New Music

Many of the city's ensembles and presenters are holding back their flashiest programs until after the opening of the Kimmel Center for the Performing Arts in December. But no halfway intrepid listener need go begging in the meantime. Especially the new-music fan. The Network for New Music, those smart and stalwart reporters from the composition front, premiere Richard Wernick's The Name of the Game with new-music guitarist David Starobin on Oct. 21 and 28. Another contemporary guitar work, this one by Christopher Rouse, gets a workout with Sharon Isbin and Orchestra 2001, Sept.

Like a perfect storm, three big new-music events are simultaneously converging on Philadelphia, all but unbeknownst to one another. June's unofficial new-music festival has the Opera Company of Philadelphia giving the U.S. premiere of Hans Werner Henze 's Phaedra June 3-12 at the Kimmel Center, while the company's former chorus master, Donald Nally, unfurls his Month of Moderns Festival with the Crossing choir June 5, 18, and 26 at Presbyterian Church...

Joseph Franklin was tasting a local beer in a cafe near the old town square and talking about how the Philadelphia ensemble of which he is artistic director could be a catalyst for change. "We're reaching out," he says of Relache, whose musicians are devoted to new music. "American musicians - Americans in general - spend too much time looking at their navels. We've got to look outward, too. There's a changing world out there. " Here in the heart of Europe, where the future is being delivered daily, the Prague Spring Music Festival is one cultural piece of that transition.

Discovering new music that's to your liking is simple and fun with the help of a few well-chosen applications for your smartphone. Shazam, by Shazam Entertainment Ltd., is a free app for Apple and Android that does one fine trick. Say you are out and about, and hear a song you like. Shazam will listen to a few seconds of music, identify the song, and link to all sorts of information about it. You can "tag" a song and share it on Facebook and Twitter, or send your find by e-mail to anyone or to your "Shazam friends.

Matthew Greenbaum, speaking to his audience Friday night, said he didn't intend "gradual eradication of the living performer. " Yet that was the general effect of his Fourth Book of Motions (1992). Played by saxophonist Marshall Taylor at the Network for New Music's concert at the Philadelphia Art Alliance on Rittenhouse Square, the piece pits sounds generated by a human being against those spewed forth by a tape. As Greenbaum pointed out, the technique is nothing new. Stemming from technology first used by Pierre Schaeffer nearly 50 years ago and further developed by dozens since then, the idea is to explore the similarities and differences between electronic and acoustic sound.

In the post-Valentine's Day spirit, we're "speed dating" new album releases today. _ PJ Harvey, "Let England Shake" (Vagrant, A-): Polly Jean puts varied voices to missives about the downfall of Britain and aftershock of war. You scare me, girl. Gotta see you again. _ Cowboy Junkies, "Demons: The Nomad Series Volume 2" (Latent/Razor & Tie, B+): Margo and Michael Timmins ease access to the dark ruminations of the severely crippled (and now sadly departed) singer/songwriter Vic Chestnutt.

The Settlement Music School's Contemporary Players are a prime example of how music performance has changed over the centuries. By establishing a regular performance schedule, the ensemble and the sponsoring school are committing themselves to performance of new music in a sustained way. Two hundred years ago, every musician made a living playing new music. Had some formed a group to play music that had been popular a century earlier - by, say, Bach or Telemann - they would have been seen as strange, and in need of patronage from a similarly eccentric archduke.

"Trans-Sonic: A Festival of New Music" this weekend offers two nights of the experimental sounds that have come to be called "new music. " New music's pioneering use of synthesizers and other electronic hardware has yielded an intricate, abstract music whose sound ranges from the lush and densely layered to the spare and minimalistic. "Trans-Sonic" features both local and national figures prominent within the genre. Tonight, the Mikel Rouse Broken Consort makes its Philadelphia debut.

Composer-arranger John Zorn, whose band Naked City launches the New Music at Annenberg Center series Monday, has a personality split between at least two conflicting approaches to music. For contemporary-classical ensembles such as the Kronos Quartet, Zorn creates pieces that incorporate "found" sounds, record-scratching and rock motifs. These somewhat formally composed pieces have won him praise for redefining the boundaries of "traditional" string-quartet music. For more improvisation-oriented groups, of which the five-piece Naked City is one stripped-down representative, he works in the moment by creating an environment in which snips of narrative, sparring guitars, blood-curdling screams and dramatic movie-score melodies rip and run over agitated, funk- influenced rhythms.

It should not be surprising that four composers born in China and now working in America would utilize techniques of both Eastern and Western musical cultures. What is not so usual, but was apparent in Sunday's Network for New Music concert, is that all have created music of uncommon drama, introspection and spirituality. With the composers in attendance at the Settlement Music School in Queen Village, the concert began and ended with music of great momentum and coloristic variety.

