Posts in Music

Mat Maneri's program notes for our concert at Mannes, February 6

It can be difficult to write about what we do as improvisers. Perhaps it’s easier to explain it through a series of questions we’ve been asking, ourselves:

What is composition?

What is chamber music? Is it repertoire, or rather an approach to creative collaboration?

What is musical time? Is it linear? Cyclical?

What is jazz when you remove its canonized instrumentation and approach?

What are the essentials in the musical language we like to present?

What are the styles and ideas that motivate us? Abstract art? Schumann lieder? Eliot Carter?
How do we evoke these ideas without mimicry?

What do you call this music? Is it chamber music; is it jazz? Is it Mahler? Is it free improvisation?

It’s everything we love.

MusicTanya KalmanovitchFebruary 1, 2015 Comment

Kalinka: Tanya Kalmanovitch and Ted Reichman, April 26 2010

In the introduction to Gulag: A History, historian Anne Appelbaum observes a brisk tourist trade in Soviet paraphernalia springing up on Prague's Charles River Bridge in the immediate wake of the collapse of the Soviet monolith. Western tourists who would be sickened by the thought of wearing a swastika snapped up pins, hats and T-shirt emblazoned with the hammer and sickle. "It was a minor observation", she writes, "but sometimes it is through just such minor observations that a cultural mood is best observed. For here, the lesson could not have been clearer: while the symbol of one mass murder fills us with horror, the symbol of another mass murder makes us laugh."

Program Notes, MusicTanya KalmanovitchMarch 20, 2014program notes, live performance Comment