As the world pauses to reflect once more on the tragic events of September 11, 2001, on the occasion of their tenth anniversary this Sunday, many will turn to music in remembrance. Included in the many events marking this anniversary are works by and performances from a number of Nonesuch artists, including Steve Reich, John Adams, Laurie Anderson, and Ingram Marshall. Here are a few of them, followed by our regular listing of events taking place this weekend featuring Nonesuch artists.
As the world pauses to reflect once more on the tragic events of September 11, 2001, on the occasion of their tenth anniversary this Sunday, many will turn to music in remembrance. Included in the many events marking this anniversary are works by and performances from a number of Nonesuch artists. Here are a few of them, followed by our regular listing of events taking place this weekend featuring Nonesuch artists.
Steve Reich's new piece WTC 9/11 can be heard online at NPR Music as part of a full-album stream of the composer's forthcoming record of the same name. The piece, performed by Kronos Quartet, reflects on the World Trade Center attacks of September 11, 2001, when Reich and his family lived only four blocks away from the site of the tragedy. To listen to the complete album, go to npr.org/music.
Reich discusses WTC 9/11 and its personal nature in the latest episode of Studio 360, which can be heard here in the Nonesuch Journal.
In Japan, NHK's Premium Theater will broadcast Kronos Quartet's world-premiere concert performance of WTC 9/11, recorded this past March at Duke University's Page Auditorium, along with the two earlier quartet's Reich wrote for Kronos, Triple Quartet and Different Trains. The show airs Saturday night at 11:30 PM Japanese time. For more information, visit nhk.or.jp.
As noted earlier today in the Nonesuch Journal, Steve Reich is in Kraków, Poland, for the launch of the Sacrum Profanum Festival on Sunday. The week-long festival offers a retrospective of some of the composer's most iconic works, along with newer additions to his repertoire. Sunday's Opening Night concert at the ArcelorMittal Electrolytic Tinning Plant includes Daniel Variations, Electric Countrpoint, and Music for 18 Musicians, and features performances by Ensemble Modern, special guest Jonny Greenwood, and the composer himself. The concert will be broadcast on Polish Radio 2 at 7:30 PM local time, online at polskieradio.pl.
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John Adams wrote On the Transmigration of Souls, the Pulitzer Prize- and Grammy Award-winning piece to commemorate the one-year anniversary of September 11 in 2002. The Wall Street Journal, in an article on the various musical responses to September 11, says the piece "set a high bar" for such works. "Opening compellingly, with the word 'missing' repeated flatly against an increasingly cluttered soundscape," writes David Mermelstein, "the work draws to a moving, hypnotic conclusion as a litany of victims' names are recited against gently rising and falling tones."
Adams spoke with NPR about the piece in 2002. You can listen to the interview at npr.org, where it has been newly re-posted as part of the week-long series of about the music of 9/11 from NPR Music's classical music blog Deceptive Cadence.
You can also hear him discuss the inspiration for the piece, via New York's online new-music station Q2, here:
On the Transmigration of Souls will be performed by a number of orchestras across North America this weekend.
The Utah Symphony, led by Music Director Thierry Fischer, opens its 2011-12 season with a September 11 commemorative concert pairing Adams's piece with Beethoven's triumphant Symphony No. 9. The orchestra will be joined by the Utah Symphony Chorus and choristers of the Madeleine Choir School in concert at Salt Lake City's Abravanel Hall tonight and Saturday night.
The Calgary Philharmonic Orchestra, led by conductor Roberto Minczuk, offers its own hometown audience the same program, pairing On the Transmigration of Souls with Beethoven's Ninth, in concert at Calgary's Jack Singer Concert Hall tonight, with the Calgary Philharmonic Chorus and Cantaré Children. The program was first performed last night.
On September 11 itself, Adams's piece will be featured in two different events: A Concert of Remembrance, which also includes Brahms's A German Requiem, performed by the Elgin Choral Union with the Elgin Symphony Orchestra, Heartland Voices, and Elgin Children's Chorus, at Hemmens Auditorium in Elgin, Illinois; and A Memory Space in Metaline Falls, Washington, which will include a live piano and cello concert followed by the audio recording of On the Transmigration of Souls.
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On Sunday at 3:30 PM, NPR Music and Q2 present a live audio webcast of Remembering September 11, a free concert by the Wordless Music Orchestra taking place at the Metropolitan Museum's majestic Temple of Dendur in New York. Included on the program are Ingram Marshall's meditative work Fog Tropes II and Alfred Schnittke's Collected Songs Where Every Verse is Filled with Grief, as arranged by the Kronos Quartet. The Kronos recording of the former can be heard on Marshall's 2001 Nonesuch album Kingdom Come, the latter on Kronos Quartet's 1997 album Early Music and the 1998 collection Schnittke: Complete String Quartets. Listen online at wqxr.org.
