The Well-Tempered Ear
Just Bach free concert series seeks Interim Co-Artistic Director. Apply by July 5
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By Jacob Stockinger
The Ear has received the following announcement to post about an interim job at Just Bach:
Do you love the music of Johann Sebastian Bach (below)?
Would you love to perform it every month in one of the most beautiful churches (below, in a photo by Barry Lewis) in Madison?
Are you a professional instrumentalist with training and experience in period performance practice?
Do you have strong organizational skills?
If the answer to all these questions is yes, then Just Bach needs you!
Because Co-Artistic Director Marika Fischer Hoyt (below) will leave on a sabbatical starting in November, Just Bach is looking for an instrumentalist to join the Artistic Team. (You can check out the typical format by using the search engine on this blog or going to Just Bach’s Facebook page or YouTube Channel.)
The popular monthly concert series, which made it to the final round of the 2021 “Best of Madison” awards, seeks an Interim Artistic Co-Director for its upcoming fourth season.
POSITION SUMMARY
The Interim Artistic Co-Director works with the Just Bach team and the staff at Luther Memorial Church to program, produce, promote and perform monthly Bach concerts (below) from September through May.
The Interim Co-Artistic Director helps finalize the programming, contract any remaining needed players, schedule rehearsals and performances, perform in the concerts as needed, and upload the concert video to the Just Bach YouTube channel.
The Co-Artistic Director devotes about 4 hours per month to administrative tasks, on a volunteer basis.
The Co-Artistic Director rehearses and performs as needed in the monthly concerts — and is paid $100 per concert. (You can hear and see the closing concert of this past season in the YouTube video at the bottom. Click on Show More to see other instruments, players, singers and the program.)
The current Artistic Team will provide training for this position, and will be available for assistance once the season begins.
A detailed job description is available at:: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1CDis-RSY5FUnfUGCBvYunWZ1fR4EtyfzSo3xYiMyjUs/edit#
For more information, please contact and apply to Just Bach at: justbachseries@gmail.com
APPLICATION ARE DUE BY JULY 5.
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Classical music: ECM Records finally streams its entire catalogue of award-winning artists and recordings
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By Jacob Stockinger
The critically acclaimed and award-winning independent label ECM (Edition of Contemporary Music) was founded in Munich, Germany, in 1969 by the Grammy-winning producer Manfred Eicher (below).
Known for its penchant for the contemporary and even avant-garde, Eicher’s label was nonetheless a conservative hold-out when it came to the newer technology of digital streaming.
The old technology has its points besides superior sound quality. When you got an ECM CD, you usually also got one of their terrific black-and-white photographs, often a square-format landscape, as a cover. (ECM even published a book of its photographic covers.)
But as of this past Friday, ECM finally gave into the inevitable and streamed its entire catalogue. Its rationale was that it was more important for its music and musicians to be heard than to remain loyal to certain platforms.
ECM also cited the pressure from unauthorized uploads to YouTube and bootleg versions of its recordings as the reason for the decision.
So as of yesterday, ECM, which has won many awards for individual titles and artists, will be available on Apple Music, Spotify, Amazon, Deezer, Tidal and other streaming services.
ECM is known for its popular and critically acclaimed jazz artists including pianist Keith Jarrett (below, of “The Köln Concert” or The Cologne Concert) and saxophonist Jan Garbarek and the Hilliard Ensemble (“Officium”). But it also included classical chamber music groups such as the Keller Quartet, the Trio Medieval, the Danish Quartet and others.
ECM is also known for championing contemporary classical composers (Arvo Pärt, below, who is the most performed contemporary composer, as well as Tigur Mansurian, Lera Auerbach, Gyorgy Kurtag and Valentin Silvestrov among others) and some outstanding crossover classical musicians, including Jarrett, a jazz great who has also recorded Bach, Handel and Shostakovich on both piano and harpsichord.
The Ear especially likes violist Kim Kashkashian and Harvard pianist Robert Levin (a frequent performer at the Token Creek Chamber Music Festival) in sonatas of Brahms. He is also fond of Alexei Lubimov in various piano recitals as well as the many recordings of Bach, Beethoven, Schubert, Janacek and Robert Schumann by the superb pianist Andras Schiff (below). In the YouTube video at the bottom, you can hear Schiff in a live performance of the Gigue from Bach’s Keyboard Partita No. 3.)
And there are many, many more artists and recordings worth your attention. Here is a link to an extensive sampler on YouTube:
https://www.youtube.com/user/ECMRecordsChannel
Who are your favorite ECM artists?
What are your favorite ECM recordings?
What ECM downloads do you recommend?
The Ear wants to hear.
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The Well-Tempered Ear 
Classical music: The Virtual Bach Around the Clock 2020 festival ends today. Here’s how to catch up on the 10 days of making Baroque music
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PLEASE HELP THE EAR. IF YOU LIKE A CERTAIN BLOG POST, SPREAD THE WORD. FORWARD A LINK TO IT OR, SHARE IT or TAG IT (not just “Like” it) ON FACEBOOK. Performers can use the extra exposure to draw potential audience members to an event. And you might even attract new readers and subscribers to the blog.
By Jacob Stockinger
If you recall, this year’s 12-hour Bach Around the Clock festival – a platform for students, amateurs and professional musicians to celebrate the birthday of Johann Sebastian Bach (below) — was scheduled to take place at St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church on Saturday, March 28.
Faced with cancellation of the annual free event because of the public health dangers posed by the COVID-19 pandemic and the need for social distancing, the organizers decided to try going virtual and hold the festival online by asking performers to send in short videos made at home.
And it worked.
“From what we have heard, it has been a very rewarding experience for both the performers who sent in videos and for the people who watched and listened to them,” says violist and BATC artistic director Marika Fischer Hoyt (below).
The cost of going virtual was not great, but it took lot of time and hard work, admits Fischer Hoyt, who says she spent between 7 and 10 hours a day to post each day’s Bach video.
It was hard especially at the beginning, she notes, when she had to learn how to use software programs, such as iMovie, to make and then upload and post the videos.
She didn’t just organize the online festival. She also performed and provided gracious introductions to the program for each day.
Lately, the videos average about 20 minutes – your Daily Minimum Requirement of Bach, as the witty Wisconsin Public Radio host Anders Yocom would say. But they were longer at the beginning when more videos were sent in. Towards the end, the festival even used some photos and audio recordings from past years to round out programs.
But the reach of the virtual festival, intended to be local, was wider than Fischer Hoyt had expected. Musicians replied and participated from Florida, Minnesota and – as you can hear today – from Costa Rica.
All the effort worked.
In one of the major victories against all the coronavirus cancellations and postponements in the Madison music scene, the Virtual Bach Around the Clock 2020 brought the public beautiful Baroque music by voices, strings, keyboards and winds in cantatas, partitas, preludes and fugues, sonatas and suites.
Listening to just one a day would be a good way to spread out and savor the joy of the festival for 10 days while you self-isolate and shelter in place at home.
You can find the videos on YouTube. In the search bar, just type in Virtual Bach Around the Clock 2020, Madison, Wisconsin.
But a much easier and more organized way can be found here on the festival’s home website, which lists the videos in chronological order and links to them: https://bachclock.com/audience-listening-viewing
Try listening to them and tell us what you think about the individual videos and performances — do you have a favorite? — and about mounting the virtual festival.
And, if you like, leave a note of thanks in the Comment section.
The Ear wants to hear.
Here is Day 5:
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