Pittsburgh New Music Net

Hebron Presbyterian Church
$10 suggested donation

Music in the Country at Hebron Presbyterian Church presents the Freya String Quartet in concert on October 31st, 2010 at 3 pm. Join the FSQ for an enchanting afternoon of chamber music, including Beethoven’s witty String Quartet No. 2 in G Major, the world premiere of Sean Neukom’s At 7.0, and the youthful exuberance of Mendelssohn’s String Quartet No. 3 in D Major. Admission is free and open to the public. $10 suggested donation at the door. A concert not to be missed! For more information call 412-371-2307 or visit

A busy weekend for lovers of contemporary music starting tonight with the PSO playing Joan Tower’s Uncommon Woman and Made in America (they’ll repeat the program on Saturday as well), Carnegie Mellon Contemporary Ensemble giving a 5 p.m. performance on Saturday at Kresge (see the previous post), and Music on the Edge presenting Norway’s Cikada Ensemble with guitarist Magnus Andersson on Saturday at 8. And don’t forget to check out Andy Druckenbrod’s article on Joan Tower in Thursday’s P-G.

Music made fresh! Come out to CMU’s Kresge Theatre this Saturday at 5pm for the Contemporary Ensemble’s fall 2010 debut, featuring a lively program (see below!) and a variety of guest student conductors, in addition to music director Ronald Zollman.

Roberto Sancasto Calvo – E-Octet
Gavin Bryars – Creamer Etudes
Keun Oh, conductor
Benoit Mernier – Les Niais de Solophe
Maestro Ronald Zollman, conductor
Sofia Gubaidulina – Concordanza for Chamber Ensemble
Jan Pellant, conductor
Hans Werner Henze – Quattro Fantasie
Daniel Nesta Curtis, conductor

… an official free improvising experimental chamber-eclectic ensemble, and is it Outer Circle? Find out more here.

Greetings blog readers! My first post upon this here site is to tell you about the imminent Outer Circle show, this coming Monday October 18th at 7:00 PM. It’s at Frick Fine Arts auditorium and features special guests/former member Melissa St. Pierre, with her duo partner Zach Noel, playing toy piano and small keyboard with vocals and live processed electronics. Plus new and old songs by the Circlers, the official free improvising experimental chamber-eclectic ensemble of the Pittsburgh Steelers!* Admission is $5 – $10 donations at the door.  Don’t miss it!

www.outercircle.us

*negotiations with the Steelers pending

That’s right, I just coined a phrase. Eclectroacoustic. You’re welcome! Why? Because there ain’t no good way to describe the show on Sunday night at Gooski’s unless you use many more words. Suffice to say it features Canadian acts Not the Wind, Not the Flag and Fossils along with local talent Edgar Um and Ryan Emmett/Dan Miller (H/T Ryan Emmett).

But that’s Sunday night. On Sunday afternoon, Music in a Great Space presents IonSound Project playing Takemitsu and on one of my favorite pieces for the end of all time, Messiaen’s Quartet for the End Time and Shadyside Pres will be a great place to hear it.

The details are are here.

Gooski’s in Polish Hill, $5

via Ryan Emmett

NOT THE WIND, NOT THE FLAG

A Toronto duo consisting of Colin Fisher (guitar, bouzouki, ney, tenor sax, guzheng, hulusi, misc percussion) and Brandon Valdivia (Trap set, Mbira, Slit Drum, Percussion).

On any occasion their music could echo the traditions of Balinese music, West African music, Persian or Turkish music or it could be devastatingly loud Post-Hardcore, Noise, Free jazz eruptions. Or all of the aforementioned at once! The music refrains from being derivative but comes from a place of deep respect for the music that has lifted and guided their spirits.

FUCK TELECORPS

Ed Um’s electro/acoustic/performance vehicle for a couple decades now. For this show he will be performing some sort of synth based komische/motorik rocking type thing.

RYAN EMMETT AND DAN MILLER

Dan does guitar and pedal/laptop manipulations. I will be performing a bowed cigar box guitar and other bits. Dan records under d/s/miller and had done a split release with me on Dynamo Sound.