Like the John Cage and Morton Feldman festivals in recent years, Network for New Music's Third Space festival of electronic music revealed numerous pieces that shouldn't need a festival in order to be heard, but don't fit (sometimes physically) into typical concert halls. The venues of the Friday-through-Monday concerts told much of the story: Small studios and theaters at the University of Pennsylvania, Temple University, and Community College of Philadelphia were chosen for their technological resources.

Dreams of musical utopia have yet to materialize in the electronic-music world, but Network for New Music's Third Space Festival, running from Friday through Monday, is out to show mainstream audiences that the music's ethereal landscapes can be gorgeous. "It's been wrongly perceived as being ugly or crunchy, when it can be a beautiful extension of acoustic sound, with greater expressivity and emotional range," said Linda Reichert, Network's artistic director. "Some of these pieces are coming out of the world of Debussy - beautiful textures that could only be done electronically.

Network for New Music The Arc of Curiosity traces the progression of American electronic composers from the first-ever computer (1946) to present-day composers such as James Primosch and Paul Lansky. So the music will be far more than experimental. (At Penn's Rose Recital Hall, April 5.) Choir of King's College, Cambridge The venerable group performs Benjamin Britten's beloved A Boy Was Born (written when the composer was 19, in sophisticated eight-part harmony), along with works by Byrd, Blow, and Purcell.

By Joseph Neubauer Nearly 20 years ago, I traveled to Germany to meet with Wolfgang Sawallisch to discuss our desire to engage him as conductor of the Philadelphia Orchestra. We sat in his garden surrounded by evergreens and mountains stretching off into the distance. At the time, the orchestra was facing a number of challenges. Concert attendance was falling. Recording contracts and broadcasting opportunities were evaporating. Arts programs had been eliminated in schools, and our audiences were growing older and older.

Unsure if you'd rather try out for a TV game show or a singing competition? You're in luck this weekend. On Saturday, NBC is hosting an open casting call for an upcoming progam tentatively titled, The Winner Is..., with dueling singers. Before hearing the judges' verdict, the contestants will decide whether to bow out in exchange for cash, or risk remaining in the competition for a shot at a $1 million prize. Individuals and groups of all ages who sing any style of music - from country to opera to hip-hop - are welcome to audition at the Trocadero Theatre, 1003 Arch St., from 9 a.m. to 3 p..m.

It was a Ford Econoline Van, the flat-front version. Alki Steriopoulos was 20, driving that van. Full tank, empty head. That empty head cobwebbed with fatigue, because it was New Year's Day and he'd been up all night playing piano in a band, then partying with a girl he'd met that night, then scrambling into that van to drive from Pittsburgh to Indianapolis and another gig. Came within inches of driving that van into the back end of a gasoline tanker...

Just because Philadelphia choral organizations are laudably focused on new music more than ever these days doesn't mean their concerts are anything alike. Sunday's Mendelssohn Club of Philadelphia's Center City concert had new works by Robert Moran that settled in comfortably with Bruckner. On Saturday, the Crossing's concert at Presbyterian Church of Chestnut Hill was more political than poetic, articulated in a fashion far more removed than the 13 geographic miles separating the two. The Crossing's program betrayed no allegiances to any political party, but director Donald Nally was definitely addressing eternal issues of class struggle, most especially in David Lang's Statement to the Court , premiered by the Crossing in 2010 but reprised Saturday in a far better performance.

Contemplating alternative states of being has long been a preoccupation in music, a medium that easily accommodates the unimaginable. Much of New York's opera intelligentsia is reeling over David T. Little's recently premiered Dog Days , whose bloody, devastating climax was accomplished purely through electronic means. Though the young composers heard in the Voice Electric concert Friday at the Annenberg Center are still finding their voices, they are doing so aided by electronically generated sound that readily takes the ear into the ether waves with an ease and fluidity not available to past generations.

Though vespers tend to be among the most open-ended platforms for religious music, the latest one to be unveiled in the Crossing choir's Month of Moderns festival Saturday was so wide-ranging that words like unorthodox, eccentric, and crazy seem pathetically inadequate.   The hour-long Vespers Cantata: Hesperus Is Phosphorus by Lewis Spratlan encompasses so many schools of thought that it even gives a sloppy kiss to agnostics. The composer uses certain chord structures one associates with mainstream English choral composers and bits of the standard Magnificat text.

If you don't come out of the Walnut Street Theatre humming these days, then you just don't hum at all. For me it was "That'll Be the Day," but then I turned to "Peggy Sue," which will still be in my head next week this time, the way these things go. The Walnut's new main-stage show is Buddy - The Buddy Holly Story, and what you see in that title is precisely what you get - both the everyday and the quirky stuff about the short...