The Center for Black Music Research (CBMR) is an independent research unit of Columbia College Chicago devoted to the documentation, research, preservation, and dissemination of information about the history of black music on a global scale. I recently spoke with Melanie Zeck, Research Fellow with the Center, over Skype. Zeck joined the CBMR in 2005, […]
Category: Interview
Posted inInterview
Sacred Spaces
Recently, I met the organist Paul Jacobs at a restaurant in Lincoln Center, where he ate a salad and a bowl of cold soup. Jacobs is known in the U.S. as the only organist to have ever won a Grammy; he has an active recital career and collaborates regularly with major American orchestras, such as […]
Posted inInterview
Surreal Conjunctions
The composer Annea Lockwood has been inspired by a lifelong fascination with timbre to record the sounds of rivers across the globe, to incorporate the sounds of the cosmos into her installations, to attach a music box to 20 helium balloons, and to set defunct pianos on fire just to listen to them burn. She […]
Posted inInterview
Cannibalization
Streaming is often regarded as the inevitable future of the music industry. Brian Brandt sees it differently. For the founder of the legendary New York-based label Mode Records, streaming solutions from Spotify and its competitors are the problem. Like many other independent label owners, he is against the insidious devaluation of recorded music, which has […]
Posted inInterview
DNA Of Our Time
An elderly woman flicks the switch on a silver box. Inside a glass container a yellow light turns on and low electric hum begins to sound. She blinks. With her bandaged hand on a wooden handle, she slides some kind of sheet of paper, with metallic stubs, through the hanging strips of a mysterious machine. […]
Posted inInterview
Speaking Through The Moment
Saul Williams is a rapper, actor, musician, and slam poet who toys with the sounds of syllables, words, and terminologies. Classical composers, such as Thomas Kessler and Ted Hearne, have found themselves inspired by his texts. We spoke with him about resistance, colonialism, and why he only sits when he’s performing with a string quartet. […]
Posted inInterview
Prisms
The French composer Mark Andre writes music of a vivid, fragile melancholy. To me, it sounds modest, careful, and penetrating, like W.G. Sebald’s book The Rings of Saturn, in which precise observations of landscapes, meals, rooms, and destruction accumulate to devastating effect. I met Andre one rainy afternoon in a café in Berlin, where he […]
Posted inInterview
Stroke, Sign, Gesture
One recent afternoon, I met up with the German-born, New York-based composer and conductor Matthias Pintscher at a Berlin seafood restaurant. He wore a v-neck t-shirt, and after twice asking the waiter whether the oysters were 100 percent safe to eat, ordered nine of them for us to share, along with a glass of white […]
Posted inInterview
The Main Focus
The classical music educator Andrés Andrade has spent most of his 30-year teaching career thinking about the voices of teenagers. Originally from Tampa, Florida, Andrade currently operates a private voice studio in Manhattan. He has taught at the Queens College’s Aaron Copland School of Music, New York’s LaGuardia Arts High School (better known as the […]
Posted inInterview
Boundaries
During this year’s Ojai Music Festival in Ojai, California (June 8-11), I met up with George Lewis, the Edwin H. Case Professor of American Music at Columbia University, to discuss his opera “Afterword,” which received its West Coast premiere at the festival on June 9. The theme of this year’s Ojai Music Festival, directed by […]