writing about music for people who like music

Madeleine Shapiro

Written on July 16, 2010 by Michael E. Karman in Interviews

Asymmetry: You’ve been involved with new music since your college days. How did all that get started?

Shapiro: I was introduced to new music as an undergraduate at the State University of New York at Stony Brook by Paul Zukovsky, who was my mentor. I don’t know why he thought I would be interested, but he just said “You might want to play something new. I’ll choose and help you with it.” And he chose an amazing piece, which could have been a crazy choice but turned out, I guess, to be a brilliant choice for me. He chose the Davidovsky Synchronisms No. 3.

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Some Shapiro CDs

Written on July 15, 2010 by Michael E. Karman in Reviews

Madeleine Shapiro, one of the founding members of the New Music Consort, plays on two Mode discs with that ensemble in pieces by Anne LeBaron ("Rana, Ritual & Revelations" and The Musical Railism of Anne LeBaron). Except maybe for Lamentation/Invocation on the Rana, Ritual & Revelations disc, these CDs are not something to get to ...

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2009 ISCM World New Music Days

Written on May 27, 2010 by Michael E. Karman in Events

In 2008, the ISCM World Music Days were held in Vilnius along with that city's Gaida Festival. In 2009, each festival was back to being its own separate thing, the ISCM in three towns in Sweden, Visby, Växjö, and Göteborg. It was interesting but ...

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2008: Gaida and ISCM in Vilnius

Written on May 5, 2010 by Michael E. Karman in Events

The 2008 ISCM World Music Days were held in Vilnius, Lithuania in conjunction with the Gaida Festival, an annual event in that city. I was impressed with the high level of performance of new music by all the ensembles and by the size of all ...

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connections, opportunities for mistakes

Written on April 28, 2010 by Michael E. Karman in Composers, Reviews

Francisco Meirino's 2009 release is all about the sounds music machines make when they're failing--minidisc players, P.A. systems, cassette recorders, and so forth. And very interesting and musical sounds they do make, to be sure. But ...

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SEAMUS 2009

Written on April 9, 2010 by Peter Karman in Events

SEAMUS 2009 took place over three days in Sweetwater's new LEED certified headquarters in Fort Wayne, Indiana. Not only is it a pretty, comfortable building, not only is their warehouse just on the other side of a huge doorway in the main hall (allowing me get some new toys without having to mail-order them), not ...

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Music@Taborspace

Written on March 23, 2010 by Michael E. Karman in Events

The Portland New Music Society's March concert took place at the Taborspace coffeeshop on the corner of SE 55th and SE Belmont. Featured were Matt Hannafin, Kelvin Pittman, and Doug Theriault in three solo sets and a trio. Matt opened with a monumental forty minute piece for amplified and electronically altered percussion.

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Cascadia new music festival

Written on March 23, 2010 by Michael E. Karman in Events

Cascadia Composers recently hosted the National Association of Composers conference in Portland, OR, a three day festival of music and seminars that Asymmetry managed to miss entirely. But James Bash (Northwest Reverb) attended the second evening's concert. Here's his review of that for the Oregon Music News.

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Oh! Space… space…

Written on February 10, 2010 by Beatriz Ferreyra in Composers, Editorials

A large number of books and articles have been edited over the decades on the theme of sound space, its perception, its fixed and mobile configuration in the composition of acousmatic music, and its perception in the space of a particular environment.

In this article, I would just like to testify to my experience as a composer of acousmatic music who is fascinated by the different techniques of stereophonic and multiphonic spatialization.

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Intuition and Order in Xenakis’s Orient-Occident

Written on February 2, 2010 by Brandon Conway in Composers, Editorials

In the late 1950's and early 60's, Xenakis worked with GRM (Groupe de recherches musicales) in Paris to produce several pieces for electromagnetic tape, including Orient-Occident, a piece often overshadowed by works like Concrete PH and Bohor, which are rightly considered more groundbreaking pieces in Xenakis's early oeuvre, particularly Bohor, with its unique source material, ...

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