Cast your Vote for the Kepler Quartet’s recording of Ben Johnston’s: String quartets 1, 5, 10, for the BBC Music Magazine Chamber Music Album of the Year.

It’s a great honor to be nominated, but help them win for their hard work on this amazing album!

Vote here.
Hurry! Voting ends 29 February 2012.

Keep up with New Dissonance on Twitter: @NewDissonance HERE

Follow Ben Johnston news, performances, clips, etc., as well as other happenings from the New Music world.

A video I prepared for Ben’s lecture at Eastman last year:

Lots to look forward to this year:  Premieres of Ben Johnston’s music, an exciting (unreleased) schedule at Microfest, new videos and recordings, lots of John Cage centenary celebrations/performances, and the Kepler Quartet rehearsing and recording the last in the cycle of Ben’s string quartets, Nos. 6, 7, 8.

Leigh Cross is a music enthusiast, scholar, and instrument builder whom Ben and I had the pleasure of meeting last year at a colloquium at Wright State. Leigh has designed and built a proportional pitch keyboard based on Ben Johnston’s fifty-three note, expanded just intonation scale as described in Ben’s paper, Scalar Order as a Compositional Resource (which can be found in his book Maximum Clarity). I had the pleasure of meeting up with Leigh again recently in his workshop in Vancouver, where I shot this video of Leigh explaining the keyboard.

Leigh is making this an open source project, as the keyboard needs development with the help of electricians, programmers, etc. If you would like to contact Leigh, please write to info[at] newdissonance.com and all inquiries will be passed along.

Here is Steve Smith’s flattering New York Times review of the new recordings by the Kepler Quartet of Ben Johnston’s String Quartets Nos. 1, 5, and 10.

And they are quite positive:

Frank Oteri’s piece for New Music Box can be found here.

Another review from the blogosphere is here.

The Kepler Quartet’s new album featuring premiere recordings of Ben Johnston’s 1st, 5th, and 10th String Quartets is available now on New World Records.

Thanks to the quartet members: Sharan Leventhal, Eric Segnitz, Brek Renzelman, and Karl Lavine, for all the sacrifice and hard work they put in to make these amazing recordings of this beautiful music. And thanks to Ben, for continuing to inspire us all.

A classic documentary on American composer John Cage (1912-1992).

“American Masters” John Cage: I Have Nothing to Say and I Am Saying It (1990)

Vivian Perlis (writer)
TV Series: “American Masters” (1983)
Original Air Date: 17 September 1990
Country: UK
55 min

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