Carrick & Rosenberger Performances This Week!

by Ted Gordon on Jan. 28, 2013, 1:31 p.m.

The new year is shaping up to be a busy time for our PSNY composers, with world premieres abounding! For New York audiences, the Woodwind Quartet DZ4  performs the World Premiere of Richard Carrick's "sub-merge" on January 28th at the Greenwich House Music School. 

And for those on the West Coast, be sure to catch Katharina Rosenberger's installation, "Viva Voce," at Human Resources Gallery in Los Angeles! This project, a collaboration with video artist Heiko Kalmback, features interactive video, audience-controlled playback, and performances by Juilana Snapper, Pamela Z, and Shelley Hirsch. Check out Katharina's Vimeo page for video excerpts of this piece. And while you're at it, spend some time with this excerpt from her work "Scatter 2.0", available from PSNY:

PSNY at CMA

Jan. 16, 2013, 3:48 p.m.

Project Schott New York is proud to be a part of this year's Chamber Music America Conference, taking place right here in New York from January 17-20th. Be sure to stop by the Schott booth in the exhibitions hall to meet our team and check out exciting, vital new chamber works. Plus, if you stop by our booth and mention our blog, you will recieve 50% off the purchase price of a digital score. If you've been wondering about all the hype surrounding digital scores, now is your time to see for yourself!

Check out some highlights of our ever-expanding catalog:

Timothy Andres, "Comfort Food" for women's chorus and mixed nonet. Andres writes, "taken from an informal survey of friends, family, and members of the Milwaukee Choral Artists, the text moves from pedestrian and earthly food items through an episode of depressants, and finaly into the somewhat metaphysical."

Christopher Cerrone, "The Night Mare" for ensemble and electronics. In this 10-minute ensemble piece, Cerrone's field recordings from daily life meld with intricate instrumentation to form a meditation on dreams, inspired by the poetry of J.L. Borges. 

Ann Cleare, "Dorchadas" for ensemble. Cleare's exploration of Dorchadas (Irish for "darkness") approaches the inner-most diad of darkness and light through music, at once maximalist and minimalist, employing extended technique and innovative scoring for chamber ensemble.  

David T. Little, "sweet light crude" for ensemble and voice. Written for his chamber-rock ensemble Newspeak, "Sweet Light Crude," released on New Amsterdam Records, is an uncomfortable paean to oil: "reminiscent of vintage quasi-epic Metallica tracks like 'For Whom the Bell Tolls' and 'One,' 'sweet light crude' manages to rock hard without ever sounding self-conscious or contrived," writes Brian Sacawa in NewMusicBox.

Alex Mincek, "Pendulum VII" for ensemble. A 2011 composition in Mincek's Pendulum series, this work continues the complex, sometimes dissonant, angular organization of sound. Mincek's sonic "pendulum" framework, somtimes applied to solo instruments, here finds full expression in a larger ensemble.  

Andrew Norman, "The Companion Guide to Rome" for string trio. Norman's tour-de-fource string trio, inspired by the architecture of Rome, is an increasingly-popular composition, radiating beauty and the sublime. Norman's trio jumps from frenetic moto perpetuo to simple ostinati, a gestural interpretation of the chaotic rhythms of daily life.  

Hannah Lash, "C" for piano and vibraphone. Lash writes, "C is a piece about the expansion of material in a motor-like, additive process. Its anchor and beginning are the C-octaves, which spin out of the rest of the material in relentless perpetual motion."

Pierre Jalbert, "Secret Alchemy" for piano quartet. Jalbert's mysical, lyric piano quartet likens the compositional process to alchemy: the obscure art of creating gold from common materials. Except in this case, Jalbert's musical materials are far from common: from the start, they glitter with hidden luxury. 

Keeril Makan, "The Noise Between Thoughts" for string quartet. Keeril has recently written eloquently in the New York Times on several of his works available through PSNY, including this quartet. 

Hear additional highlighted works below:

Works for Chamber Ensemble

Works for String Ensemble (with and without piano)

Works for Solo Instruments

Works for Voice and Ensemble

Works with Guitar

Works for Winds

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New Year, New Works!

Jan. 10, 2013, 2:14 p.m.

Happy new year from PSNY! 2013 is shaping up to be a great season, with over 30 new works recently added to the catalogue, all available as digital editions for immediate download. Audiences in New York will be able to hear works by two PSNY composers performed live at Carnegie Hall this season, as well. On January 18th, the American Composers' Orchestra performs the World Premiere of Kate Soper's now is forever for Soprano and Orchestra; and on April 2nd, pianist Jonathan Biss and the Elias String Quartet perform the New York Premiere of Timothy Andres' "Piano Quintet," a co-commission by Carnegie Hall. Be sure to attend these performances if you can! 

Some standouts from this windfall of new works include pieces by both well-established and up-and-coming composers ranging from Andrew Norman to Fred Lerdahl, Morton Subotnick to Scott Wollschleger. Many of these pieces are excellent additions to repertoire, and are standouts at every performance. Some highlights: 

 Andrew Norman, Gran Turismo. What’s better than an Andrew Norman piece for solo strings, such as Sabina? An Andrew Norman piece for 8 violins, of course! Gran Turismo is quickly becoming an internationally renowned piece, a virtuoso show-stopper perfect for orchestras and chamber ensembles alike.  

Kamran Ince, Symphony in Blue. Ince’s alchemical melding of Western concert music with Turkish influence manifests itself in his newest solo piano work, Symphony in Blue. Premiered in Turkey in June, 2012, Symphony in Blue was commissiomned by the Istanbul Museum of Modern Art to honor the rare viewing of Burhan Dogancay's painting, “Symphony in Blue” (Mavi Senfoni, 1987).

Morton Subotnick, Liquid Strata. Subotnick, now the acknowledged godfather of electronic music, composed Liquid Strata for piano and electronic ghost score in 1977. We are extremely pleased to offer, for the first time ever, Subotnick’s electro-acoustic pieces for sale through PSNY, with all required software patches included.  

Chris Cerrone, Memory Palace. This work, appropriately listed near Subotnick’s, also includes electronics to accompany a solo performer, in this case a percussionist. Cerrone has laid out detailed instructions for this piece on the construction of home-made percussion instruments, which constitute the majority of this work’s instrumentation. In addition to these homemade instruments, field recordings give this work an extra layer of sonic activity, adding to its radically subjective aesthetic.  

Scott Wollschleger, Brontal No. 3. Wollschleger’s conception of time, owing strongly to French theorist Gilles Deleuze, frames his melodic lines with an aspect he describes as “Brontal”:  strange, primordial, monolithic, and of odd proportions. This piece, for small ensemble, deconstructs melody and refrain with a rarefied sensitivity to time, a slowly-recurring, ephemeral birdsong. 

Lei Liang, Lakescape II and Dialectal Percussions. Two percussion works by Liang highlight his involvement with the dramatization of the grey area between music and language. Dialectical Percussions, ideally performed on a dark stage with low blue lighting, maps the Peking dialect onto the percussionist, creating a monodrama of “musical dialects.”  

Fred Lerdahl, Fantasy Etudes. Lerdahl’s Etudes, scored for small ensemble, form an intelocking set of 12 studies verging on the fantastic. Characteristic of Lerdahl’s chamber style, these etudes begin with seemingly simple figurations and evolve into complex variations, eventually “collapsing under the weight of its elaborations” as a new etude begins.