I knew my friend Bill Osborne and Samuel Beckett had met and spoken about Osborne’s musical settings of Beckett’s plays. But I had never heard the details. Now at last the full story! By William Osborne I spent seven years doing nothing else but setting the works of Beckett to music. At the end in […]
Kid Congo & The Pink Monkeybirds: ‘Conjure Man’
I think of it as “Four Notes and the Dreamachine.” EmailFacebookTwitterReddit
‘Music for the End of Time’
Excerpted from the complete 52-minute work for trombone, video and quadraphonic electronics. Based on the Book of Revelation, the music had its premiere in Montreal, at McGill University, in March 1998. The video was premiered in Taos, New Mexico, in September 2007. Personnel: Abbie Conant, trombone; Norbert Bach, digital stills; William Osborne, music and video. […]
Edith Piaf, ‘The Sound of Suffering Humanity’
La Môme et de Rouge, by Heathcote Williams. Narration and montage by Alan Cox. EmailFacebookTwitterReddit
Alban Berg’s ‘Lulu’ in a Sexy Production from Zurich
Yes, Zurich. If this is Eurotrash, I’m all for it. EmailFacebookTwitterReddit
La Môme et de Rouge
!["La Mome et de Rouge" [front cover of four-page folio of the published poem, COLD TURKEY PRESS, 2011].](https://www.artsjournal.com/herman/wp/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/williams_lamome_1-e1357138251842.jpg)
Date: April 26, 2012 11:43:35 AM GMT+02:00 Had a message from Marianne Faithfull . . .. . . ‘Isn’t it time you wrote me another song?’ I said ‘What do you want it to be about?’she said she’d been reading a book about Edith Piaf and was gripped by it.I said I’d have a look. […]
Channeling John Cage
Is there anybody not paying tribute to John Cage this year, the centennial of his birth? My own favorite tribute is a performance that began more than a decade ago “in a crumbling medieval church” in Halberstadt, an eastern German city that has been described by The Wall Street Journal as “forlorn.” The piece, called […]
Big Title, Big Music, Young Composer
Dylan Mattingly by name. He’s got a thing for Amelia Earhart, the famous pilot who disappeared 75 years ago near Howland Island in the Pacific. Inspired by the story of her last flight, Mattingly wrote a forty-minute work for chamber orchestra, “Atlas of Somewhere On the Way to Howland Island,” as an homage to her […]
Going Viral?
Here’s a change of pace. It’s a parody music video. Guy who made it calls it ‘Casual Pimpin.’ I call it catchy. Guy’s name is Tim Ellis. He’s something of a one-man band. Wrote it. Performs it. Shot it with his “fly girl.” He also happens to be a friend of mine. Now that I’ve […]
VPo + America – Blacks = (Classical Music x Cultural Racism)²
Having taken William Osborne Given the many European press reports about the Vienna Philharmonic’s sexism and racism — see articles in Profil magazine for two recent examples — one might ask why the orchestra continues to be euphorically received in the United States. How can we explain that the Philharmonic’s sexist and racist employment practices are […]
MALCOLM GLADWELL BLINKS AT ABBIE CONANT
By Jan Herman If Malcolm Gladwell had written about you in his latest best seller, Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking, you’d probably know it in a New York minute. If you were Abbie Conant, who is the subject of the book’s final chapter, you wouldn’t. When pressed, Conant recalls speaking with Gladwell (right) […]
Books ‘n’ Stuff
My biography of the Hollywood director William Wyler, A Talent for Trouble, is available as an ebook at Amazon and an ebook on iTunes at the Apple store. Putnam published it in hardcover, and Da Capo Press published it in paperback. Several other books, include a collection of theater criticism, Second Nights (Vol.1) and (Vol. […]