This is a reminder that at 2 AM Sunday, March 9, it magically becomes 3 AM. If you thought you had an eleven-hour break between Metal Machine Music and the Vesalius Quincentennial Tribute—wrong. Sleep fast.
Author Archives: MMMozart
March Music Moderne returns with more musical merriment and mayhem
In like a lion, out like a lamb, they say, but for a while this March, Portland will sound like something altogether outside the natural realm — a chimera, a griffin, maybe even a jackalope. Welcome to March Music Moderne, the rite of spring celebrating the eternal renewal of ideas in sound.
—James McQuillen, The Oregonian (read the full article)
Hear Beethoven’s Ninth stretched out over 24 hours in ‘9 Beet Stretch’
Odds are, you’ve heard Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony — or at very least part of it — but have you ever heard the masterpiece stretched out over 24 hours?
—Jamie Hale, The Oregonian (read the full article)
Bob Priest talks about MMM IV — part 2 of interview
This is the second installment of an interview with Bob Priest about the fourth annual March Music Moderne Festival. This part of the discussion covers the first few days of the second week of the Festival.
—James Bash, Northwest Reverb (read the full article)
Music for moderns
Part of the March Music Moderne IV festival, “Retro-Moderne” will focus on new works for woodwinds, including “Shout Chorus” by Portland composer Kenji Bunch.
“This is a highly demanding, virtuosic work that pushes the instruments to the extreme,” Bunch says, “but one that was written in the spirit of the infectious dance rhythms, humor and joy of American big-band jazz of the 1940s.”
—Rob Cullivan, The Portland Tribune (read the full article)
March Music Moderne: Classical Revolution PDX
With marriage equality finally on its way to long-overdue reality throughout the rest of the civilized world, Classical Revolution PDX celebrates music by gay composers, including works by Lou Harrison, Pauline Oliveros, Eve Beglarian and Peter Maxwell Davies—all of whom also just happen to be among the finest of the 20th century, regardless of orientation.
Brett Campbell, Willamette Week (read the full article)
Béla Bartók’s String Quartet: Quatuor Ébène
Coming on the heels of the PDX Jazz Festival, March Music Moderne provides a wonderful modernist counterpoint to its more august cousin. The schedule for the fourth annual festival, organized by local musician and composer Bob Priest, looks to be a stunning one, including this rare Portland appearance by Quatuor Ébène.
—The Portland Mercury (read the full article)
March Music Moderne: Resonance Ensemble, Venerable Showers of Beauty Gamelan Ensemble
One of the city’s finest and most musically adventurous professional choirs teams up with the Javanese percussion orchestra based at Lewis & Clark College….
Brett Campbell, Willamette Week (read the full article)
Headout Picks 3/5/14
Thirty-nine years on, critics still don’t know what to make of Lou Reed’s free-noise opus Metal Machine Music. When Portland composer Bob Priest listened to it, he heard the score for a butoh-style dance piece—which really is as legitimate an interpretation as any.
—Willamette Week (read the full article)
Metal Machine Music (Kogut Butoh): Lou Reed, with white kimonos and candlelight
Arrhythmic and discordant, [Metal Machine Music is] a perfect accompaniment for abstract movement, which is why Bob Priest instinctively paired it with butoh for his March Music Moderne festival this weekend.
—Aaron Spencer, Willamette Week (read the full article)