He doesn't look much older than when he was 60. But he's showing his age in a way that true artists do. His 2014 piece, Greenwich Village Portraits, is one of his very best. David Amram has led multiple lives simultaneously. He's a jazz musician able to improvise an actual song on the spot, the master of many ethnic and folk musics who plays at Farm Aid concerts (and fits … [Read more...] about David Amram at 85: Distilling his multiple personalities
Bach at the Armory – with gongs, noise-canceling headphones and deck chairs
Every concert should be as comfortable as this. Goldberg, a new performance art piece created by Marina Abramovic that involved a full performance of Bach's Goldberg Variations, was a marriage made in ... well, the drill hall of the Park Avenue Armory in New York. Abramovic was quoted as saying she would make audiences suffer for their Bach - a scary prospect: one of her … [Read more...] about Bach at the Armory – with gongs, noise-canceling headphones and deck chairs
John Luther Adams makes the earth speak (while tourists cover their ears)
John Luther Adams often seems like an Alaska Impressionist - or so I've said in the past, perhaps misleadingly. The implication of that moniker implies pretty-sounding Arctic Debussy, something more descriptive than Sibelius and surely full of more bears than lions and tigers. In fact, Adams (who lived in Alaska for years) has an all-embracing attitude toward sound that … [Read more...] about John Luther Adams makes the earth speak (while tourists cover their ears)
The Pope, the music and the evacuation
A pope without music is like a ship without a flag. It's part of the papal aura - but, unlike incense, it doesn't send your sinuses into spasms. At the Festival of Families Saturday night on Philadelphia's Benjamin Franklin Parkway, the music at a gala concert in Pope Francis's honor was quite secondary - almost a footnote that was all-too-easily ignored, even with … [Read more...] about The Pope, the music and the evacuation
Harry Partch’s sonic cathedral – and what others have built around it.
Harry Partch's biggest and most accomplished work, Delusion of the Fury, long stood alone like some singular Gaudí-designed cathedral in a desert. But now, 46 years after its premiere, it appears at Lincoln Center Festival with a like-minded artistic community having grown up around it. Strange no more, the music maintains its singularity while feeling familiar. Long … [Read more...] about Harry Partch’s sonic cathedral – and what others have built around it.