FOSSILS

David Payne (from Hamilton, Ontario) began building his Fossils empire back in 2004. Since that time Fossils has colonized the underground circuit with a steady flow of ultra-limited tapes/cdrs, many of them through David’s own Middle James Co imprint. The Fossils sound is always one of formless despair. Churning low-grade electronics, primitive tape manipulations, and an aura of stoned reverie are all genuine signatures. (Graham Lambkin, 2010)

Analog cassette and effects experiments. Releases on Turgid Animal, Knife in The Toaster, Fag Tapes, American Tapes, Digitalis Ltd, 905 Tapes, Neon Blossom, RRRecords and a bunch more.

Frick Fine Arts Auditorium
Free

Robert Frankenberry and Roger Zahab will perform a diverse program of contemporary music for violin and piano.

Program:

Paula M. Kimper: Suite from: The Bridge of San Luis Rey

Gilda Lyons: Between Dog and Wolf

Roger Zahab: radiant

Eric Moe: Blue Air

Judith Weir: Michael’s Strathspey

Eric Moe: Legend of the Sad Triad (Ballade for piano)

Judith Weir: Music for 247 Strings

Roger Zahab: Enfolding Studies

Carnegie Music Hall

Tickets: $5 for adults, $4 for seniors,
free for Carnegie Mellon students with ID

The Carnegie Mellon Wind Ensemble will perform a concert featuring the premiere of Christian Kriegeskotte’s new work Tycho’s Machine. The program will also include Kathryn Salfelder’s 2007 work Cathedrals, Leonardo Ballada’s Cumbres, and Vincent Persichetti’s Divertimento for Band.

About Tycho’s Machine Kriegeskotte says,

The work is inspired by the movement of the planets through the Zodiac as demonstrated by one of the fabulous wonders of mechanico-scientific art we have inherited from the Renaissance; the Armillary Sphere. While astronomical instruments of this nature have existed for millennia (let us not deny credit to the Astrolabe and the wondrous Antikythera Mechanism), it is the fabulous splendor and esotericism of Renaissance pseudo-alchemical scientific investigation that I am most influenced by.

The title, “Tycho’s Machine” is in reference to one of the Armillary Sphere’s creators, the 16th century astronomer and mathematician Tycho Brahe. Indeed, growing up I knew the device by its more common moniker, the Brahe Sphere. While the Brahe Sphere is mechanical, I am also implying that the motion of the planets across the ecliptic plane and how we perceive their motion is no less than a form of great cosmic clockwork, finely tuned and ever advancing as we hurdle through space. In my piece, which I am considering a sort of static theme and variations, I present the listener with twelve sonorities (based upon instrumentation and articulation more so than harmonic structure) that each represent a sign in the Zodiac. As we travel through the Zodiac, unique musical events fade in and out representing the planets passing through each sign. These events are ultimately dominated by a constant eighth-note pulse throughout, representing the mechanism itself as it ticks and booms behind the scenes. It is this constant pulse I am considering a sort of abstract “theme” and each of the planets and signs are the variations.

Wood Street Galleries

Jem Finer’s Longplayer, a 1,000-year-long composition that has played continuously since 1999, and which arrives in Pittsburgh as part of Wood Street Galleries’ sound-installation show, Audio Space (Oct. 1-Dec. 31, 2010). The installation of Longplayer at Wood Street Galleries marks another first, as Pittsburgh joins a remarkable list of sites with Longplayer listening posts including the Royal Observatory at Greenwich, England, and the Bibliotecha in Alexandria, Egypt. The Wood Street Galleries installation will be the first listening post anywhere between San Francisco and London.

About Longplayer

Created with London-based arts organization Artangel to mark the turn of the millennium, Longplayer is Finer’s response to the difficulty of representing and understanding time on a grander scale. At its core, Longplayer is a mathematically self-generating score—not random, but a set of principles that allow the score to continually create itself in a way that is aesthetically beautiful and musically unique. For 10 years, Longplayer has played through a computer system replicating the sound of Tibetan singing bowls; in 2009, it was performed live for the first time, for 24 hours on real singing bowls. It is not a computer-generated piece: As the hour-long segment “Shortplayer” goes to prove, it can be performed on any instruments, at any stage.

Artist and composer Jem Finer is considered a unique voice in exploring issues combining science, technology, and philosophy such as “deep time” through sound installation, autonomous technology, and astronomical sculpture. He has been artist-in-residence at Oxford University’s department of Astrophysics and in 2005 won the PRS Foundation New Music Award for “Score for a Hole in the Ground.” As co-founder and co-writer with famed Irish-punk band The Pogues, Finer has helped create some of the most popular and influential British pop music of the past 25 years.