NEW MUSIC Circle 50th Anniversary SEASON

Chris Brown and Guillermo Galindo River of Voices Sunday, May 31, 2009 – 5 p.m. Co-sponsored by Laumeier Sculpture Park Laumeier Sculpture Park 12580 Rott Rd.Admission:Free with a portable radio, or purchase radio at door.

I hope some of you will be able to attend our annual New Music Circle benefit this year: It will be held at Laumeier Sculpture Park on Sunday, May 31st. Sparing you too much detail here, the event will be divided into two parts: A) An interesting and stimulating,  performance art – audience participation project by Chris Brown and Guillermo Galindo which will start at 5:00pm and be FREE of charge. It will, however, require that you bring your own portable radio or buy one there for $20.00 (For more details on this, click on our website http://newmusiccircle.org/)

B) The performance will be followed by our traditionally fabulous dinner for which the ticket price is $50.00 (It’s our 50th Anniversary Season!) or, since we are in the depths of a recession, I’ll quote the original invitation for possible variations: “If you’re a starving artist, divide by 5; If you’re a little short, subtract $5.00; If you have some to spare, add $5.00; If you love new music, mulitply by 5,4,3, or 2”.

The dinner will be held on the tented deck behind the Education Center.

In any case, if you haven’t already received an invitation for the benefit, you can still phone in your reservations, (314)567-5384, or reserve by e-mail (alumrod@gmail.com), before May 22, if possible and then pay at the dinner.

See you there!

Let me tell you about one really terrific concert I attended last Tuesday, 5/5, presented by The St. Louis Low Brass Collective (http://www.stllbc.org/). It featured a working group called The Trombones of The St. Louis Symphony, led by principal trombonist, Timothy Myers and had to be one of the most well balanced, varied, yet musically challenging programs I’ve enjoyed in some time. Music by Claude Debussy and Jacques Charpentier was answered by modern composers (St. Louis’s own) Robert Wykes and brass specialist, Anthony Plog.

You may know something about Anthony Plog, because his full album of brass music, “Colors For Brass”, features the St. Louis Brass Quintet on one piece, and overall, an amazingly broad range of  brass techniques and color effects. (Just go buy it!).

I loved Robert Wykes’s piece, also. It was short enough to be played at the beginning and at the end of the concert (also a clever programming device), yet it was more than just a fanfare. It ended with an exciting flare, yet developed through a wide range of melodies and harmonic colors in the process of getting there.

So…… keep an eye out for their next event, and I’ll do the same.

Hi All, I have just picked up a notice about an amazing art project (right here in our town), called Wander Full, produced by the Chautauqua Art Lab,
focusing this week on a wildly eclectic festival of events from May 3 – 7. I’ll say no more, because I’m just learning about it as we go along, except to say…..CLICK ON THIS LINK, ASAP, http://artwanderlust.blogspot.com/ and then scroll down to the “calendar of events”.
If you can come out on one or more of the evenings, GREAT, but in any case, be sure to click on all the links from that site to individual artists and arts organizations. You’ll be amazed, as I was, at the range of creativity we have here in St. Louis, from music to painting to theatre to film making to architecture.

CAMA Event!
Tom Hamilton
Fifty (or More)
Saturday, May 2, 2009 – 7:30 p.m.
Kranzberg Arts Center (Big Brothers, Big Sisters Building)
501 N. Grand Blvd.
Unless otherwise noted, tickets to all shows are $15 regular admission, $7 for students with a valid ID.

Descriptive terms like “multi-media”, “eclectic” and “experimental” come to mind when I think about the work of electronic composer and longtime NMC performer, Tom Hamilton. Aside from his own solo compositions and improvisations,  his collaborations have enhanced the work of opera composer, Robert Ashley, the paintings of Bill Kohn, the videos of Van McElwee; and he has enjoyed a close musical rapport with instrumentalists as diverse as classical flutist, Jacqueline Martelle, new music improviser, J.D. Parran, and experimental percussionist, Rich O’Donnell.

Saturday’s performance (5/2) will be sure to follow right in line with any expectations you might have that music should always contain the unexpected. In a very brief description: Pre-recorded musical excerpts will be processed and manipulated spontaneously by Tom Hamilton in a collaborative interaction with a widely diverse group of “live” performers (Tom Brady – performance artist; Robert Fishbone – tape & voice; Rich O’Donnell – percussion; Dave Stone – saxophones; Scott Bryan – percussion & guitar; Zimbabwe Nkenya – bass & kalimba; Tony Renner – guitar.)

Don’t miss this one!

As a flutist, having studied some of the extended techniques in Robert Dick’s groundbreaking reference book, “The Other Flute”, I have a very special appreciation for his personal accomplishments on the instrument. He has cultivated the language of these techniques way beyond their notion as “effects”, into his own vernacular that flows from his horn just as if you or I were playing the simplest melody in C Major.

