Pittsburgh New Music Net

Underground isn’t just a metaphor when it comes to The Outer Circle’s upcoming show/holiday party. This Friday night, the locally owned and operated avant-garde improv collective will literally perform underground i.e., in the basement of Kerrith Livengood’s home. Concert begins at 8 p.m. and festivities go into the early morning hours. Suggested donation is three French hens for general admission and two turtle doves for students and seniors, which should make for a fine soup. Alright, I made that last part up. Check out Kerrith’s post about the show for the actual details.

Short notice, but there’s a fascinating event happening next Friday (the 17th) at 1107 Greenfield Ave. — a festive holiday party/experimental music show. If you’re a fan of food, beer, the end of the semester, Christmas, creepy basements, apples, and awesome improvisatory music, or even just some of the aforementioned things, you don’t want to miss this one. Music starts at 8:00, party continues, all are invited to stay and partake. A modest donation ($3) to help defray refreshment costs is requested, beverages and food welcomed.

Here’s your chance to take in one more new music concert before the first big snow of the year. IonSounders play Mother Goose Suite, Piazzola, and more at the Carnegie Library (Main) today at 2 p.m. They’ll be sharing the program with Alison Babusci. Seriously, this is so cool. Take your kids to this concert and before you know it, they will want to take Suzuki violin, they’ll learn Bach and Mozart, their math scores will improve, then sometime around age 13, they’ll say, “Mom, Dad, I want to spend the rest of my life realizing the indeterminate music of John Cage. Where’s the credit card?” And you will think to yourself, “It all started at an IonSound Project concert.”

So between Cikada performing Eivind Buene’s Possible Cities/Essential Landscapes in October, and Duquesne Contemporary Ensemble’s multimedia production Invisible Patterns (tonight at PNC Recital Hall), I feel like the cosmos is telling me it’s time to read Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities, the novel that inspired both Buene’s composition and Duquesne’s production. Or at least Duquesne director Patrick “The Cosmos” Burke is telling me to read it. Either one.

In any case, new music groups at both Duquesne and CMU will present programs this week. Duquesne goes tonight (Thursday at 8 p.m.) and CMU is on Saturday at 5. You can find the details, as always, on the Events Calendar.

PNC Recital Hall
$10 Suggested Donation

Patrick Burke and David Cutler, directors.

The Duquesne Contemporary Ensemble will perform its fall concert, entitled Invisible Patterns, based in part on the novel Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino and Eight Patterns for Eight Instruments by Tom Johnson.  This multimedia event will include brief readings from the novel, a lot of live music, and video by Duquesne grad student Ryan Leber.  Besides the Tom Johnson work, we’ll be performing pattern-filled pieces by young composers Nico Muhly and Mason Bates, works by American icons Joan Tower and Ned Rorem, and a new version of a medieval rondeau by Guilluame de Machaut, arranged by Duquesne student Chris Jarvis.

Calvino’s novel consists of a fictional conversation between Kublai Kahn and Marco Polo, in which Marco describes the cities of the Kahn’s empire to him.  Each chapter is a description of a different city— some are mundane, some are fantastical, but each description reveals something about human nature, as patterns begin to emerge.  The book is hypnotic, like an incantation–like music– and each excerpt describes in some way the music that follows.

Kresge Theatre
Free

Ronald Zollman, music director
Jan Pellant, Keun Oh, and Daniel Nesta Curtis, assistant conductors

Program:

Igor Stravinsky - Septet for mixed ensemble
Roberto Gerhard – Leo
Oliver Knussen – Songs without Voices op. 26
Toshio Hosokawa – Im Fruhlingsgarten
Kenneth Hesketh – Fra Duri Scogli
Igor Stravinsky – Concertino

Carnegie Library Main, Oakland
Quiet Reading Room (first floor)
Free

This concert features playful arrangements of Maurice Ravel’s Mother Goose Suite, and Astor Piazzola’s Oblivion. Special guest Alison Babusci assists IonSound in bringing classic and original tales to life with her expert storytelling.

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.