Composer/Trumpeter Jon Hassell proposes that Western music (and culture), must simultaneously look forward with technology and innovative forms, while cultivating a relationship to the rich multiplicity of the earth’s tribal musics.
Sound
Postcommodity’s ‘Repellent Fence’ Land Art Spans the U.S. Border
Postcommodity is a collective of American Indian artists from different backgrounds and mediums, combining to create giant musical instrument installations, video, sound and sculpture. Their Repellent Fence installation floated Scare-Eye Bird Repellent balloons over the border between Arizona and Sonora.
Brian Eno: A Visual Music of Ambient Melody
The principal innovator of Ambient and Generative Music, multi-media composer and producer/collaborator with David Bowie, Talking Heads, and U2, Brian Eno is most fascinated by chance music by performers who ‘don’t completely understand their territory’
Gershwin’s Reluctant Kaleidoscope of America in ‘Rhapsody in Blue’
With reluctance, George Gershwin, commissioned by the self-styled King of Jazz in 1920s New York, composed his “musical kaleidoscope of America,” Rhapsody in Blue. Stephen Vessels curates the discussion.
The Supreme Love of the Church of John Coltrane
Discover the African Orthodox Church of St. John Coltrane, Founded on the Divine Music of A Love Supreme. Evicted in 2016 from its original Fillmore neighborhood in San Francisco from gentrification, it has moved to the Western Addition/NOPA, which once was once the epicenter of the city’s jazz scene.
Pursuit of Beauty: William Alwyn’s Classical Romanticism
Rising from the East Anglian shadows of Benjamin Britten, William Alwyn’s prolific compositions and pioneering film scores from the 1940s-50s set him apart in 20th Century classical music. Stephen Vessels curates the discussion.
Is Classical Music, and the Desire for Rebellion, Dead?
Do today’s elite lack the patience and culture for classical music? Or is it a matter of cultural dominance of the popular, the fame producing, and capital revenue streams which have sacrificed painstaking complex creation? John Halle opines.