New Composed Music: May 2017 Seattle * Eastside * Tacoma

SI_button2Second Inversion and the Live Music Project create a monthly calendar featuring contemporary classical, cross-genre, and experimental performances in Seattle, the Eastside, Tacoma, and places in between! 

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Keep an eye out for our this flyer in concert programs and coffee shops around town. Feel free to download, print, and distribute it yourself! If you’d like to be included on this list, submit your event to the Live Music Project at least 6 weeks prior to the event and be sure to tag it with “new music.”


Program Insert - May 2017

Racer Sessions
A weekly showcase of original music with a jam session based on the concepts in the opening presentation.
Every Sunday, 8-10pm, Cafe Racer | FREE

Wayward Music Series
Concerts of contemporary composition, free improvisation, electronic/electroacoustic music, & more.
Various days, 7:30/8pm, Good Shepherd Chapel | $5-$15

Eighth Blackbird with Will Oldham (Bonnie “Prince” Billy)
Will Oldham joins Eighth Blackbird for half the program with original songs and Frederic Rzewski’s Coming Together. The program also includes Bryce Dessner’s Murder Ballades, and David Lang’s Learn to Fly.
Thursday, 5/4, 7:30pm, The Neptune Theatre | $33.50

Harry Partch’s Oedipus: A Musical Theater Drama
The UW School of Music presents the rarely performed Oedipus by Harry Partch after the play by Sophocles. This performance is a “multi-genre theatrical work” featuring a unique collection of Harry Partch’s handmade instruments currently in residence at UW.
Friday, 5/5, 7:30pm, Meany Theater | $10-$20
Saturday, 5/6, 7:30pm, Meany Theater | $10-$20
Sunday, 5/7, 2:00pm, Meany Theater | $10-$20

Seattle Classical Guitar Society Presents Antigoni Goni
Award winning guitarist and renowned pedagogue Antigoni Goni performs a solo recital including music by contemporary Greek composers and others.
Saturday, 5/6, 7:30pm, Nordstrom Recital Hall, Benaroya Hall | $38

Angelo Rondello: Music of Our Sister Cities
Seattle Music Exchange Project presents pianist Angelo Rondello.  The program includes music of Seattle’s sister cities in Italy, Japan, Hungary, and Norway.
Thursday, May 11, 7:30pm, Nordstrom Recital Hall, Benaroya Hall | $20-$42

Seattle Symphony: Celebrate Asia
Seattle Symphony is joined by Indian composer, producer, and performer A. R. Rahman is their ninth annual celebration of the musical traditions of Asia, focusing this year on India and Japan.
Friday, 5/12, 7:00pm, Mark S. Taper Auditorium, Benaroya Hall | $40-$105

DXARTS: Music of Today
The UW School of Music and The Center for Digital Arts and Experimental Media (DXARTS) present a concert of audio and video by current DXARTS students and alumni.
Friday, 5/12, 7:30pm, Meany Theater | $10-$15

Gamelan Pacifica: Lou Harrison at 100 Years
Celebrate the centenary of Lou harrison with a rare opportunity to experience his music for gamelan and percussion live.
Saturday 5/13, 8:00pm, Good Shepherd Chapel | $5-$15

Seattle Rock Orchestra Performs The Beatles
In a Seattle Mother’s Day tradition, Seattle Rock Orchestra performs the Beatles.  Bring your mom.
Saturday, 5/13, 8:00pm, Moore Theatre | $25
Sunday, 5/14, 2:00pm, Moore Theatre | $25

Nat Evans’s Vertical Saxophone Aura Readings at Seattle Art Museum
Nat Evans presents an interactive work for saxophonists on escalators. Two saxophone players serve as personal sound escorts to museum patrons on the escalators leading up to the Seeing Nature exhibition.
Thursday, 5/18, 7:00pm, Seattle Art Museum | free-$20

