This Thursday, Oct. 19th, the "Charles Wadsworth and Friends" series kicks off another season at the Columbia Museum of Art, featuring the highly acclaimed Miro Quartet. Why this concert is not being trumpeted more loudly in the Columbia papers, or by the Art Museum itself (scant info is available on their website), I have no idea (I only knew about this concert because cellist Josh Gindele told me). The Miro Quartet is merely one of the most important and accomplished young string quartets in the world today, so sometimes these things have to fall to "MMM" to tell you...The quartet won the Naumburg Competition in the mid-1990's and then the Avery Fisher Grant just 3 years ago. In residence at the University of Texas, they maintain a whirlwind schedule of international concerts. I don't know what's on the program except that pianist Melvin Chen will be joining them for Dvorak's Piano Quintet. That means lots of nice tunes for cellist Gindele and violist John Largess. Incidentally, just to give you an example of how the "new generation" of classical artists is thinking and working these days, Gindele recently launched Classical Lounge, a kind of MySpace for classical musicians.

Large-scale Romanticism continues on the weekend with Saturday night's South Carolina Philharmonic concert. Johannes Brahms' First Piano Concerto, in reality a "symphony with piano solo," is the featured work, with pianist Simone Dinnerstein, who got a lot of positive attention last season in New York for her perfomance (and subsequent recording) of Bach's "Goldberg Variations." That's this Saturday, Oct. 21 at the Koger Center. I'll be at the Miro concert Thursday but will have to miss Saturday's show...the Steve Reich 70th-birthday party continues this weekend in New York, with another "Music for 18 Musicians" that night at Carnegie Hall.

Well, I'm not a paid music critic, don't get the hundreds of free CD's for my perusal that they do, and so the size of the sample I'm measuring against is not as fully representative as theirs would be. But I cannot possibly imagine that any classical recording of 2006 is more important, a greater achievement, a greater contribution to our world, than New World Records' release of four of Ben Johnston's string quartets, as performed by the Kepler Quartet.

Ben Johnston turned 80 this year; what John Rockwell wrote about him 16 years ago ("one of the best non-famous composers this country has to offer") is still sadly true, for the most part. It's often said that Johnston's music is more often discussed than played; this mostly is due to the incredible difficulty of accurately rendering the microtonal aspects of his music. (See this for a discussion of microtonality). When I recorded his microtonal piano works a decade ago, all I had to do was play the same set of keys on the piano I always would, letting the piano tuner do all the hard work[Yes, I think the disc has gone out of print...but folks are working on it]. But for a string quartet, the challenge is immense, especially because of the precision required not just on an individual basis, but for the quartet as a whole in tuning vertical sonorities.

This has scared away even contemporary-music-minded quartets from attempting Johnston's works. That's a real shame; Kyle Gann had it right when he proclaimed Johnston's string quartets "the most important contribution to that repertoire since Schoenberg and Bartok." And that was when there were only nine quartets; Johnston has since written a tenth, which the Kepler premiered in Milwaukee in 2002 to audience rapture that nearly blew Santiago Calatrava's roof off the Milwaukee Art Museum.

The Keplers (Sharan Leventhal and Eric Segnitz, violins; Brek Renzelman, viola; Karl Lavine, cello) all are regulars (as I am) with the Present Music group in Milwaukee. Through conversations with them, I can attest to the sweat, tears, and (who knows) maybe a little blood that were expended to make this first volume of a projected 3-CD set a reality. Midi realizations of the quartets helped them achieve true accuracy with the pitches; Johnston himself was present at most if not all the recording sessions, and worked painstakingly with the group through much of the unbelievable rehearsal time that went into this project.

The result is stunning. The Ninth Quartet, from Johnston's later tonal period, using extended just intonation to heighten the contrast between consonance and dissonance, is an amazing work. The slow movement is Haydn on acid. The disc follows Johnston's prescribed pairing of the serial Third Quartet from 1966 with the Fourth from 1973, a set of Variations on "Amazing Grace" first made famous by the Kronos Quartet's recording some years back. Separated by a silence on the disc of a minute and a half, "Crossings," as the pairing is called, is indeed (as Johnston himself says) a "transformation/journey...from one rim of a canyon to the other..."

