Sounds Like This Week

The “Sounds Like Now” festival coming up this week looks like old home week for the Downtown scene. Microtonalist David First and electronics maven Tom Hamilton curated the festival, and text composer Chris Mann is emceeing. The schedule, running from Thursday through Sunday, October 14 to 17, at La MaMa Etc., 74A East 4th St. in New York City, is as follows:

Thursday, Oct 14 8PM

“Blue” Gene Tyranny

Annea Lockwood

Petr Kotik

Alvin Lucier

Thomas Buckner

Friday, Oct 15 8PM

“Blue” Gene Tyranny & Jon Gibson

Jin Hi Kim

David Behrman

Muhal Richard Abrams and Roscoe Mitchell

Saturday Oct 16 2PM

“Blue” Gene Tyranny, Jon Gibson & Peter Zummo

Robert Ashley

Jim Staley

David Rosenboom

Douglas Ewart

Saturday Oct 16 8PM

“Blue” Gene Tyranny, Jon Gibson, Peter Zummo & Leroy Jenkins

Joshua Fried

Pauline Oliveros/Deep Listening Band

Phill Niblock

Downtown Ensemble (William Hellermann/Daniel Goode/Mary Jane Leach/Peter Zummo)

Sunday Oct 17 2PM

“Blue” Gene Tyranny, Jon Gibson, Peter Zummo, Leroy Jenkins & Mark Dresser

William Duckworth/Cathedral Band

Fast Forward

Carl Stone

Nicolas Collins

Michael J. Schumacher

Sunday Oct 17 8PM

“Blue” Gene Tyranny, Jon Gibson, Peter Zummo, Leroy Jenkins, Mark Dresser, & Roscoe Mitchell

David First & Tom Hamilton

Joan La Barbara

Kyle Gann

48nord & George Lewis

Morton Subotnick

That’s right, that’s yours truly in there on the final concert, and it’s my only New York performance this fall. (I have some San Francisco performances November 3 and 6 that I’ll tell you about later.) At “Sounds Like Now” I’m playing three of my Disklavier pieces, Bud Ran Back Out, Petty Larceny, and the world premiere of Unquiet Night – although if you’ve been listening to Postclassic Radio you may have already heard the last-named piece. [A Disklavier, since many people have no idea what one is, is an acoustic piano, with real strings struck by real felt hammers and vibrating in real air, played by a computer via MIDI cables. The sounds are not electronic, and do not play through loudspeakers.] So show up at La MaMa Etc., 74A East 4th St., and you’ll hear many of the stalwarts who inhabited the new-music scene of the 1980s and ‘90s with me.