Tag: C4

Hayes Biggs Premieres and Video

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I was remiss in not posting prior to recent performances of music by my Columbia classmate Hayes Biggs. In the first week of March, Hayes had two premieres in New York: a motet called Goe, Lovely Rose, performed by C4 (the Choral Composer/Conductor Collective); and a new work for Rolf Schulte, violin and Stephen Gosling, piano, called Inquieto (attraverso il rumore). I’ve listened to a recording of the new violin and piano piece, and Hayes hit the mark with a brilliantly virtuosic piece that made good use of his formidable performers while not skimping on musical depth.

You can check out Hayes’s music at his SoundCloud page. I previously wrote about Hayes here, here, and here, and there is a video interview with Hayes here.

Don’t Just Sit There

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Why are you reading this blog when you could be:

- donating to Winsor Music’s Kickstarter to support their creative educational programming at the Mather School in Dorchester, MA for two years. Winsor Music’s artistic director is Peggy Pearson, the sublime oboist with Emmanuel Music.

- listening to a stream of C4‘s first album, this week’s WQXR Q2 Album of the Week. C4 is the Choral Composer/Conductor Collective. The album opens with a piece by my friend and fellow Columbia alum Hayes Biggs.

- browsing the hundreds of scores Music Sales Classical (G. Schirmer, AMP, Novello, Chester, etc.) has put online here.

Of course, get back over here when you are done!

(Not an Olympic) Miscellany

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-I just came across a nice write-up about the Mendelssohn Club’s disc that includes my Fire-Memory/River-Memory. A relevant portion:

James Primosch’s “Fire Memory/River Memory” has a more choral/symphonic through-composed quality. The music has a harmonically more adventurous palette and well crafted choral-symphonic sonances. Of the three works, this one has the most sweeping flow to it. It revels in suspension and release, choral part writing that is set off very effectively by poetic orchestration, a solo violin part that weaves in and out of the neo-impressionist orchestral light and shadow. The final of the two movements has some fireworks of an orchestral sort and more of the beautiful choral writing that permeates the work as a whole.

- Very fine composer and good friend Hayes Biggs is part of a Kickstarter campaign in support of a recording project by C4, the Choral Composer Conductor Collective. I wrote about Hayes’s music here and here, and there is a sample of his work at C4’s Kickstarter site.

- Newport Jazz Festival streams here.

- My colleague Steve Mackey blogs about The Rite of Spring.

- Read this in connection with Hiroshima and Nagasaki days.

C4 offers Biggs premiere in NYC

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C4 - the “choral composer/conductor collective - offers two performances this week including a new setting of Hopkins’ “The Caged Skylark” by Hayes Biggs, as well as  “Ecstatic Meditations” by Aaron Jay Kernis, “The Hildegard Motets” by Frank Ferko and works by Jonathan David, Michael Dellaira, John Harbison, Robinson McClellan, and Tarik O’Regan. Here are the particulars:

Thursday, November 17th at 8:00PM
Holy Trinity Lutheran Church
3 West 65th Street, NYC
(at Central Park West)

and

Saturday, November 19th at 8:00PM
Church of St. Luke in the Fields
487 Hudson Street, NYC
(just south of Christopher Street)