The Kepler Quartet, formed specifically to realize this project, has a website which includes some of the critical acclaim they have received for this disc. The most important thing to realize about Johnston's music is its emotional directness; I've found that general classical audiences react extremely positively to his music, and detailed intellectual grasp of his tuning theories is not required in order to be profoundly affected by his vision. Instead of plunking down $18 to buy the latest crossover/crosscultural marketing ploy of an overpaid classical music superstar (insert your preferred name here), buy this disc, contribute to the Kepler Quartet's project via their website, and be inspired by the example of four tremendous musicians who have made great personal sacrifice to create something beautiful in which they truly believed.

Sunday marked the first anniversary of the opening post of Mostly Music in the Midlands. This is the 104th post of the blog, and to date there have been nearly 2000 visitors to the site. It's been a lot of fun for me so far and I'm looking forward to continuing it into its second year. The purpose of the blog (other than my own amusement and a useful mode of procrastination) has evolved a bit over time, as I look back on the various posts to date.

Primarily, I still hope for this blog to be a clearinghouse for information about the many and varied happenings on the cultural front in this part of the country, Columbia specifically, but the wider area of the Carolinas as well. Soon I'll be posting more about Marvin Chernoff's Columbia Festival of the Arts, which seeks to focus greater attention on the ever-growing variety of arts offerings in this city; you could say that "MMM" is the ongoing, online version of that idea, at least as seen through the tastes and interests of one individual.

I've tried not to be too self-absorbed in this blog, and to limit the "diary" aspect of it to those musical-professional activities of mine that might have a bit more interest to a wider number of people, connecting my travels and adventures to the other musicians and composers who are very active in our time, like my just-finished London gigs with Steve Reich, for example, or some of the really interesting performers out there who I've been lucky enough to work with.

In any case, thanks to those of you who have checked in here, and I hope that Blogstream makes it less onerous to post comments so that there can be more back-and-forth with readers here. To Year Two, and beyond!

There is a clear blue sky and piercingly brilliant sun as I'm posting this entry this morning in London, unusual for this time of year here. This week an enormous festival at London's Barbican Centre celebrates the 70th birthday of the composer Steve Reich with performances by his ensemble (which is why I'm here), Kronos Quartet, Bang on a Can All-Stars, the London Symphony Orchestra, and several other groups and individuals. Wednesday thru Friday nights at the Barbican we are performing "The Cave," Reich's (and wife Beryl Korot's) opera/cantata/video piece on the story of Abraham and the Cave of Machpelah, from the different perspectives of Israeli Jews, Palestinian Muslims, and Americans. Saturday sees performances of other works such "Music for Mallet Instruments, Voices, and Organ" and the landmark work, "Drumming." Then our final performance will be Sunday night, with the world premiere of the "Daniel Variations" and Reich's 1976 hour-long minimalist classic, "Music for 18 Musicians." [More on Reich's music and the upcoming New York commemorations of his 70th birthday can be found on this NPR profile which aired last week]

It's a real pleasure, as always, to reunite with the remarkable musicians and delightful human beings who have been involved with Steve's music for a long time...folks for example like the percussionists Bob Becker and Russ Hartenberger, with whom it's a special joy to share any stage. We don't gather that often, but when we do, it's as if we hadn't been apart at all since the last post-concert "hang."

Back on the western side of the Atlantic: if you're reading this in Columbia, I'd like to bring your attention to one of those times when you have to make a painful choice on your cultural menu, as two significant events are taking place at exactly the same time. You can choose between two musical titans of the 20th century this coming Saturday night, Oct. 7, in Columbia. At 7:30 PM in USC's Recital Hall, the Southern Exposure series has its first event of the season, a concert by the New York Lyric Chamber Ensemble. They'll be performing Olivier Messiaen's "Quartet for the End of Time," probably the most important chamber music work of the century. Go to www.music.sc.edu/events.html for more info.

And next door at the Koger on the same evening, the SC Philharmonic is doing an all-Shostakovich program to commemorate the 100th anniversary of his birth. I had previously groused slightly about the dearth of Shostakovich in Columbia up to this point this year, so a tip of the hat is due here to the Philharmonic. Zuill Bailey will be the soloist in the 1st Cello Concerto, and the orchestra will perform Shostakovich's 7th Symphony, the "Leningrad." Go to www.scphilharmonic.com for more info. Too bad they couldn't be on consecutive nights!

With a steadily deteriorating view of the United States now spreading even in the democracies of Europe, Asia, and South America, here is some very welcome news about the US being pro-active on this front, and I don't mean in a military sense. [Link from Washington Post may require free registration; hat-tip to "ArtsJournal.com."]