Pytheas Center for Contemporary Music

Bohuslav Martinů

Piano Concerto #4, "Incantation" (1956)

Ivo Kahanek (piano), the BBC Symphony Orchestra, Jiř Bělohlvek (conductor)            ~ ~     check out our video archive         post your comments at PytheasTalk

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thingNY

New York, New York, USA

Comprised of composer-performers from the NYC metro area, thingNY creates and performs theatrically charged experimental music and collaborative fluxus-esque multimedia works, which have included collaboratively created operas, a radio play by Beckett, and over a hundred premieres of new music. Called an "inventive new music cabal" by Time Out New York, thingNY has presented in theaters, concert halls, radio stations, art galleries and DIY venues around New York, Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, California, Oregon and Washington. Their yearly call for scores, SPAM, has resulted in the premieres of more than 200 new works over three marathon performances. The ensemble took part in Varispeed's Perfect Lives Manhattan, a site-specific retelling of Robert Ashley's opera for television, which made "Best of 2011" lists in both the New York Times and Time Out New York. thingNY also collaborated in 2011 with the Panoply Performance Laboratory to create a multimedia performance with accompanying hardcover book called Time: A Complete Explanation in Three Parts, which ran for two weeks at The Brick Theater in Brooklyn and was called "stunning" and "thoughtful" by Flavorpill. NewMusicBox hailed thingNY's first album, the eccentrically excessive opera ADDDDDDDDD, as "riding this cultural zeitgeist with flair... rapid-fire... pulse-racing... all consuming... packaged with a fun, quirky, comic book libretto. A lovely item that takes the album a step beyond the usual CD release, it makes the physical object in the digital age an interesting piece of art in and of itself, worthy of shelf space and providing plenty of additional visual stimulation" . . . Learn More

        Joseph Schwantner

                Composer Portrait

The career of Joseph Schwantner is perhaps as prestigious as that of any living American composer at the turn of the twenty-first century. Although trained in the high-serialist school, the mid-1970s saw Schwantner abandon that style in favor of a distinctly coloristic, harmonically rich, but solidly tonal (albeit often "pantonal") sound. His voice throughout the 1970s and 1980s is often characterized by rich, dark brass scoring, lurching polyrhythms, and mesmerizing ostinati. One favorite technique is the employment of "ringing sonorities," or sounds that are articulated loudly then suppressed and sustained. These sounds resonate with Schwantner's evocative titles like From a Dark Millennium (1980), Aftertones of Infinity (1978), and Wild Angels of the Open Hills (1978). His timbral palette is further enhanced by the use of nontraditional instruments like crystal glasses, water gongs, and bowed cymbals. Schwantner's style in the 1990s combined occasional excursions into disorienting atonal and vaguely serialist areas with weighty and often overpowering tonal blocks, and continued to explore new timbres.His honors include a Pulitzer Prize (1979), a Guggenheim Fellowship, and no less than six Composers Fellowship Grants from the National Endowment for the Arts . . .
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