Beat Furrer in New York

by Ted Gordon on May 23, 2013, 3:18 p.m.

Beat Furrer, the Swiss composer and founder of Klangforum Wien, has just ended a week-long residency in New York with the Talea Ensemble. The residency included lectures, open rehearsals, and several concerts, including a non-staged performance of Furrer's opera, FAMA, which included the vocal ensemble Ekmeles, at the Bohemian National Hall. The week also included the US premiere of Furrer's 2011 Studie für Klavier, available from PSNY, on May 14th at the Austrian Cultural Forum. We're excited to be able to make available several of Furrer's works, which are notoriously difficult to get a hold of. In addition to the Studie für Klavier, Furrer's a due for violin and piano, presto for flute and piano, and Spur for string quartet and piano are all available for download. 

Announcing Two New PSNY Composers

by Ted Gordon on Sept. 27, 2012, 12:08 p.m.

We're back with some very exciting news-- did you miss us? Today, PSNY announces the publication of works by two new composers, Ann Cleare and Erin Gee!

Ann Cleare hails from county Offaly in Ireland, where she attained a B. Mus and M. Phil from University College Cork, and has been in America studying with Chaya Czernowin and Hans Tutschku at Harvard towards a PhD in Composition. (That is, of course, by way of the Akademie Schloss Solitude in 2007 and IRCAM from 2008 to 2009.) Ann's music for instruments and electronics is singularly powerful, and we're extremely honored to publish several of her works on PSNY, complimenting our growing catalogue of chamber and electro-acoustic compositions. 

For a taste of what Ann's music is like, here's a sample from her 2009 work, I am not a clockmaker either, for accordion and electronics. 

Ann gave a great interview with the Contemporary Music Centre in Ireland, talking about the work and its recording, made available through the CMC: 

Erin Gee is an American composer and vocalist who recieved her BA and MA in Music at the University of Iowa in 2002, where she studied with Réne Lecuona, Lawrence Fritts, and Jeremy Dale Roberts. From there, she went on to study with Chaya Czernowin, Beat Furrer, Richard Barrett, Steve Takasugi, and others in Germany and Austria, earning her PhD in Music Theory from the Universität für Musik in Graz, Austria in 2007. Like Ann, Erin also studied at the Akadmie Schloss Solitude, and like our composers Andrew Norman and Anthony Cheung, she recieved the Rome Prize, in 2007. 

But unlike any of our other composers, Erin writes music that has an incredibly unique sense of vocal performativity, even in her instrumental works. Listen to the vocal qualities of the wind instuments in her PSNY work, Mouthpiece: Segment of the 4th Letter:

We're extremely excited to have Erin join our roster of composers- in addition to Mouthpiece: Segment of the 4th Letter, be sure to listen to Mouthpiece VI, also newly available, and be on the lookout for more of her works soon!

Coming up in October: the Deadalus Quartet performs the complete string quartets of Fred Lerdahl, all available on PSNY, at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston! The JACK Quartet performs Alex Mincek's String Quartet No. 3 "lift-tilt-filter-split" on Sept. 30th at the Festival Music ain Strasbourg, France! And, last but not least, check out our other new works by PSNY composers: Adrian Knight's Bon Voyage, Chris Cerrone's The Night Mare, Alex Mincek's Flutter, Pierre Jalbert's Dual Velocity, and Hannah Lash's Three Movements for Horn Trio.

Also, if you haven't noticed yet, you can now subscribe to our PSNY blog via our new RSS Feed. Click on the RSS icon on the upper right corner of this page to subscribe!

Sleeping Giant on WQXR

by Ted Gordon on Jan. 11, 2012, 4:52 p.m.

In case any of you missed it, the members of the illustrious Sleeping Giant collective took over "Hammered!" on WQXR's Q2 for the entire month of December. (And if you're not familiar with these gentle giants, they are: Timothy Andres, Robert Honstein, Jacob Cooper, Chris Cerrone, Andrew Norman, and Ted Hearne.) Timothy Andres hosted and performed his own music, as well as music by the other Sleepy G's, and the show was hosted by each composer in turn during the week.

Much of the music featured was by the Sleeping Giant composers, including PSNY composers Timo Andres and Chris Cerrone. But the programming also ran the gamut of contemporary piano composers: Arvo Paert, Thomas Ades, Morton Feldman, Gyorgy Ligeti, Ryuichi Sakamoto, Alex Mincek, Adrian Knight, Scott Wollschleger, and Beat Furrer. Phew!

You can stream all episodes from WQXR's website. Here's the full recording of Alex Mincek's "Stems", which aired on the December 15th episode: