rhodri Davies on Another Timbre
Gen Ken Montgomery on Monochrome Vision and Banned Production
Toshimaru Nakamura / Mark Trayle on Creative Sources
Pichelin / Charles / Grydeland on SOFA
Richard Pinhas / Merzbow on Cuneiform
Cyrill Schläpfer on CSR Records
Strotter Inst. on Hintzerzimmer and Public Guilt
Zeitkratzer / Carsten Nicolai

WORDS

Paul Steenhuisen. Sonic Mosaics. Conversations with Composers. (University of Alberta Press) www.uap.ualberta.ca
IWords on Sound. Jeanette Winterson, from Art Objects: Essays on Ecstasy and Effrontery

Events

Awashawave in Mississauga Ontario
MUTEK_10 in Montreal, Quebec
Open Ears Festival in Kitchener, Ontario
Suoni Per il Popolo Festival in Montreal, Quebec
Ulrichsberger Kaleidophon in Ulrichsberg, Austria