This recent program by Toronto's Thin Edge New Music Collective includes the première of Dark Flower, a major new piano quartet by Smith, alongside pieces by Jonathan Bailey Holland, Sarah Hennies, and Alex Jang.
Wagnerism
Miscellany
Two video streams from the Bavarian Radio Symphony give a foretaste of the incipient Simon Rattle era in Munich. The first pairs Messiaen's Et Exspecto with a premiere by Ondřej Adámek; the second makes an unexpected but very Rattlean link between Purcell's Funeral Music for Queen Mary to Georg Friedrich Haas's in vain.... I hugely enjoyed a recent concert by the Australian Chamber Orchestra, not only on account of a Thomas Adès premiere (Shanty — Over the Sea) and an intense performance of Arvo Pärt's Tabula Rasa, but also because of the happy explosions of bravos and applause, signs of musical life resuming Down Under.... Also worth exploring: the 2021 edition of the Ukrainian Contemporary Music Festival.... A few months back I heard from Scott Spillman, an editor at the Colorado Encyclopedia, asking if I knew anything more about Jack Bradley and Charles Burrell, two Black musicians who joined the Colorado Symphony in 1946 and 1949 — among the first to be hired by a major American orchestra. I'd mentioned Bradley in an article last fall. I had no new leads, but Scott found much more: follow the links in this entry for the Colorado Symphony.... Congratulations to Hannah Edgar, who, with the help of the Rubin Institute for Music Criticism, will be writing reviews for the Chicago Tribune.... On Tuesday I will talk about Wagner and Wagnerism in conjunction with SF Opera's online Ring Festival. My interlocutor will be none other than Tony Kushner.
Will Robin's Industry
I've known Will Robin since his sophomore year in college, when I signed a copy of The Rest Is Noise for him in Chicago. That summer he asked if he could do any work for me as an assistant; he ended up helping me hugely with Listen to This, my second book, and with Wagnerism in its early stages. In the ensuing decade, as I continued to grind away at the same book, Will went to graduate school, became an assistant professor at the University of Maryland, married, fathered an adorable baby boy, and completed his own first book. He's become a valued colleague and a close friend; I now feel I learn more from him than he does from me. All this by way of saying that I feel personal joy at the arrival of Industry: Bang on a Can and New Music in the Marketplace, which Oxford University Press publishes today. At its heart, Industry is the story of the emergence and evolution of the Bang on Can ensemble, but it goes much wider, examining struggles within new music to find a footing as Reaganism dismantled arts funding. There were gains and losses in the course of that "marketplace turn," as Will calls it, and despite his close contact with the Bang on a Can leaders he doesn't shy away from delineating compromises with the gig economy and other aspects of neoliberal culture. What I find most admirable in the book is the balance it strikes between historical narration and critical analysis: such balance is hard to achieve. Will has a book launch "at" the 92nd Street Y tonight: he'll converse with Allan Kozinn, who covered the rise of Bang for the New York Times. On Wednesday, he chats with Anne Midgette. Heartiest congratulations!
Du Bois's Ode to Joy
From W.E.B. Du Bois's Black Reconstruction in America, 1935.
