They Used to Call It Classical
Chamber music in nightclubs, composers collaborating with pop stars, pop stars as composers, performance ensembles with genre-breaking repertoire, and a groundswell of young audiences: this is the music formerly known as "classical." Is it really as healthy as it seems out there? Has the death of the record company meant the birth of new possibilities for composers and performers?
Presenters
ED WARD has been a print journalist / author since 1965 in California, Texas, Germany, France. Worked for / consulted SXSW since inception. "Rock and Roll historian" for Fresh Air with Terry Gross, 1986-present.
Janet Cowperthwaite started working with the Kronos Quartet/Kronos Performing Arts Association in 1981. Kronos is a San Francisco-based string quartet which tours internationally for half the year, has commissioned more than 750 new works, released more than 50 cds, and won many awards, including a Grammy, the Polar Music Prize and the Avery Fisher Prize. Kronos is a not-for profit organization with a staff of 10. Cowperthwaite is responsible for all aspects of KPAA, including touring, commissions, marketing, artistic collaborations, project development, fundraising, media relations, recordings and fiscal and personnel management.
Carl Stone is one of the pioneers of live computer music, and has been hailed by the Village Voice as "the king of sampling." and "one of the best composers living in (the USA) today." He has used computers in live performance since 1986. Stone was born in Los Angeles and now divides his time between California and Japan. He studied composition at the California Institute of the Arts with Morton Subotnick and James Tenney and has composed electro-acoustic music almost exclusively since 1972. His works have been performed in the U.S., Canada, Europe, Asia, Australia, South America and the Near East. In addition to his schedule of performance, composition and touring, he is on the faculty of the Information Media Technology Department, School of Information Science and Technology at Chukyo University in Japan.
Justin Kantor is a co-founder of (Le) Poisson Rouge (LPR), a multi-media performance space, art gallery, and cabaret in New York's Greenwich Village. LPR has hosted artists such as the Kronos Quartet, Lou Reed, Yoko Ono, Florence & the Machine, Norah Jones, Juilliard String Quartet, and others. As well as being an active partner in LPR he is a performing cellist who has performed with the Wordless Music Orchestra, the Glenn Branca Ensemble, Karen O, and Ensemble LPR. He lives in New York City.
Alex Ross has been the music critic of The New Yorker since 1996. He is the author of the books The Rest Is Noise, a Pulitzer Prize finalist and National Book Critics Circle Award winner, and Listen to This, an ASCAP-Deems Taylor Award winner.
Friday, March 16
