Harold Carr

music featuring harold

Story About Love by Marilyn Lerner (w/ Marilyn)
It's Up To You by h. carr (w/ Marilyn Lerner and Flavia Cervino-Wood)
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home :: music :: 2010-03-04-Other-Minds.html

Tue, 09 Mar 2010

On Thursday (3/4) I attended the opening night of the Other Minds Festival of New Music in San Francisco (with Andrew).

The first piece was Jurg Frey's Steichquartett II (1998-2000) performed by the Quatuor Bozzini string quartet. A very minimal, quiet, spacious work with a touch of danger. Basically it's the quartet playing one chord after another for a little over twenty minutes. Here is an excerpt of the first two minutes:

If you like that you can get the CD of that piece and four others from Edition Wandelweiser Records.

The next piece was Chou Wen-chung's Twilight Colors

At intermission Andrew and I talked to members of the ROVA saxophone quartet, Andrew's old band. They will be premiering a piece at Other Minds later in the week.

The next piece was a short solo piano work, also by Wen-chung: The Willow Are New. It was a quasi polytonal minor pentatonic piece.

The final piece of the evening was Lisa Bielawa's Kafka Songs (2001-2003) performed by Carla Kihlstedt on voice and violin. It was composed of about five or six shorter pieces, each based on a sentence or two of Kafka's more introspect Meditation (1912). Sentences such as: "And this time I only recognized these old games after being with them for such a long time. I rubbed my fingertips against each other to erase the shame."

Carla, after saying the sentence, would then proceed to sing the words while simultaneously playing violin. A seemingly simple, sparse, but powerful presentation.

My favorite work of the evening was Frey's string quartet (I purchased the CD), with Bielawa's Kafka Songs a close second.

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