Clarinet Dreamcapes - Glenn Dickson

Clarinet heavyweight Glenn Dickson, known for his groundbreaking work on John Zorn’s Tzadik label with Naftule’s Dream, performs a solo concert of his Clarinetrics project: microtonal dreamscapes performed on on clarinet with electronics. He will be joined for part of the concert by members of the Metal and Glass Ensemble. The concert will be held on Nov. 2, 2008, 5 PM at St. Paul's Cathedral, 138 Tremont St., Boston and the admission is $10. The concert is a part of the Play! Concert Series which features microtonal improvisers and is produced by Noah Kaplan.

Glenn Dickson has taken the processing techniques of Robert Fripp and Brian Eno and applied them to the clarinet, creating an ethereal and haunting atmosphere with the warm humanity of the clarinet sound. His compositions utilize the microtonal palette he learned from playing with microtonal jazz legend Joe Maneri, resulting in shimmering other-worldly harmonies and speech-like inflections in the melodies. Glenn will be joined by members of the Metal and Glass Ensemble, lead by Matt Samolis on microtonal flute, with steel cello tuned glasses.

Glenn is the band leader of Naftules Dream and Shirim Klezmer Orchestra, and has toured North America and Europe in venues as diverse as the Berlin Jazz Festival and the Philly Pops. His music has been used by Woody Allen in “Deconstructing Harry” and he has won a Massachusetts Cultural Council Grant for music composition.
To hear audio samples visit www.Myspace.com/GlennDickson.
For more information about the Play! Concert series visit http://www.bostonmicrotonalsociety.org/

Premiere of new work by Julia Werntz

On Sunday, October 19 at 2:00 pm the Tapestry of Voices poets group will hold their annual Cummings celebration as part of the poetry reading and concert series in the chapel at Forest Hills in Jamaica Plain (where Cummings is buried). This year, along with readings of Cummings's and their own poetry, a new set of songs by Julia Werntz, “but also nowhere”, for unaccompanied soprano and countertenor, will be performed by Jennifer Ashe and Martin Near, for whom they were written. The texts are taken from Cummings’s book “95 Poems”, which was published exactly fifty years ago. This will be the premiere performance.

Admission is $9/$5 for members of the Forest Hills Trust.

More information on the event can be seen at the following link, but please note that since Julia’s songs are a very recent addition to the program, they are not listed on the site. http://www.foresthillstrust.org/calendar.html

Julia earned her Bachelor's Degree in Performance on the oboe from the New England Conservatory in 1988, studied composition privately with Joe Maneri, and in 2000 earned a Ph.D. in Composition and Theory from Brandeis University, where she studied with Yehudi Wyner, Martin Boykan and David Rakowski. She has taught Music Theory and Composition at Northeastern University in Boston, and, since the retirement of Joe Maneri, has been teaching the course in Microtonal Composition and Performance at the New England Conservatory of Music. As Director of the Boston Microtonal Society since 1992, she has led workshops, taught classes, co-published a newsletter, and produced concerts.

Werntz’s doctoral thesis on microtonality was published in the Summer 2000 issue of Perspectives of New Music. She has also published articles in the Sonneck Society Bulletin and ParisTransAtlantic web magazine, and for several years wrote a monthly column for NewMusicBox, the web magazine of the American Music Center. In May 2008 she was a Fellow at the Virginia Center for the Arts, and she has been invited to a composing and lecturing residency at the Centre de Création Musicale de Iannis Xenaksi (CCMIX) in Lyon, France in the spring of 2009.

Since the mid-1990s, Werntz’s compositions have been almost exclusively microtonal. They have been performed by the Auros Group for New Music and the Firebird Ensemble, and by prominent performers including violinist Curt Macomber, cellist Ted Mook, and trombonist Chris Washburn, and have been featured at festivals and concerts including the Darmstadt Akademie für Tonkunst, the festival Stockholm New Music, EarPort in Duisburg, June in Buffalo, New York’s Vision Festival, and the Boston Microtonal Society concert series. A CD with three of her compositions was released in the spring of 2003 on the Capstone label; a second CD of her work is in progress.

Nota Riotous at Brandeis

NotaRiotous is “in residence” this fall at Brandeis University. Julia Werntz and violist Anne Black have already taken part in a colloquium for the composition department on Sept. 25, and other events are coming up in November and December. Students in the graduate and undergraduate composition department are composing pieces for NotaRiotous, who will rehearse them with the composers, and present them in two concerts.

Here’s the schedule: all events take place at Slosberg Recital Hall, and admission is free.

Saturday, Nov, 8, 2008, 2:30 – 5 p.m. Reading Session/Workshop (for composers only)

Saturday, Dec. 13, 8 p.m. New Music Brandeis. Graduate composers concert.
Sunday, Dec. 14, 7 p.m. New Music Brandeis. Undergraduate composers concert.

Julia Werntz reported that the colloquium (“Practical Aspects of Composing with Microtones”) was a great pleasure. She played music of several microtonal composers from different styles; she and the students discussed technical and stylistic issues; Anne Black demonstrated various microintervals; students had many good questions and interesting thoughts.

Anne also played excerpts from “—and, as I was saying…” (1979), a solo piece for viola by Ezra Sims, and Julia played a recording of one movement from “and also nowhere,” a set of songs she has set to an E.E. Cummings text. She reported that the students seemed energized to compose with microtones, one of the prime goals of the Boston Microtonal Society