Veranstaltungsort: Roulette, Brooklyn

Held from 15-23 October, SONIC programmed works by over 80 young composers, presenting their works in 11 venues in Manhattan and Brooklyn. 

There’s more than one way to blow a trumpet, and the (figuratively) innumerable players at Roulette in Brooklyn accounted for many of them Wednesday night. While Tuesday’s performance at the same venue was the first in the 2013 Festival of New Trumpet Music (FONT), this second concert was much more frank in its orientation, putting the instrument and its idiomatic style directly in the spotlight.

What compelled the composer to use this particular ensemble? Why does this musical texture work best for this moment? Is there a better one? Should I be able to hear more of what’s going on right now? Is that sound really coming from that instrument? These and other questions, uncommon or irrelevant in the context of a Beethoven symphony or a Haydn string quartet, were front and center Tuesd

The 1960s and 70s are famous for breakthrough developments in rock music, but the story was really no different for the field of art music during those decades. The advent of electronics seems to have instilled in composers a fresh thirst for sound-exploration and conceptual writing.

It’s a rainy night and a little girl’s recorded voice sings out “it’s ice cream time”, triggering an outburst from sax quartet and electric guitar, a sort of warped chorale loosely based on her melody.Thus began sax quartet PRISM’s Roulette debut, and the New York première of Nick Didkovsky’s Ice Cream Time on Sunday night.

Roulette has never looked so snazzy: the usual dishevelled hipsters were replaced by well-dressed audience members of all ages, wearing heels rather than flannel, drinking from wine glasses rather than beer bottles.

This past December at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, six percussionists drummed on wooden planks for an hour in one of the most powerful performances of 2012. The six musicians of Mantra Percussion (Joe Bergen, Al Cerulo, Chris Graham, Michael McCurdy, Jude Traxler, and Nick Woodbury) were performing the New York première of Michael Gordon’s Timber, an immersive and meditative work.