Jessica Osborne, one of my favorite collaborators will perform Just Stripes, a piano piece I composed for her in 2009, at Third Street Music School Settlement. The concert begins at 7 PM. Admission is free. (More info here.)

“In music, we never say the same thing twice, because the saying is also the thing”

- Igor Stravinsky

Just Stripes is part of a larger cycle of works inspired by Borge’s famous poem, The Other Tiger, that include my original clarinet trio, Another Tiger and several projected chamber, choral, solo and large ensemble works. Borge’s poem, which ruminates on writing and influence, has been, along with Wolfgang Rihm and Harold Bloom, an enduring philosophical impetus for me, a composer obsessed with history, genealogy, succession, influence and intertextuality. Like Borge’s “third tiger,” mine “Exalts the vast and dusty library” of not only recent and older musical history, but my own recent work.

But Borge’s work is only an oblique reference; Rihm’s concept of musical cycles, if not the individual works, serves as an important precursor for my own “Other Tiger” Cycle. Like Rihm, I employ compositional techniques like “overpainting,” contrafacture, inscription and palimpsest. In Just Stripes I have stripped my clarinet trio, Another Tiger of its clarinet and cello parts leaving naked silences punctuated by surviving, virtuosic piano licks.  Such silences are rare in my music and for the sake of novelty I have let them stand. Other silences are filled in with elaborations of the original piano parts, while still other silences are themselves “elaborated” with harmonics- the pianist silently depresses keys and strikes a chord, releasing the upper partials of the strings. This striking becomes the principle motive of Just Stripes.

Just Stripes was written for Jessica Osborne, my friend who has performed most of the piano parts of my recent music, including Another Tiger. It was made possible, in part, by a fellowship from the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts.

October 16 2011

The JACK Quartet premieres Matthew Barnson’s String Quartet No.3 
and Music by Jason Eckardt and Christopher Otto

at SONiC: Sounds of a New Century Festival

JACK Quartet

Sunday, October 16, 2011 at 9 PM
Miller Theater
Columbia University
2960 Broadway, New York City, New York

BUY TICKETS

Program

Artists

The JACK Quartet electrifies audiences worldwide with “explosive virtuosity” (Boston Globe) and “viscerally exciting performances” (New York Times). David Patrick Stearns (Philadelphia Inquirer) proclaimed their performance as being “among the most stimulating new-music concerts of my experience.” The Washington Postcommented, “The string quartet may be a 250-year-old contraption, but young, brilliant groups like the JACK Quartet are keeping it thrillingly vital.” Alex Ross (New Yorker) hailed their performance of Iannis Xenakis’ complete string quartets as being “exceptional” and “beautifully harsh,” and Mark Swed (Los Angeles Times) called their sold-out performances of Georg Friedrich Haas’ String Quartet No. 3 In iij. Noct.“mind-blowingly good.”More information…

The JACK Quartet will be premiering my String Quartet No.3 on October 16, 2011 as part of the SONiC Festival in New York City. Details forthcoming but tickets can be bought here.

These are three of my favorites; I didn’t realize that this video existed.

Patti Smith won the National Book Award for her beautiful new book on her relationship with Robert Mapplethorpe, Just Kids. I first encountered Mapplethorpe’s work as a thirteen year old at Barnes and Noble – quite innocently and it was and remains incredibly shocking! I didn’t encounter Patti Smith’s work until recently and now she seems to be everywhere at once! Last week she appeared over and over in a new but forgettable documentary of William Burroughs and now she writes this moving, inspiring and elegiac book. She tells, romantically, of a very different New York City than what I know  and it’s particularly interesting because I work in the East Village and Lower East Side where Patti, Robert and Burroughs all lived in the 60′s and 70′s.

I love a couple of lines:

In my low periods, I wondered what was the point of creating art. For whom? Are we animating God? Are we talking to ourselves? And what was the ultimate goal? To have one’s work caged in art’s great zoos– the Modern, the Met, the Louvre?

I crave honesty, yet found dishonesty in myself. Why commit to art? For self-realization, or for itself? It seemed indulgent to add to the glut unless one offered illumination

And:

In the war of magic and religion, is magic ultimately the victor? Perhaps priest and magician were once one, but the priest, learning humility in the face of God, discarded the spell for prayer.

I’m not sure artists today have the same bold visions or maybe they just aren’t happening in New York.

I live in Harlem which is not as cool as Brooklyn but enables me to have an enormous one bedroom apartment a block from two express trains.

Being self-conscious about this (I’m afraid that I’m surely missing out on something), I was delighted to read the following passage in Michael Cunningham’s fantastic new book, By Nightfall

Does the fringey urban semi-exile in which most artists live affect their output? Sure, young artists are expected to be poor, they’re supposed to be poor, but the poor artists of other generations lived in Paris, or Berlin, or London, they lived in Greenwich Village. To what extent do the Impressionists exist at all because it was suddenly so much cheaper to leave Paris and go to Provence? Yes, they lived meagerly, but they lived in places of real if sometimes decaying beauty; they lived in cities or villages that could be rough but had no doubts about their ancient profundity, their queenly rights not only to exist but to exult in their own habits and particulars. Bushwick, on the other hand, is pretty close to nowhere. Its founders didn’t take much trouble with it; even the oldest of the buildings were obviously put up as quickly and cheaply as possible. In a place like this, wouldn’t it seem a little…silly to think about producing earnest work that aspired, however imperfectly, to the profound I mean, hello, Bushwick, hello, America, hello, mega-malls and feed lots. Here’s my attempt to slit the skin of mortality and see what glitters on the other side. How embarrassing would that be?
Who was it who said a country gets the government it deserves? Does America get the art it deserves?

My buddies in the JACK Quartet got a fantastic profile in the Sunday NYTimes. I’ve got to start (and finish) my promised Third Quartet for these guys before Steve Reich discovers them and they only play quartet arrangements of Music for 18 for the next four years!

Christoph Demantius (15 December 1567 – 20 April 1643) – not pictured

Threnodiae: Quis dabit oculis nostris fontem

Q: How do you get from Lassus to Schütz?
A: Demantius

Here’s the fantastic album that includes more marvelous German funerary music