Ecco Chamber Ensemble: Enough is Enough
Ecco ends their inaugural season with music that protests modern violence and points toward peace, including a premiere by Seattle composer Sarah Bassingthwaighte.
Saturday, May 20, 2:00pm, St. John United Lutheran Church, | $15

Seattle Metropolitan Chamber Orchestra: SPARK.1
This Capitol Hill performance marks the first event in SMCO’s genre-bending SPARK series.  Live SMCO musicians are joined by local DJ Suttikeeree and the Skylark Horn Quartet.
Saturday, May 20, 8:00pm, Fred Wildlife Refuge (21+) | $25

ALBUM REVIEW: Alarm Will Sound’s Modernists

by Geoffrey Larson

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The always-adventurous Alarm Will Sound is an ensemble that seems equally hungry for fun as they are for musical innovation. The music on their latest release seems to benefit from an approach that eschews austerity, focusing on what an incredibly good time it is for a virtuosic ensemble like AWS to perform music of such a level of fascination and complexity.

The album is cleverly bookended by contemporary takes on Varèse modernism, beginning with music that started life as a Beatles track, no less. Musique concrète and the avant-garde influenced John Lennon and Paul McCartney in the creation of their experimental track Revolution 9. McCartney was listening to quite a bit of Varèse and Stockhausen at the time, and Yoko Ono’s modernist aesthetic was also a guiding force on Lennon, who said he was trying to paint a picture of a revolution using sound. Although Matt Marks’ arrangement begins with the basic repeated building blocks of the Beatles track (a looping “Number 9” vocal sample and a piano melody), he quickly moves away from what would become an extremely annoying repetition. We are swiftly thrust into a kaleidoscopic world of similar musique concrète-like materials presented with increasing variety: samples of speech and crowd noise, short fragments of abbreviated melody, and instrumental effects that seem to mimic tapes being played backwards. The dark, noir-like feel of the first half of the track seems to veer towards a more chaotic depiction of revolutionary activity, and the ensemble is brought together at the conclusion with unified, purposeful chanting. Whatever one would call this music, it is a fascinating mix of sounds that not only reminds us of the awesome powers of a small chamber ensemble, but also connect the expressive qualities of conventional instruments with the speaking (and yelling) human voice. It is relentlessly striking, and although I am not always a fan of abrupt swerves in approach throughout a short piece, it absolutely is successful here.

In the middle, we experience a more introspective Augusta Reed Thomas, flanked with good old (new?) contemporary music party time. I saw Charles Wuorinen’s Big Spinoff live in 2014, and found the virtuosity and romping rhythms that drive the work to be intoxicating. It’s a work that unmistakably shares some DNA with John Adams’ two chamber symphonies, in all their banging rhythm and cartoonish runs of notes. The percussive, endlessly riffing texture is pretty non-stop with little variation, however, making us ready for something new by the time we get to Augusta Reed Thomas’ Final Soliloquy of the Interior Paramour. That next track features two texts, the titular Wallace Stevens poem and The Poem that Took the Place of a Mountain by the same author. The English text is spoken and sung, and explores the godliness of artistic creation and imagination, among other things. Without a doubt, we are in the midst of a theatrical experience here, and staging and lighting effects immediately come to mind when we hear the wispy curtain backdrop of instrumental sound. Alarm Will Sound changes gear again in the following track, where disjunct saxophone melodies introduce Wolfgang Rihm’s Will Sound, a technically challenging work written specifically for AWS (duh). It is atonal nearly to the point of serialism, which makes the surprising major and minor chords at the very end that much more neat and quirky. Alarm Will Sound under the direction of Alan Pierson is tremendously well-organized in its technical outbursts, but those startling chords at the conclusion would have had an even more powerful effect if had they been perfectly in tune. Masterful displays of technique abound on the succeeding track as well, as do moments of unsettled intonation. John Orfe’s Journeyman rounds out the core of this album with music that uses some seriously wacky combinations of instruments, seeming to evoke things like a local carnival ride, a Broadway opening, and a train.

