What’s real minimalism? It’s not there at all. And that’s exactly what happened to Rhys Chatham’s eagerly awaited piece for 200 electric guitars, A Crimson Grail, on Friday night: The performance (part of a Lincoln Center Out of Doors evening titled “Wordless Music: 800 Years of Minimalism—The Spiritual Transcendent”) was canceled at the last minute because of thunderstormy weather that made it dangerous to plug in all these axes. And boy the fans are angry! Not only are they upset the show was canceled, but they seem really mad that they had to endure the other two acts on the bill—Beata Viscera and Manuel Göttsching—before being told A Crimson Grail wouldn’t happen. (Typically, instead of causing a healthy ruckus on the scene of the crime, they bravely left in silence then took to the blogs.) read more
In music performance today, one of the hottest presenters around is Wordless Music . If you’re a New Yorker, they seem to be suddenly everywhere, and their concerts have been getting raves from critics from The New Yorker, The New York Times, New York magazine, and Gramophone magazine, as well as attracting audiences that represent the demographic holy grail: twenty-something hipsters. Wordless Music’s self-professed goal is “to demonstrate that the various boundaries and genre distinctions segregating music today—popular and classical; uptown and downtown; high art and low—are an artificial construction in need of dismantling.”
At the moment, they’re doing some of their dismantling at the Whitney Museum of American Art, where at 7 pm. on four Fridays in June, you can hang out with the other cool kids from the class at concerts that are free with pay-as-you-please museum admission. read more
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