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Laurie Anderson participates in Music After, a free marathon concert co-produced by composers Eleonor Sandresky and Daniel Felsenfeld and taking place at the New York's Joyce SoHo, starting at 8:46 AM and finishing after midnight. The event will represent composers who lived or were housed in downtown New York on September 11, 2001, presenting the music of Anderson, Sxip Shirey, Philip Glass, Steve Reich, Michael Gordon, Carter Burwell, Don Byron, Nico Muhly, Justin Vivian Bond, and many others. Other performers include Shirey, Bond, JACK Quartet, Ethel, Lisa Moore, Joan LaBarbara, Tift Merritt, and many more. For details, visit musicafter.com.
The New Yorker asked its contributors to look back on how their lives were changed by the September 11 attacks. New Yorker music critic Sasha Frere-Jones, asked what piece of work to emerge from that day has stayed with him the most, explains that it was an album from many years before that did so: Laurie Anderson's Big Science and its 2008 Nonesuch reissue.
"I found an old love, and watched it leap from its moment twenty years into a future it presaged," Frere-Jones explains. He cites the lyrics to the song "From the Air," which refer to a plane crash and take on an almost prescient feel in retrospect. "Anderson couldn’t know what was coming," he says, "but she knew the sound of American speech and the cultural role of comfort."
Read why at newyorker.com.
As much as music is able to help in healing, so too is it a cause for celebration, as the live musical offerings ahead this weekend listed below can attest.
Björk brings the music of Biophilia, her interdisciplinary exploration of the universe and its physical forces, to Bestival on the Isle of Wight, where she headlines the four-day festival's closing night. Björk's next live performance of will be in her home town of Reykjavik for the Iceland Airwaves festival in October, one day after the release of the Biophilia album.
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The Black Keys are the main event at the Virgin Mobile FreeFest taking place at the Merriweather Post Pavilion in Columbia, Maryland, tomorrow. The band closes out a day of music from the likes of Cee Lo Green, TV on the Radio, Patti Smith, Cut Copy, Okkervil River, and much more. Tickets, which were free of charge, are no longer available.
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Carolina Chocolate Drops have a busy weekend of music-making ahead with a show every day. The weekend kicks off with a special set with the Taj Mahal Trio and vocalist Alvin Youngblood Hart at Ellnora | The Guitar Festival, held at the Krannert Center in Urbana, Illinois tonight. They head back to their home state of North Carolina for a set at the Mountain Song Festival at the Brevard Music Center on Saturday. The next day, the group joins Grace Potter & The Nocturnals in concert at the historic Ryman Auditroium in Nashville Sunday night.
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Shawn Colvin performs at the Narrows Center for the Arts in Fall River, Massachusetts, tonight.
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Jessica Lea Mayfield has two shows in the Midwest this weekend: first in her home state of Ohio, at The Basement in Columbus tonight, followed by a Saturday night show at Indiana State University in Terre Haute for the Blues at the Crossroads Festival.
Speaking of blues, or rather, blue, don't forget to submit your entry in Mayfield's search for the official animated music video for her song "Blue Skies Again," off her Nonesuch debut album, Tell Me. The contest deadline has been extended to September 22. Mayfield's favorite will take home a $500 cash prize, an autographed copy of Tell Me on vinyl and CD, a t-shirt, concert tickets, and backstage passes. For more information and to enter, visit her Facebook page here.
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Brad Mehldau kicked off his solo tour of Europe last night in France and continues with two shows at the Cité de la Musique in Paris tonight and Saturday night.
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Pat Metheny offers a special preview of us his upcoming tour with bassist Larry Grenadier in a benefit concert for The Jazz Gallery taking place at St. Elias Church in Brooklyn, New York, tonight. The church provided the practice grounds for Metheny's 2010 Orchestrion tour and can be seen in the short film introducing that project at nonesuch.com/media. Metheny and Grenadier launch their tour in two weeks.
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Chris Thile and Michael Daves conclude their brief Midwestern duo tour this weekend with a free set at the aforementioned Ellnora festival in Urbana, Illinois, tonight, followed by a show at Lincoln Hall in Chicago Saturday night.
The Chicago Reader recommends Saturday's show. "Both men are so technically skilled they could sound nonchalant playing almost anything," writes the Reader's Peter Margasak of the duo's debut Nonesuch album, Sleep With One Eye Open, "but here they give themselves over to an unfussy, almost artless urgency, bashing away at their instruments with such abandon you'd swear they were bloodying their knuckles. They've also developed an excellent vocal blend, clearly building on the sweet brotherly harmonies of the Delmores, Louvins, and Everlys—and despite the sweetness of their singing, it's just as intense as their picking and strumming."
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Sara Watkins concludes her tour with Garrison Keillor and the cast of A Prairie Home Companion this weekend. The show's Summer Love tour, which consist of "evenings of passionate duets, hot jazz, Catchup, English Majors and Poesy, closes out with shows at the Tuscaloosa Amphitheater in Alabama tonight, Chattanooga Memorial Auditorium in Chattanooga, Tennessee, on Saturday, and the Mud Island Amphitheatre in Memphis on Sunday.
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