by Kevin McLaughlin
You might have gone to the Sunday, June 2 She Scores concert to hear exemplary works by female and nonbinary composers, or simply to enjoy some fresh new sounds. But once there, you would have stayed for the dazzling expertise on display, from both composers and performers alike.
Credit the Local 4 Music Fund and executive director Amber Rogers for organizing the fourth annual iteration of this splendid concert series, which ran from May 30-June 2 in CIM’s lovely Mixon Hall. Genre or gender aside, this was an afternoon of superb music.
Margi Griebling-Haigh’s Triskaidekaphilia (“love of the number thirteen”) for three violins made for an arresting and mathematical start. Violinists Ken Johnston, Leah Goor-Burtnett, and Emily Cornelius drew out the composer’s introspective and playful sides in this well-crafted three-movement work. [Read more…]
For the recent set of concerts in their season-long celebration of the surreal, No Exit turned to two pivotal events in the history of dadaism for inspiration — the 1920 Festival Dada and the 1923 Soirée du Coeur à Barbe. This program, “Piano Dada,” included works of poetry, theater, and music that were performed at those historic Paris festivals. I attended the performance on March 16 at Heights Arts.
At one point during our recent conversation on Zoom, pianist/composer and Cleveland native Rob Kovacs gestured behind him to a bookshelf holding what he estimated to be 350-400 old video game cartridges. He laughed. “I’ve been collecting for about fifteen years, and I just keep going.”
No Exit’s summer offerings took a surprising, yet delightful turn on Friday, July 19 — to classic video game music. Rob Kovacs is from the generation of musicians who grew up playing video games on the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) in the late 80s. Last year, he began an ambitious project dedicated to arranging this music for solo piano. 88bit, Kovacs’s alter ego, now has about an hour’s worth of music from eight games in his memorized repertoire. He played with passion and panache on his electronic keyboard at the intermission-less concert in the cozy atmosphere of Appletree Books in Cleveland Heights.
When a festival runs for long enough, it becomes interesting to look back and remember that it wasn’t always a staple of the local culture. At one time, it was entirely new.
Since 2008 audiences have come to expect the unexpected from the Cleveland-based
A concert of “new music” conjures up for some listeners the works of the atonal and twelve-tone works of the likes of Arnold Schoenberg and his disciples, the austere works of Pierre Boulez, or the dense modernist Harrison Birtwistle. But these days composers of contemporary “classical” music are no longer bound by such musico-political considerations. There is no “accepted” modern style. Instead composers now draw upon a wide variety of inspiration: old works, pop and rock music, jazz and world music, among other influences. 
Since May of 2008, the Cleveland-based FiveOne Experimental Orchestra (51XO) has presented concerts featuring an eclectic mix of repertoire that bridges the gap between pop and art music at out of the ordinary venues such as the Sculpture Garden and the East Cleveland Cemetery. On Saturday, September 26 at 8:00 pm,