Harlem School of the Arts on Broadway

Just a quick note of congratulations to former Harlem School of the Arts student Shannon Tavarez for landing the role of Young Nala in the Broadway production of the Lion King. Her teacher was Rebecca Purdum, who recently moved from NYC to San Francisco. Break a leg, Shannon!

Harlem Buildings

Found this great blog with a posting about some of the building I pass everyday. Growing up in Toronto, I was always painfully aware of how little we knew about the architecture there, and consequently, how little we knew of the city's past. One holiday season as I was returning to New York, I remember speaking to a woman from Montreal who said that if her town had the money, they would have bulldozed their past the same way Toronto did. Any chance the cultural history of the two cities might be tied to these facts?

Radiohead Remix

Here's my contribution to the Radiohead Reckoner remix project. Hope you enjoy.

Menon Dwarka - Bio

Composer, conductor, writer and music administrator Menon Dwarka has worn many hats in his professional career. A former director of the 92nd Street Y School of Music, Menon was also a staff composer at Rocket Music, a firm that provided music and sound design for advertising giants BBDO and Y and R. Menon is also a composer of "serious" music, with works in a variety of genres, including orchestral, chamber and electronic compositions. Menon is also the administrative coordinator for Wizard Music, a non-profit organization created by Morton Subotnick and Joan La Barbara to conduct studies in musical creativity in education. Wizard Music also develops music education software, as well as promotes performances of contemporary classical composers.

Sherman Alexie

A little movie made illustrating one of Alexie's short stories. Even though I much prefer music and art to the written word, the single greatest artistic experience I ever had was hearing Alexie speak at the Union Square Barnes and Noble a few years ago. He read What You Pawn I Will Redeem, a story brimming with affection for it's woefully unlucky protagonist. As with all of the best of his writing, Alexie's words reveal the inherent divinity in these characters to whom we rarely give a second look, but in this reading Alexie did something I've never seen anyone else do: he not only made the audience experience the magical transformation of the main character, but somehow, at the same moment, we all realized that magic was present, in the room with us, and just as those feelings became concrete, the story ended and the whole audience was suspended in holy, silent, rapture followed by the most thunderous applause I've ever heard in my life. That night, that audience didn't just experience art, we were art.

Click here to see part 2.

Farewell to Stromness

Years ago, I fell in love with the music of English composer Peter Maxwell Davies. Like his friend Hans Werner Henze, Davies never forgot that music could touch the mind, soul and heart of the willing listener. Here's a rare gem of Max's: Farewell to Stromness, arranged for guitar by Timothy Walker. Like so many pieces of his compatriot Benjamin Britten, the melody of this work seems unnecessarily simple and maybe even trite, but also like Britten, the work takes quietly takes root in one's imagination long after the first hearing, becoming a constant reminder of how magical the musical experience can be. What I love about this piece is that it's so successful in creating a sense of longing and, dare it say it, homesickness for Stromness, a place most of us have never visited or will ever visit. For all of you social activist types, Davies wrote this work to protest the potential uranium mining in the Orkney islands. A perfect jewel it is, and sorely deserving of more performances.

Webern's Legacy

A friend of mine recently dashed off a quick email asking for my thoughts on Austrian composer Anton Webern. I told him I need to a few days to collect my thoughts and I would get back to him as soon as possible.

It's at least a month later, and I've been mulling over what to say. It's not that I've been trying to come up with something profound to say about the man's work. In fact, my thoughts on Webern are pretty much the same ones I've held since my early teens, but I've always hesitated in expressing my views because I never saw similar assertions in existing commentary. Funny how age makes you care less and less about how fashionable your thoughts and feelings might be, isn't it?

Anyway, here it is: Webern's legacy has little to do with his serial structure, pointillistic textures or his dramatic use of silence. Webern simply invested the whole of his creative life in, if you'll allow me to borrow from the world of literary criticism, the lyric rather than the epic.

Perhaps he felt Mahler could not be outdone in the building of epic structures, and perhaps it is because the constituent parts of such large structures became in themselves almost complete, that Webern felt that they could exist on their own, untethered from a supporting dramatic edifice to hold the up. If the 19th century was concerned with the whole human body, the discovery of the nucleus of a cell was enough to capture imagination for the totality of his compositional output. Yes, there were miniatures by composers of preceding generations, but these rarely let go of the epic thrust which informs much of Western music, in fact, it may be the single most defining characteristic of that genre, and why composers such as Cage, Feldman and Takemitsu were so taken with his work. Interestingly, Webern's rediscovery in Europe after the war was followed by a generation of composers who sought to create works of an epic nature from Webern's example. I suppose traditions die very, very hard. Thank God for amnesia. =)