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Austin360 blogs > Austin Arts: Seeing Things > Archives > 2009 > May > 27
Wednesday, May 27, 2009
Review: Audio Inversions’ ‘Meditations and Homage’
Austin indie classical music group Audio Inversions paid a smart homage Friday night at the Long Center to one of their inspiring sources, the late American composer Lou Harrison — a pioneer in the use of world musical influences, new instruments. inventive textures that yet never lost track of a deeply felt lyricism and delightful tonality.
The winner of the third Audio Inversions composition competition? ‘Lou’ by Balinder Singh Sekhon, a short piece for percussion ensemble of regular and irregular instruments (including flower pots, brake drums and metal pipes) and amplified cello, written as tribute to Harrison.
And ‘Lou’ was a fitting tribute: percolating with offbeat character, filled with world music references that were honest and not hamfisted (as such reference so often can be) and a delightful challenge to the cellist Benjamin Westney who didn’t so much touch a bow as strummed and picked. ‘Lou’ rocketed along, sometimes almost threatening to collapse under its own rhythmic cacophony. But it recovered and ended with an energy-packed flourish.
Sekhon received Audio Inversions $750 prize money along with the premiere performance.
‘Lou’ made a fitting to finale to solidly conceived program of new classical music, a keen mix of brand new works and two masterful song clusters by Henryk Gorecki.
Both the captivating Gorecki vocal pieces — ‘Three Lullabies’ and ‘Szeroka Woda’ — got a luminous treatment from the unaccompanied vocal quintet (Jeb Mueller, Amanda Lundy, Jimmy Shepard, Meredith Bowden and Caitlin Anderson-Patters) and seemed to grab the audience in a thrall of hushed awe.
James Norman’s ‘Incline, O Maiden’ was a brilliant mini-opera enchantingly sung by mezzo-soprano Misha Penton. Using text from Goethe’s Faust, Norman — who is composer-in-residence with Audio Inversions — gave us a jewel-like monodrama modern in its stylings and packed with both visceral drama and ethereal sounds. Short, dramatically direct, modern — is ‘Incline, O Maiden’ the anti-Wagner opera? Perhaps.
Audio Inversions stirred up entries from more than 100 composers for this year’s composition contest. And in addition to performing the Sekhon’s winning entry, the group also premiered Delvyn Case’s ‘Gemini Variations,’ the competition’s honorable mention and a short, spirited if still immature piece for two saxophones.
Audio Inversions does it right. Taking matters into their own hands, they advocate for the progression of classical music by just doing it — supporting new compositions, framing new classical music in approachable terms and making it happen. Kudos.
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Your A-List: Best Museum
Readers have chosen Austin Museum of Art as their favorite in this week’s A-List poll with AMOA receiving 37 percent of the votes.
This weekend, AMOA opens ‘The Lining of Forgetting: Internal & External Memory in Art,’ an exhibit of international contemporary art that all expresses the ways we remember or forget or even re-write our memories.
Image from the exhibit at right: Dinh Q. Le, ‘Untitled (From Vietnam to Hollywood),’ 2003, C-print and linen tape, Courtesy of P.P.O.W., New York.
Here’s something to remember: Austin’s art museums have a very symbiotic history.
Nearly a century ago, friends of famed German-born sculptor Elisabet Ney established the Texas Fine Arts Association in 1911 to honor Ney. The group bought Ney’s idiosyncratic home and studio in the Hyde Park neighborhood to pave the way for some kind of official state art gallery.
At its first meeting, that group of early 20th-century arts supporters pledged to found an art school in connection with the University of Texas, thus planting the seeds that grew into UT’s art program and the Blanton Museum of Art), now the largest university art museum in the country.
In the early 1940s, the TFAA deeded the Ney house to the city of Austin, which now operates it as the Elisabet Ney Museum, a national, state and local historic landmark. And yet the materials in the Ney Museum, belong to UT’s Ransom Center.
Wait, there’s more: After the Ney house was deeded to the city, TFAA received stewardship of the Clara Driscoll estate on Lake Austin known as Laguna Gloria. TFAA ran its programs there until 1961, when a separate entity known as Laguna Gloria Art Museum, was established.
TFAA and Laguna Gloria Art Museum co-existed at the Driscoll mansion for years with TFAA organizing an annual exhibit and Laguna Gloria percolating and growing as a civic art museum.
Jump ahead a few decades and by the early 1990s, TFAA moved downtown to a permanent facility at 700 Congress Ave and re-named its Arthouse. It’s now a burgeoning contemporary arts center.
At the same time the TFAA was morphing into Arthouse, Laguna Gloria re-named itself the Austin Museum of Art and opened its current downtown location at 823 Congress Ave.
Others receiving A-List votes
- Mexic-Arte Museum, 19 percent
- Bob Bullock Texas State History Museum, 17 percent
- Blanton Museum of Art, 16 percent
- Austin Children’s Museum, 2 percent
- Ransom Center, 2 percent
- LBJ Library and Museum, 2 percent
- Texas Memorial Museum, 1 percent
- O. Henry Museum, 1 percent
- Elizabet Ney Museum, < 1 percent
- George Washington Carver Museum, < 1 percent
- Austin Museum of Digital Art, < 1 percent
- French Legation Museum, < 1 percent
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TCA announces Texas state poet laureate, musician, artist
he Texas Commission on the Arts announced Tuesday its appointments to the positions of state poet laureate, state musician, state two-dimensional artist and state three-dimensional artist.
The eight appointees named for 2009 and 2010 were selected for the exceptional quality of their work and for their outstanding commitment to the arts in Texas
The 2009 appointees include Texas State Poet Laureate Paul Ruffin of Huntsville, Texas State Musician Willie Nelson of Austin, Texas State Two-Dimensional Artist Rene Alvarado of San Angelo and Texas State Three-Dimensional Artist Eliseo Garcia of Dallas.
The 2010 appointees include Texas State Poet Laureate Karla K. Morton of Denton, Texas State Musician Sara Hickman of Austin, Texas State Two-Dimensional Artist Marc Burckhardt of Austin and Texas State Three-Dimensional Artist John Bennett of Fredericksburg.
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