Hop along and grab some tickets; all seats are $25!
Gabriel Kahane is a songwriter who lives in Brooklyn NY.
Tickets for my joint gig with Timo Andres at Carnegie Hall on April 7, 2016 are on sale today, and they are moving quickly.
From Carnegie’s web site:
This concert gives two friends the chance to throw caution to the wind in a free associative program that brings together four centuries’ worth of music, from J. S. Bach to world premieres written by Gabriel Kahane and Timo Andres for one another. At the center of the program is a call-and-response between the two composer-performers, juxtaposing solo piano music with songs for piano and voice that range from Schubert, Schumann, and Thomas Adès, to Jerome Kern and Andrew Norman. Framing this quasi-live mix tape are sets of Britten folk song settings and Ives songs, each nested in the lapidary elegance of Kurtág’s transcriptions of Bach chorale preludes.
- Timo Andres, Piano
- Gabriel Kahane, Piano and Vocals
Program
- BACH Sonatina from Cantata No. 106: Gottes Zeit ist die allerbeste Zeit (Actus tragicus) (arr. Kurtág)
- BRITTEN Selections from Folk Song Arrangements
- GABRIEL KAHANE New Work for Solo Piano (NY Premiere, co-commissioned by Carnegie Hall)
- TIMO ANDRES New Work for Piano and Voice (NY Premiere, co-commissioned by Carnegie Hall)
- IVES Songs to be announced
- BACH Chorale Prelude: “O Lamm Gottes unschuldig,” BWV 618 (arr. Kurtág)
So grab your tickets now!
Alt-Classical Riposte
I’m afraid that Brian Sacawa’s blog post on the “alt-classical” movement – and let me say that that moniker does make me bristle, smacking as it does of hipsterrunoff snark – seems somewhat myopic and reductive, particularly read in conjunction with Matt Marks’ comment on the same subject.
Brief recap of story to date: In response to Sacawa’s exploration of whether or not the alt-classical scene– in which composers of new music draw liberally from contemporary pop sources (harmonically, rhythmically, texturally, otherwise)—is a passing trend, Marks suggests that in fact, this movement away from “uncompromising” sonic landscapes is actually a welcome unshackling of new music from its long-held snooty academic dogma that shunned any hint of diatonicism.
Sacawa sets up a binary between alt-composers, whom he views as being of a generation comfortable with the incorporation of pop music into their scores, and the cat-bearing Wuorinens
of the world, whose “Who Cares if They Listen” philosophy was borne out of the self-ghettoizing attitude that pervaded and continues to pervade certain classical music institutions, both academic and otherwise. And while he acknowledges that pop-influenced “classical” music (are these descriptors ridiculous or what?) is nothing new, citing Bang-on-a-Can and minimalism as predecessors, he attempts to tie the current movement to a changing of the guard at universities, suggesting that the new pedagogy offers a more laissez faire approach to concert vocabularies.
But I’m afraid that something is being lost in this discussion. To my ears, pop music has ALWAYS been a crucial element in art music, from the Quodlibet of Bach’s Goldberg Variations, built almost exclusively on two popular tunes of its time, to the ethnomusicological efforts of Bartok which saw Magyar and Hungarian folk tunes incorporated and transformed into any number of scores. The vernacular can be traced through the work of nearly every canonic composer from Bach to Bartok, and for good reason: if music, following Adorno, holds up the mirror to society and transforms it, then naturally part of that societal landscape includes vernacular sounds. What has changed, or been lost, is the craft with which vernacular sounds are introduced into the concert realm.