The season of new-music marathons is upon us. The Bang on a Can Marathon falls on May 31 this year; Make Music NY is on June 21; and throughout the month of May the Brooklyn space Galapagos and the New Amsterdam label present Undiscovered Islands, with contributions by the likes of Sarah Kirkland Snider and Missy Mazzoli. This weekend, venturesome Chicagoans will lap up Northwestern University's 26-hour Music Marathon, with proceeds benefiting the People's Music School. The event begins with the Gentlemen of NUCO (the group originated as the male contingent of the Northwestern University Chamber Orchestra) playing songs of Radiohead; a set by dal niente follows. In the dead of the night, saxophonist-musicologist Billy Robin, who's producing the marathon, leads a rendition of In C. And it goes on from there, ending with the Bruckner Fourth Symphony. The entire show will be webcast here.... A mini-festival is ushering in WNYC's new live-performance venue, the Greene Space.
On April 30, John Zorn and René Pape will perform back to back.... With music writers
disappearing from other publications, it's great to see that Newsweek has hired Seth Colter Walls, an arts writer with a serious interest in the contemporary classical. He conducted an interview with Steve Reich on the occasion of his Pulitzer; the online story includes streaming audio of the entire winning piece, the Double Sextet. Seth also recently had stories on Darcy James Argue and on Bernd Alois Zimmermann, who has made relatively few appearances in American newsweeklies to date.
