Christopher Cerrone's "High Windows" on Q2 Music's "LPR Live" Podcast

by Gabrielle Misiewicz on Feb. 26, 2016, 12:19 p.m.

This year Q2 Music, WQXR’s online contemporary classical music channel, launched “LPR Live”, a podcast showcasing performances recorded at Le Poisson Rouge and interviews with composers and musicians. On Tuesday, host Conor Hanick invited Christopher Cerrone and conductor Andrew Cyr to discuss Cerrone’s work for string quartet and string orchestra, High Windows:



Cerrone talks briefly about the unlikely source material for the piece, and the pitfalls of writing for string orchestra. Cyr weighs in as well, explaining what it’s like to be inside the music. After their brief conversation, the podcast closes with the full performance of High Windows by Quartet Senza Misura and the Metropolis Ensemble. Check out a performance of High Windows below:

"In The Chamber" with Kamran Ince, Pierre Jalbert, and Christopher Cerrone

by Ted Gordon on Feb. 23, 2016, 1:59 p.m.

(photo: Tom Bamberger; Present Music)

Milwaukee's Present Music is known for its imaginative and bold concerts of new music in the Midwest, bringing music to new venues and new audiences for over thirty years. Their upcoming concert program, "In The Chamber", features performances of works by PSNY composers Kamran Ince, Pierre Jalbert, and Christopher Cerrone, among others. The concerts will be held in four different venues around Milwaukee, including the Zelazo Center for the Performing Arts, the Wisconsin Conservatory of Music, and the Villa Terrace Arts Museum. Highly anticipated by the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinal and WISN Arts Milwaukee, this concert is not to be missed. 

Ince, Jalbert, and Cerrone have all been commissioned by Present Music in the past, and the ensemble has worked closely with the composers to produce truly innovative chamber music. The program will include Ince's Curve, inspired by the spirituality of architectural spaces in Turkey, much like his works Domes and Arches. Jalbert's Trio for Clarinet, Violin, and Piano shows of Jalbert's signature compositional style of intensity, virtuosity, and passion. And Cerrone's Sonata for Violin and Piano retains the architectonic form of the classical sonata while exploring extended techniques, clashing timbres, and unity of expression. 

Check out some recordings of these works below! 

Alex Mincek Portrait Concert at Miller Theatre

by Ted Gordon on Feb. 18, 2016, 10:22 a.m.

Alex Mincek—the composer and performer dubbed "the new guard of the New York avant-garde" by the The New York Times—will see his music featured in a Composer Portrait Concert at Columbia University's Miller Theatre on February 25th. The portrait features the piano/percussion quartet Yarn/Wire and the Mivos Quartet in the premiere of two new works: Torrent, an octet for two pianos, percussion and string quartet, commissioned by the Miller Theatre, and Images of Duration (In homage to Ellsworth Kelly), for Yarn/Wire. To compliment these new works, Yarn/Wire will perform Mincek's Pendulum VI: Trigger, composed in 2010, and the Mivos Quartet will perform String Quartet No. 3 ("lift – tilt – filter – split"). 

Mincek's Images of Duration, for Yarn/Wire, references the sequence of images that Kelly planned as a book in 1951: Line Form Color. He elaborates:

"In Kelly's work a succession of images proceeds from one to many lines, then grids, then primary color fields, then mixed color fields, and finally shapes embedded in color. My own work follows roughly the same strategy, applied to sound, in various reorderings, and emphasizes, like the Kelly, the futility of fully separating the experience of color from that of shape/gesture and how the order, or 'form' of the successions can intensify or dilute the perception of each." 

Pendulum VI: Trigger is part of Mincek's Pendulum series of compositions, which deal with the constantly-changing nature of pendulum swings. Mincek writes, 

"As a pendulum swings, it repeatedly passes smoothly through all the space and time between extremes without becoming fixed on any single position. The 'Pendulum' series presents a catalog of musical extremes, but like a pendulum, does not become fixed on any one musical position. Instead, it represents a refusal to choose any one side. Both sides of multiple polemics are treated as equals and are mediated by alternating in constant succession from one to the other, in an attempt to represent the futile insistence of having both, many, and all at once."

Check out an excerpt from Pendulum VI below: 

String Quartet No. 3 ("lift – tilt – filter – split") also plays with constantly-changing musical flux, though more akin to a Foucault Pendulum, which shows both its own oscillations and that of the constantly-rotating earth. This piece allows multiple points of entry, using constantly-changing textures to represent dynamic systemic changes. Check out a preview of the Mivos Quartet performing Mincek's String Quartet No. 3: