#christopher rountree

[jacobwren]

Wild Up: Tiny Desk Concert

[chromaticla]

Portrait of Chromatic member and director/founder of wildUp Christopher Rountree, photographed by member Rus Anson, 2015.

[thenewobjective]

wild Up ~ Feather & Stone

wild Up ~ Feather & Stone

We review a lot of modern classical crossover at ACL, but this is the real deal: the type of composition that moves music forward.  For evidence, look no further than the inclusion of Messiaen’s “oiseaux exotiques”, a piece that won’t be appearing on a pop chart anytime soon.  L.A.’s wild Up collective – along with label Populist Records – is beginning to own its region like Iceland’s Bedroom…

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[lprnyc]

Here are a few photos from last night's Ensemble LPR concert with pianist and composer Timo Andres and conductor Christopher Rountree. See more on our Facebook page.

Photos by Stephen Trotman

[nuancemegaphone-blog]

Our new recording is here. It's loud, live, and FREE.

[nuancemegaphone-blog]

This is fascinating.  Today I'll be speaking at the Association of California Symphony Orchestras conference in Pasadena--and I can't think of anything more relevant then this brief article by Futurist, Jim Carrol.

Article: Ten Things That Are True About the Future, Jim Carroll

Talking to a friend after he attended the League of American Orchestras conference a month ago he said: "...it was like a hotel lobby filled with ocean liner captains. Everyone needs to change course, and we can't find the steering wheel."

Point being, I'm excited to be part of the discussion about where we're going and how we'll get there.

-COR

[nuancemegaphone-blog]

Happy Bloomsday

I was a Flower of the mountain yes when I put the rose in my hair like the Andalusian girls used or shall I wear a red yes and how he kissed me under the Moorish wall and I thought well as well him as another and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes.

Joyce

[nuancemegaphone-blog]

On being at Ojai.

I’m sitting in the coffee shop across from St. Thomas Aquinas Thrift on the main drag in Ojai.  It’s full of well dressed summer people holding rolled program booklets, bobbling  around talking about electric string quartets and a dinner joint, Feast which apparently has fries described as ambrosia or something equally celestial. The contemporary music lover is everywhere.  A gestalt animal identified by the appearance of a black Steve Jobs t-shirt, minimalist watch, glasses (superfluous or otherwise) and sentences like, “That first movement! It’s like making love in a confessional with a prostitute dressed in a prelate’s liturgical robes reciting Baudelaire while ten electronic organs reproduce the Well-Tempered Clavier played by Scriabin.” 

 It’s totally beautiful here.

We’re ready to hear George Crumb’s The Winds of Destiny staged by Peter Sellars and sung by Dawn Upshaw. All these people jammed into ten rustic city blocks. The energy is far from electric, more relaxed and specialized. Everyone, wants everyone else to know them — and more than hear, they want to meet the important others. Anyway, there’s some serious discourse about art music, its place, and how we’ll do it better. 

 The most notable experience of day one, a discussion on the nature of art in wartime. This talk, between opera veteran Sellars, war journalist Danner and Juilliard dean Ara Guzelimian (to whom, as an aside, John Adams’ Son of Chamber Symphony was recently dedicated) is in fact the most compelling, righteous and truly virulent your correspondent has experienced. It’s the kind of lecture that makes you want to create art that matters, music so deeply engaged in creating discourse and opening the spirit that it changes something. Everything. On this occasion Sellars, who’s haircuts and egolessness often seem to be inversely related, notably steps aside and Danner gives the symposiums true opening comment, 

  “Is this who we are? A quote from Barack Obama, ‘America, is this who we are?’” 

  He goes on, getting at a not-so-readily available truth, “the music of George Crumb, the anti Vietnam War music, the anti Iraq War music of George Crumb. Does that music belong to George W. Bush, or does it belong to Barack Obama?” At this point, yr. corrs. and everyone else is actually looking down the aisles at Mr. Crumb himself (though we don’t ask directly). It’s a fascinating conundrum, is there a moral imperative to war? Does it actually make things better to kill people, if it helps avoid a genocide? What does it mean, when we elect a liberal voting president who goes on to win a Nobel Peace Prize and send forty thousand troops to Afghanistan in the course of a week? What the fuck can we do about it?

 There’s much more here. At the Ojai Brewing Company I’m three beers in. The New Belgium dry hopped sour is fucking mondo. 

To be continued.

--Rountree