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Chinese Musicians Association of North America inspire at CMA (Apr. 11)

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by Peter Feher

The Chinese Musicians Association of North America (CMA-NA) may be less than a year old, but some of the group’s repertoire — and many of these performers’ instruments — date back centuries.

This history was on dazzling display in the Cleveland Museum of Art’s Gartner Auditorium on Friday, April 11. The evening covered thousands of years of culture, from ancient plucked melodies that might have been heard in the third, fourth, or fifth centuries BCE, to a world-premiere chamber work that imaginatively bridged Eastern and Western classical traditions.

Photos of sculptures and paintings from the Museum’s Chinese art collection, similarly extensive in scope, were projected above the stage.

[Read more…]

Oblivion Project brings tango to CMA

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by Max Newman

Argentine composer Astor Piazzolla may have passed away over thirty years ago, but his contributions to the tango music genre are truly eternal.

“Even in his sweetest melodies, there are things that are powerful,” said Derek Snyder, the self-described “de-facto leader” of the Oblivion Project, a musical group that has been performing and exploring the works of Piazzolla for over twenty years.

The project will take the stage at the Cleveland Museum of Art’s Gartner Auditorium on Friday, March 28 at 7:30 pm. Tickets available online. I was lucky to get to speak to both Snyder and Malena Dayen, the project’s vocalist, over the phone prior to the performance.

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Jazz vocalist Magos Herrera with her trio at CMA (Dec. 11)

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by Peter Feher

Magos Herrera sang for a full five minutes before uttering a single lyric at the Cleveland Museum of Art on Wednesday, Dec. 11.

It was an apt introduction to the artistry of the Mexico City-born jazz vocalist, whose boundary-free style can sometimes beguile and sometimes confuse.

Performing the wordless “Choro de Lua,” a track off her 2023 album Aire, Herrera sounded transcendent in certain moments but less than stellar in others. That pattern would continue throughout the evening in Gartner Auditorium — her set just beginning to coalesce near the end. [Read more…]

Genre-Bending Pahua at CMA’s City Stages

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by Max Newman

“It’s everything. To have a project like this is something that makes you evolve as a human.”

That’s how Mexican DJ, producer, percussionist, and vocalist Paulina Sotomayor describes her Pahua project which bridges the gap between alternative electronic music and Latin rhythms.

On July 10 at 7:30 pm she will bring her talents to the Cleveland Museum of Art’s Transformer Station as part of CMA’s City Stages series of free outdoor concerts that feature the best in global music.

And Pahua certainly is that. With over fifteen million streams on music platforms, the artist is thrilled about the upcoming concert. “It’s my first time in Cleveland. I am really excited and we are going to try to do something super special.”

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The Many Moods of Melodrama:
Sentiment, Satire, Horror, and Noir in silent film

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by Mike Telin

When we think of modern-era film composers, the names Hans Zimmer, John Williams, Danny Elfman, and Howard Shore immediately come to mind. But who was responsible for creating the music that accompanied films during the silent era?

During the past three and a half months, a group of Oberlin students have been diligently learning how to create film scores from a historical perspective.

Emily Laurance, a visiting associate professor of musicology at Oberlin Conservatory and executive director of the Cleveland Silent Film Festival and Colloquium, said during a telephone conversation that one of the objectives of her class — Music and Melodrama on Stage and Screen — was for the students “to get a feeling of music in melodrama, and to get a sense of the history of the silent film genre by learning how to compile a musical score.”

The class will culminate in a performance on Friday, May 10 at 7:00 pm at the Cleveland Museum of Art’s Transformer Station. [Read more…]

Alex Cuba shines at Cleveland Museum of Art’s
Transformer Station (May 1)

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by Max Newman

Cuban-Canadian singer-songwriter Alex Cuba has been described in many ways over the course of his career, from his “sugarcane-sweet melodies” and “pop-soul hooks” to “powerful guitar riffs that relinquish a conventional stereotype that exemplifies much of the Latin music landscape.” When he performed on the Tiny Desk concert series, NPR noted his “undeniable charm as he weaves evocative imagery into musical arrangements that not only call to mind his native Cuba but anywhere [that] an acoustic guitar and engaging voice command attention.”

All of these strengths, and more, were on display when Cuba took the stage at Transformer Station on May 1 as part of the Cleveland Museum of Art’s Performing Arts series.

