Why do we hear music the way we do? Why do human beings make music in the first place? Are its various components things that can even be explained by science? These were topics covered in just one of the events, “Notes and Neurons: In Search of the Common Chorus,” at this year’s five-day World Science Festival from June 10 to 14. The festival was packing them in at events on topics like fMRI brain research, dark energy, quantum mechanics, microbiology, and behavioral science. Many of the presentations were affairs bringing together experts from diverse fields to bring their joint creative focus to commuter traffic, the earth’s atmospheric levels of CO2, and the question of nothingness.
So judging from the sellout response, New Yorkers are pretty interested in science—as entertainment, anyway, with renowned scientists mixing it up with Hollywood actors and poets and journalists and Juilliard-trained musicians in a sort of cross-cultural musico-scientific extravaganza. read more
As the last days of school approach and the sounds of “school’s out!” ring out near the exits of New York City’s schools, music-lovers are giving a hurrah of their own. Yes, it’s summer—or nearly so—and the sounds of music increasingly can be heard outdoors in parks and bandshells and plazas throughout the city. And for the cheapskate that exists in all of us (yes, all of us: how do you think the upper classes got to be “upper” in the first place?), it’s always a welcome season for finding ways to sample as much music as possible, for as little money as possible.
This year is bittersweet, however, with arts organizations throwing one-time or annual free events for financially strapped concertgoers that crowd into Central Park and Prospect Park and Lincoln Center Plaza to hear the sounds made by performers from the city’s top music organizations—even as some of those ensembles struggle to come up with funds to keep doing what they do. read more
Lincoln Center has become an elder statesman of New York. At least, that’s the conclusion I reached after coming back from the opening celebration that just concluded yesterday morning at Alice Tully Hall—the kickoff event of “Lincoln Center 50 Years.” The event felt the way I imagine the annual Al Smith Dinner feels. That is, you put a bunch of power players in the same room and give each of them the floor for about five minutes. Big applause after each one finishes.
Here, attention was paid to important people like David Rockefeller—brother of the late John D. Rockefeller III, who spearheaded the campaign to create Lincoln Center—who acknowledged applause from his seat in the audience. Among those in Tully Hall were members of Lincoln Center’s twelve resident organizations and students from the inaugural graduating class of local High School for Arts, Imagination, and Inquiry (founded by the Lincoln Center Institute), who cheered loudly when their school was mentioned. Architect Liz Diller of Diller Scofidio + Renfro (co-architects of Tully Hall with FXFOWLE Architects) was seen flitting about the room, smiling and chatting.
The morning started with Copland’s “Fanfare for the Common Man,” performed by the definitely uncommon brass players and percussionists from the New York Philharmonic. Emcee for the event—which was streamed live—was journalist Tom Brokaw, himself an elder statesman. read more
On this past Tuesday, the curtain went up for the first time at the Jerome L. Greene Performance Space, WNYC’s new street-level set-up at the corner of Varick and Charlton streets. Or rather, the indoor space went from dark to light as the shades went up on windows looking out on both streets—at 7 p.m., it was still light outside.
In case you had missed the news, the Greene space for broadcasts and live performances is finally open, after years of planning. This small room looking out on two streets has all the technological bells and whistles, a curvy wooden backdrop to its small stage, a Fazioli piano from Italy, a soundproof broadcast booth in the corner, and several high-definition video screens. It can broadcast radio or television and live to the internet. WNYC is celebrating its opening with a ten-day festival ending on May 8 that will include broadcasts of the Brian Lehrer and Leonard Lopate shows; the launch of “The Next New York Conversation Series” with Dr. Eddie Glaude and Dr. Cornel West; and a Cinco de Mayo celebration with food, music, and dancing. read more
As if it weren’t enough doing eight Fionas a week in Shrek on Broadway, Sutton Foster has squeezed in two Monday evenings this month at Feinstein’s at the Regency. I missed her February performance in Lincoln Center’s “American Songbook” series, so I made it over to Feinstein’s for the first of these, which took place on April 6 and spotlights songs from Foster’s CD released in February on Ghostlight Records. A second date follows on April 20.
If one of the goals of an evening of cabaret-style songs is to get a more personal view of a singing artist, the picture that emerged from the between-songs banter was of a sweet ingénue with a steely interior: an intensely ambitious and intelligent performing animal who can never get enough of being onstage. On a chilly evening, the 34-year-old Foster flounced onstage in a sleeveless yellow sundress, as if willing the stubbornly slow spring into the room. Yellow seemed like the right color choice for her sunny brand of charm, as she chatted about her childhood in Georgia and played a recorded excerpt of her assertive audio Valentine’s Day message to a childhood sweetheart, saved from a cassette tape she made when she was ten. read more
If you visit McGovern’s website, the first thing you’ll see is a header in huge, red, loopy script, “THE STRADIVARIUS VOICE.” At about the same moment, you will will be hit with the sound of that instantly recognizable voice ringing out—her cover of a Bob Dylan tune, “The Times They are a-Changin’.”
