“Along with the master provocateur John Cage, Earle Brown (1926-2002) was a member of the mid-20th-century composers’ collective known as the New York School,” writes Seth Colter Walls in Monday’s (8/7) New York Times. His spirit “was alive in New York last week, during Time Spans, a festival curated by the Earle Brown Music Foundation. Over five nights, it offered pieces by 14 musicians, eight of them relatively young composers who recently participated in the foundation’s tuition-free summer academy … at the DiMenna Center for Classical Music…. The JACK Quartet gave the New York premiere of [John Luther] Adams’s ‘Everything That Rises’ … exploring dissonance and just-intonation tuning…. The Bozzini Quartet … and two percussionists [in] the repeating motifs from Jürg Frey’s 2006 piece ‘Unhörbare Zeit’ (‘Inaudible Time’) sounded unusually lavish. Even better was his String Quartet No. 3, written in 2014. [Georg Friedrich] Haas’s wife, Mollena Lee Williams-Haas … wrote and voiced the role of the Storyteller in their collaborative work ‘Hyena.’ ” Performances also included Chaya Czernowin’s Ayre: Towed, Mayu Hirano’s Bloom, Hans Tutschku’s periods of existence, and Sam Salem’s The Lovers.
Posted August 9, 2017
