Matt Hanson - Page 2

In the memory of Isabella Stewart Gardner, Steven Isserlis and Robert Levin proved faultless, performing the first of two all-Beethoven programs at Boston's prestigious Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum.

The classical music of India encompasses all of the subtle and blaring complexities of modern life in continuity with millennia of cultural tradition. The rhythmic nuance of vocalization, in unison with ancient instruments, truthfully dramatizes the frenetic synchronism of contemporary street life from Delhi to New York.

Indonesia Pusaka is a largely Jakarta-based ensemble comprised of eight folk dancers and twelve classical pianists. In Javanese, pusaka means "heritage". For the first-ever performance of Indonesia Pusaka at Carnegie Hall, the riotous Indonesian composer Jaya Suprana sat himself onstage. Regally adorned in gold-enmeshed robes to mirror the priceless Carnegie Hall decor, the ingenious Indonesian voice of classical music composition turned bellies upside down with laughter.

After nearly 300 years, with all of the epochal invention and revolutionary soundscapes to emerge from Western music, Bach is still heard with increasing relevance. Brad Mehldau, known foremost as an improviser, is the first jazz artist to serve as Carnegie Hall's Richard and Barbara Debs Composer's Chair. He has gone further, describing Bach as "radical" even today.

Jazz education is America's oral history, and the composers of jazz, contemporary and classic, are as the wise, sagely men and women who have carried the sacred knowledge of the people since time immemorial.

In 2013, the book “Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt” was published under the genre, Crime. For his research, author and Pulitzer Prize-winning, Occupy Wall Street Journal newspaperman Chris Hedges walked the sacrifice zones of West Virginia. He chronicled the brutally honest, grassroots American reality of people versus capitalism in hard-bitten, fastidious prose while listening to multigenerational landowners and land defenders like Larry Gibson.

She is the young woman counting rhythms silently, whispering mysteriously and distantly on the metro ride home after work. He is the young man moving to a different rhythm behind the cashier, his head bobbing like a life raft on the high seas, far from land. They are the emerging artists, the millennial, contemporary, twenty-something generation of up-and-coming thinkers, movers, shakers, dreamers, drifters and lovers.

With King Kreon in exile, the birds of Thebes had their fill. The air was bitter with the stench of unburied corpses lying on the battlefield. Two of those peck-eaten bodies were brothers who killed each other for their father's throne.

There's a powerfully resonant, special quality to the lifelong oeuvre of a jazz master, such as in the inimitable example of bassist Ron Carter. In the 1960s, integral to the rhythm sections of Cannonball Adderley and Miles Davis, his artistry may have seemed shadowed by the towering giants of the music that was to give voice to the Great Migration, the most significant movement of peoples in U.S. history.

The glowing fountains at Josie Robertson Plaza, plumed with a dazzling vibrancy, welcoming a throng of silvery faces. Among them sauntered an impressionable following, the young and economically diverse New Yorkers who only know the now-infamous House Un-American Activities Committee by rote.

The short two-day run of Legends & Visionaries by New York Theater Ballet drew a warm showing from the public, apparently enticed by what was a soft opener to the upcoming season of live arts at the Schimmel, a fine venue at Pace University.

Picturesquely unadorned, City Center Studio 5 is a blank canvas. Therein, minds move bodies, and bodies stir minds. Choreographer Miro Magloire is a soft-spoken German visionary, and now an artful resident of New York. New Chamber Ballet, the love child of Magloire is a wellspring of opportunity for American dancers, six of whom graced the studio floor to rehearse steps and posture before Magloire's modest presence, his unmistakable visage light with the smile of a reputable life well-lived. Among his accomplishments are fifty ballets, not to mention a practitioner's ear for musical composition and a pioneering sense of purpose in the international dance community.

The East Fourth Street cultural district is a wildly fascinating and most humbly inspired reintegration of the old and new that makes New York, New York. For the patient flaneurs and public amateurs, it's a vibrant dreamscape for the 21st century.

In terms of the origins of contemporary American culture as Americans know, breathe and live it today, authentic is a word rarely seen with such exacting definition than in the presence of David Amram. If America had a monarch, he would not only be Sir David Amram, he would be the palace seer, a magician of sound and word who transcends prophecy to the realm of absolutely artful wisdom.

In my arts criticism, I have sought to maintain an objective voice. As the preeminent American historian Howard Zinn said, "Objectivity is neither possible nor desirable." The fifth annual 9/11 memorial performance of Table of Silence demands a personal perspective.

Opening in Chelsea in 2004, the Rubin Museum of Art has since enlightened worldly art lovers and enriched the masses with a sense of the sacred in the heart of New York.

There are a few reasons why a nomadic ethnic minority from the Western Sahara has become the poster child of world music in the 21st century. In truth, no one can really put his or her finger on Tinariwen definitively, because they are the living, pure sound of a people, a place, and a time so authentically exotic. To categorize Tinariwen in predefined musical genres is as elusive as believing in a mirage.

There are other paths in this world than the clearest, largest, and most trod. The dominant paradigm is not the only way. That is the message of cultural integrity in the 21st century. The truth about other paths is that they begin from a different place and so have a different perspective on the world. They also lead towards a different future.

Mozart isn't exactly casino music. In 1788, it was. "So you can see how far we've come," said Vancouver Symphony Orchestra conductor Gordon Gerrard, reminding a full house audience of how, at times, historical progress is truly linear.

British Columbia is still British in more ways than one. Along the scenic walkway to Vanier Park, fans of The Bard sidle past the sail-strewn glittering facades overlooking False Creek and the craft beer mecca of Granville Island.