That song is part of McGovern’s latest show, “A Long and Winding Road,” which is named after her latest CD; she’s been touring the show following that recording’s release last summer. The songs are some of McGovern’s early favorites from her years growing up, including songs by Joni Mitchell (“The Circle Game, “The Fiddle and the Drum”) Lennon & McCartney (“Let It Be,” “Rocky Raccoon”), Jimmy Webb (“MacArthur Park,” “By the Time I Get to Phoenix,” “The Moon’s a Harsh Mistress”) and Carole King/Gerry Goffin (“Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow?”). These represent her roots as a folk singer; the songs are what she listened to as a girl and teenager before she rocketed to fame as the “Morning After” singer from The Poseidon Adventure. The photo on the CD cover is current, but inside there’s a photo of a 20-year-old McGovern, with long hair and guitar, taken in 1969.
This winter, McGovern chatted during a New York visit about life at her own pace—she lives full-time in her home state of Ohio, when she’s not on the road. read more
“You want me to play WHERE?”
That was Stew’s first reaction when he got the call inviting him to do a concert a the newly reopened Alice Tully Hall. As the singer-songwriter told the audience at his March 6 concert there—with collaborator Heidi Rodewald, a band of 17 instruments, plus singers de’Adre Aziza, Eisa Davis, and Rebecca Jones—he got the call while he was playing a gig in New Jersey, at “some club where Bruce Springsteen once threw up.”
Stew’s Tully concert—14 songs plus two encores from his Broadway show Passing Strange—showcased the acoustics of Tully, which now has some black muffling panels that can be brought down to cover the hall’s beautiful moabi wood side panels, to dampen the sound and the decibel level during amplified events. It is perhaps significant that, as someone who attends almost exclusively acoustic events, I heard my first concert at the new Tully in this hybrid concert, which used the amplified string quartet ETHEL, a tuba-trombone-trumpet group called The Brass Problem, electric keyboards and guitars, and percussion. read more
It just seems wrong that this February is the month of a memorial celebration here in New York for Odetta, who died in December. By rights, it should have been the month after her participation in the inauguration of President Obama, an event that would have marked a fitting and joyous high point in her participation in the civil rights struggle in America. While in Lenox Hill Hospital with kidney failure in November, Odetta’s manager, Doug Yeager, stated that “Odetta believes she is going to sing at Obama’s Inauguration, and I believe that is the reason she is still alive. She has a big poster of Barack Obama taped on the wall across from her bed.”
A long list of musicians is scheduled to attend the memorial, a free event at Riverside Church on February 24 at 7 p.m.—Pete Seeger, Harry Belafonte, Bernice Reagon, Maya Angelou, and Tom Chapin are just a few scheduled to come. The place will be packed; get there early. read more
Lots of cheap tickets: The economy tanked, and tickets to everything were magically available at short notice, at cut rates. Example A: The Metropolitan Opera continued its yearlong offer of same-day $20 tickets in the orchestra section, offered many 2007-08 operas on television here at Thirteen/WNET, continued its live HD broadcasts to movie theaters, and opened up an online lottery for $25 tickets for unsold seats in the Orchestra and Grand Tier sections.
Lots of cheap tickets, part B: I never thought I would say this, but now that it’s suddenly cool to be a spendthrift, I’m not sure if I like being part of a large crowd that until recently looked down on us lifelong cheapsters. Last week, I went to the Saint James Theatre to get tickets to Gypsy so I could see Patti LuPone one more time before the show was set to close for good. I paid a very good price for excellent seats—without trying hard at all, or breaking the law. New York is not an easy city to live or work in. I had become attached to the struggle associated with finding concert tickets I could afford. Now everything is a struggle. And it’s just wrong that Gypsy is closing. read more
Earlier this December, I took the number 1 subway up to 125th Street to catch a daytime performance by the Orchestra of St. Luke’s at the Apollo Theater http://www.apollotheater.org/ for schoolchildren. The program, “What is American Music? NYC: The Great Migration and Ellis Island,” focused on twentieth-century migration to the United states, through the music of Aaron Copland (Fanfare for the Common Man), Dvorak (the “New World” Symphony), Bohuslav Martinu (“Charleston” from La Revue de Cuisine, Suite for Orchestra), William Grant Still (Symphony No. 1, “Afro-American”), Scott Joplin (“The Entertainer”), and George Gershwin (Rhapsody in Blue). Conductor Damon Gupton (who has also worked as an actor) led the orchestra, and the young Brooklyn pianist Simone Dinnerstein was the soloist in the Gershwin.
Also attracting notice in Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue was Romie de Guise-Langlois, a young clarinetist playing up a storm in the Orchestra of St. Luke’s, who came to New York a year and a half ago from her home city of Montreal to become a Fellow in The Academy, a joint program of Carnegie Hall, The Juilliard School, and The Weill Music Institute in partnership with the New York City Department of Education. read more
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