Katherine Young Premieres "bow breath crow" at London's Cut & Splice Festival

by Ted Gordon on March 7, 2017, 10:41 a.m.

Since 2003, the Cut & Splice Festival has been a crucial resource and venue for electroacoustic and experimental music in the UK. Broadcast on BBC3's "Hear and Now" program, this festival has begun a new curatorial format where a single ensemble that curates and performs a series of concerts, co-sponsored by Sound and Music's "Composer-Curator" program.

This year's curator-performers are Manchester's Distractfold Ensemble, who will perform the world premiere of Katherine Young's bow breath crow on March 11th. Written for amplified string trio and spatialized electronics, bow breath crow will premiere in Hallé St. Peter's in Manchester, and will be recorded for broadcast on BBC3.

Check out Distractfold's "sneak peek" playlist for the festival below. 

Christopher Cerrone's 'High Windows" in Phoenix

by Ted Gordon on March 3, 2017, 5 p.m.

Christopher Cerrone describes High Windows in classical terms: a concerto grosso for string quartet and chamber orchestra in sonata form. Yet as loaded as those associations might be, they are also blank forms which Cerrone has filled with his own poetic blend of musical lyricism. High Windows was performed recently in Phoenix, conducted by Tito Muñoz.

Check out an extended interview with Cerrone about this work on Q2.

Alvin Singleton's "Sweet Chariot" at the National Museum of African American History & Culture

by Ted Gordon on Feb. 27, 2017, 12:30 p.m.

On February 26, members of the US Army Band "Pershing's Own" performed Alvin Singleton's Sweet Chariot in the recently-opened National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, D.C. Sweet Chariot, composed as a "tentet" with multiple reed doublings, sets the traditional spiritual with Singleton's characteristic inventiveness and unique compositional voice. Carman Moore writes,

Sweet Chariot seems to be, much like Singleton’s recent orchestral work Different River, created from a series of disparate events, often divided from one another by silences or long-held tones. Some of them seem lyrically mournful, some fanfare-esque, some dancey (at one point almost salsa-like), some joyful, some loud, some soft, high and low…but always highly-contrasted and unpredictable. 

If you weren't in DC, you can still watch the performance, which was live-streamed and recorded here (starting at 57:45); Sweet Chariot was also recorded and released on Albany Records in 2014.