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CelloGayageum at Cleveland Museum of Art: uniting cultures, blending styles & experimenting with sound

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by Jarrett Hoffman

“I grew up with the story of the separation of south and north in Korea,” cellist Sol Daniel Kim said during a recent interview. “And when I went to Berlin, of course I knew the history of the city, how it was separated into east and west.”

The parallel between German reunification and the hope for peaceful reunification of Korea took physical form in late 2015 with the construction of Berlin’s Pavillon der Einheit (Pavilion of Unity).

It was around that same time when Kim met Korean-born Dayoung Yoon, who plays the gayageum, a traditional Korean zither. They started talking at a concert organized by the Korean Cultural Center in Berlin, and hit it off over a shared interest in creating music.

“That was my first real encounter with a Korean traditional instrument,” said Kim, who was born in Austria, with Korean roots. “And actually she was having quite a hard time in Berlin, because it’s not easy for a Korean person to get used to the Berlin vibe. Then she met me, and everything turned around because we were making music together.”

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No Exit: Piano Dada at Cleveland Museum of Art

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by Mike Telin 

This week No Exit will continue their season-long multifaceted exploration and celebration of Surrealism on February 9 at 7:30 pm in Gartner Auditorium with “Piano Dada.” The free concert takes an entertaining dive into the realm of dreams, the irrational, the unconscious and the inexplicable.

“We’re very excited about this concert because it is our Cleveland Museum of Art debut,” No Exit’s artistic director Timothy Beyer said during a telephone conversation.

The program will include five works for solo piano performed by Shuai Wang — Francis Picabia’s La Nourrice Américaine (fast) and La Nourrice Américaine (slow), Darius Milhaud’s Caramel Mou, Georges Auric’s Adieu, New York!, and E.L.T. Mesens’ Drie Composities Voor Klavier — as well as a video of Tristan Tzara’s Dadaist Anthem.

Beyer noted that with the exception of Milhaud, Picabia, Auric, Mesens and Tzara were not composers per se. “They were artists. But these are great pieces that represent the beginning of avant-garde conceptualized music, which is prevalent today — John Cage took his cues from the Dadist’s playbook.” [Read more…]

Linking Legacies to perform at CMA, Oberlin & TMS: celebrating Black performers & composers with local ties

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by Jarrett Hoffman

Think of the people from the past who lived in your town, crossing the same crosswalks, pushing open the same doors as you. Or, as the thought occurred to violist Chris Jenkins and pianist Dianna White-Gould, performing in the same room as them.

Collaborating in a piece by H. Leslie Adams in January 2020 for a concert at The Music Settlement honoring Martin Luther King, they realized that White-Gould’s parents — composer-pianist Dolores White and cellist Donald White — had performed together as a duo decades earlier in the very same space.

More ties came to mind between past and present, time and place. “We thought, it’s so interesting to be here,” Jenkins (pictured) said during a recent interview over Zoom. “Leslie is here, and Dianna’s parents have played in this space, and we’re here now. Leslie and Dianna went to Oberlin, and her mother went to Oberlin and CIM, and I work at Oberlin.” (Jenkins is the Associate Dean for Academic Support, Visiting Assistant Professor of Musicology, and Liaison to the Office of Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion). “All those connections — it was so interesting.”

The thought of those connections led to the creation of Linking Legacies, a chamber collective headed up by Jenkins that features multiple generations of African American classical musicians performing classical works by African American composers — with a focus on deep ties to the area for both performers and composers.

[Read more…]

Alla Boara: creating soundscapes from history at CMA (Jan. 24)

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by Max Newman

If there’s one thing that the Ohio-based group Alla Boara can do, it is allowing their listeners to explore the past by relishing in the present. And for those who packed into the Cleveland Museum of Art’s Gartner Auditorium on Wednesday, January 24 for the ensemble’s performance celebrating the release of their new record, that is exactly what they got.

It was an evening of storytelling through word and song.

Bandleader Anthony Taddeo, the group’s composer and drummer, based his arrangements off of a series of Alan Lomax’s 1954 field recordings of Italian folk music. Throughout the night, Taddeo and other band members laid out historical context to the pieces on show with a backdrop of original images from Lomax’s Italian journey. It gave the audience a clear snapshot of Italy in the mid-1950s, and created an authentic atmosphere for each song played. [Read more…]

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