Sunday, March 07, 2004

Long live Other Minds!

Thursday night was opening night of OM 10, the 10th annual Other Minds music festival. I signed up to volunteer at the reception, which meant I got to open countless champagne, sparkling cider, and Pellegrino bottles. It was literally a case of "pay no attention to the woman behind the curtain", since that's where the ice buckets with all the bottles were, behind the bartenders. :) Despite this I still got to say hello to Mary Chun, Lisa Petrie, Amy X. Neuburg, Herb Heinz, Pamela Z, Ellen Fullman, and Nicole Paiement.

The Thursday night concert was preceded by a symposium featuring composers and performers from the concert. I sat with Ellen and Celeste's dad, Ed. Then came the concert itself. I had come particularly to hear Hanna Kulenty's Flute Concerto No. 1 performed by Anne La Berge and the Parallele Ensemble conducted by my former prof Nicole Paiement.

Anne La Berge played the quarter-tone flute and alto flute. The ensemble backing her up was all winds except for piano, marimba, and electric bass. Most of the winds were brasses, too, which made for an unusual sound. Sometimes they played muted, and sometimes not. The flute solo was amplified and treated with reverb. It was interesting to hear the solo with reverb with everyone else dry.

The piece had a lot of sequences in it. My favorite part was the cadenza, which was slow, haunting, and expressive on the alto flute.

In other news, it looks like I will get to record the flute part I wrote for Will Grant's piece, plus write an article for the About.com poetry site, and start working with the Punk Rock Orchestra as a composer-partner!