At the end of the collection, we get Evan Hause’s ambitious acoustic re-imagining of Edgar Varèse’s Poème électronique. The original is one of Varèse’s most famous works, conceived to be part of an architectural installation by Le Corbusier at the 1958 Brussels World’s Fair. The swooping, beeping, and thumping electronic sounds have been given to the ensemble here, sort of a Poème analogique. We’ve even got a bit of singing, somehow even creepier in this arrangement than the original. Honestly, it’s an amazing arrangement executed to stunning effect by AWS; listening to Varèse’s original, it’s hard to believe that such an interesting musical feat could possibly be successful. Acoustic instruments seem to bring out more shades of character than the all-electronic sounds of the original: the bizarre, schizoid sounds are now somehow augmented with humor and intimacy.

That’s the triumph of AWS’s latest recording in a nutshell: these composers and this ensemble are able to take modernism, with its strange, confusing soundscape, and make it personable and relatable. This kind of music is probably not something you want in your life every day; but when you need it, it’s there, and it’s an amazingly good time.

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Photo credit: Cory Weaver

NEW VIDEOS: ETHEL

ETHEL is not your ordinary string quartet – don’t expect them to perform Mozart or Haydn, though I’m sure it would be brilliant if they did!  In short… ETHEL rocks.  They focus primarily on the works of modern composers and have worked closely with Julia Wolfe, Osvaldo Golijov, Jacob TV, Phil Kline and collaborated with artists from Kaki King to David Byrne to Gutbucket to Robert Mirabal to Bang on a Can.

ETHEL was recently in the Northwest and graciously stopped by our studios for a fun video session!  Here’s one of our favorites.

Check out the other four offerings on our video page and listen below to the full audio session!

ALBUM OF THE WEEK: Time for Three (Self-Titled)

by Maggie Stapleton

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Time for Three (a.k.a. TF3) totally nails the concept of “Rethink Classical.”  The members of this genre-defying trio (Zachary (Zach) De Pue, violin; Nicolas (Nick) Kendall, violin; and Ranaan Meyer, double bass) were trained at the Curtis Institute of Music and undoubtedly have incredible classical chops.  Their fluency and natural ability to play arrangements of The Beatles, Kanye West, and Katy Perry equally as well as Bach and Brahms is what sets these guys apart and makes their self-proclaimed “classically-trained garage band” title totally accurate.

“How do we reach a younger audience?” is a hot topic among symphony orchestras around the globe right now.  The Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra has teamed up with TF3 for their “Happy Hour Series,” where they perform on about four programs per year.  I had a chance to talk to TF3 a few weeks ago about this experience and they absolutely love it.  They’ve developed a fan base of young professionals (90% are ages 20-45) who keep coming back, concert after concert.  TF3 caters to the needs of that demographic by crafting performances in the concert hall that are similar in format to rock shows – lights, trajectory of a playlist that takes you on a journey, and music that is groove-oriented and familiar.  They’ll pair Beethoven alongside Coldplay… Brahms… Radiohead.  The audience may come for the Radiohead, but find unexpected connections with Brahms.

And speaking of performances and venues, the guys are currently on tour and stopping right here in Seattle on Wednesday, August 13 at the Columbia City Theater, where you can sit or stand, drink a beer, dance, and make merry in this fun, historic space.  The show starts at 8pm and tickets are still available!

Their recently released self-titled album is an emblem for the modern era of genre-crossover, containing an impressive collection of arrangements, originals, and guest performers (Joshua Radin! Alisa Weilerstein!  Jake Shimabukuro!  Branford Marsalis!  Lily & Madeleine!).  We had the pleasure of having Nick, Ranaan, and Zach in our studios for a special in-studio performance:

(this session is no longer available)

Our hats are off to you, TF3, for this amazing collection of originals, covers, and collaborations!  If you like what you hear, pop over to iTunes or Amazon and make it yours.