That fluency allows him the freedom to exploit, spontaneously, all the creative opportunities which will be likely to emerge in such a collaborative context as you will enjoy on Saturday night, 1/31, here in St. Louis at the Kranzberg Arts Ctr. Both dancer, Ashley Tate and highly innovative, multi-percussionist, Rich O’Donnell will be sure to bring to the table their own resourceful battery of inventions to make this event one of the most electrifying of the season. – See below for more info. on the concert, and if you’re not from this area, I hope you will still visit the artists’ websites and explore some of their recordings.

NEW MUSIC Circle 50th Anniversary SEASON

New Music Circle
2008-2009 50th Anniversary Season

I hope you’ve been enjoying my music on Amie St. and all the free downloads. It’s a great way to get to know and support new artists.

For example…… I realize that Cindy Blackman and Cecil McBee have been around for a while, but their new albums on Amie St. sound young and fresh! Cindy has a fired up drumming style that exudes creativity in every measure, and almost all the compositions on Music for the New Millennium are by her  –  advanced, yet very free-flowing.

Talk about a small world, Cecil McBee’s son went to pre-school with my daughter years ago in NY, so of course we remember his wife, Lucia, quite well. He named a piece on his CD, “Unspoken” after her, and it happens to be one of my favorites. All the other pieces are strong, too, with lots of variety and imagination in the horn playing.

Here’s the link to the jazz genre at Amie St. Then you can search in their names. ENJOY!     http://amiestreet.com/browse/jazz-blues/

Remember when I was telling you about all the Olivier Messiaen we heard at the Aspen Music Festival last summer?……..specifically the full performance of Vingt Regards Sur L’Enfant-Jésus (20 contemplations on the infant Jesus)? Well, it’s coming right here to St. Louis this Wednesday, 12/17,  7:30pm at the Pulitzer Foundation, http://www.pulitzerarts.org/events/concerts/idealdisplacements-messiaen/, when Molly Morkoski will perform the 2 hour solo piano work!

If you have never heard this piece performed “live”, let me tell you that it’s quite an experience for both performer and audience: immensely dramatic contrast of dynamics and emotion between movements, with relentless demands of technique and endurance imposed upon the pianist. And most importantly…. Vingt Regards is considered (by me, too) to be one of the greatest compositional achievements of piano writing in the entire repertory.

I hope all St. Louisans will come out to this hear this concert (and people in other towns can just be jealous), but in the meantime, have some fun at this video site of various performers playing movements from the piece http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Qt_ZcdwAXo&feature=related One pianist featured here, Roger Muraro, the New Music Circle brought to St. Louis about 10 years ago to perform the work.

Hi Everybody, I wanted to let you know that my music has just been posted on a fun, new site, called Amie Street. (http://amiestreet.com)
(or direct to my page: http://amiestreet.com/music/fred-tompkins/?fms=YwyLH_EauEMx)
It’s different than other music networking sites, because anyone can listen and then DOWNLOAD FOR FREE any piece of music which has been recently added to the site (like mine, for example).
Then, as more and more people download the music (hopefully…. mine), the price of each song gradually goes up to 98 cents, and possibly 5 or 6 dollars for the whole album. Since you are all getting in on the ground level, I should be free….. or at least cheap! Also, it’s in mp3 format, so you can import the music to your iPods  and take it jogging with you.

Win/Win: The music is good for you and jogging is good for you!

Recently, the New Music Circle presented an “electrifying” concert by one of the great innovators of “live” and synthesized music, Morton Subotnick.

The music made a deep impression on me, and I believe I know why: As a composer, myself, I find that I am perennially aware of musical content in direct relationship to musical FORM. Put simply, if ideas don’t go anywhere, they quickly loose their impact and depth.

THIS MUSIC TRAVELS!….. but I encourage you to take the voyage on your own, so I’ll merely direct you to the Morton Subotnick site, where you can read articles and order his music online.

(http://www.mortonsubotnick.com/index.html)

Then, at some point, click on my blog again and let me know what you think by leaving a comment.

My wife, Odile, and I have just returned from quite an experience at the Aspen Music Festival (http://www.aspenmusicfestival.com). If you like to receive your aural medication in multiple doses then this is where to come, at least for next summer. This season is almost over, but during the course of one week in early August, we went to an average of 1.5 concerts a day, several open rehearsals and 2 lectures at the Aspen Institute. We never made it to a master class, but our timing was good for the mini-festival to celebrate the 100th birthday of Olivier Messiaen, featuring many works, such as Quartet For The End Of Time and the seldom performed, 2 hour solo piano work, Vingt Regards Sur L’Enfant Jésus. (As an aside, our New Music Circle here in St. Louis – http://www.newmusiccircle.org – brought in the pianist, Roger Muraro, to perform it a few years ago, so….. get ready for lots of surprises in ’08-’09, our 50th Anniversary Season!).

For those who might be worried about the cost of Aspen Music Festival concerts, know that many events are at a reduced rate, and accomodations outside of Aspen are reasonable. Hope to see you there next summer! Oops, did I mention sports? Everyday: hiking up beautiful mountains, biking, many other sports and activities……sorry, no skiing, not even at A-Basin.