The Chamber Choir of Asia is a professional ensemble of internationally-renowned and award-winning conductors, composers and singers coming together to perform contemporary choral music.

Towards its vision of promoting the ever-changing paradigm of Filipino and Asian compositions which are setting trends in the international stage, the group will have its premiere performance on 11 April 2010, Sunday at 6pm.

The group will be performing the world premiere of Robert Delgado's Asiana Vol 1 and John Pamintuan's Florilegium Op 6.

There will be 50 seats available to the public in this "by invitation only" concert at the Convent of the Sisters of Mary in Biga, Silang, Cavite. (around 15min from Tagaytay).  The proceeds of this charitable launching concert will be donated to the Sisters of Mary and the children of Boys' town.

Kindly contact John Cas at 0917 821 0916 for details.

The John Cage Prepared Piano Project
reposted from the John Cage Trust blogspot
written by Laura Kuhn, Executive Director


One of the very real pleasures of running the John Cage Trust is learning early on about interesting, under-the-radar projects going on around the world involving John Cage's work. This one was brought to my attention late last year by its producer, Ju-Ping Song.

Ms. Song is a pianist at the Pennsylvania Academy of Music in Lancaster. In August 2008 she was charged with creating a new music department, and to "...come up with a first project that would bring new sounds to [students'] ears without alienating them. The works to be performed needed to be interesting enough without being too stylistically or technically difficult. And the end result -- the performance -- had to make a statement, not be just another student recital.

"The Academy is responsible for more than 300 pre-college level students, and as her first project, Ms. Song prepared 16 children aged 6 to 18, along with two adults, for a tag-team performance of Cage's Sonatas & Interludes for Prepared Piano.

This was reportedly the children's first exposure to Cage's music. They learned first about preparing a piano, Ms. Song recounts, along the way being exposed to a kind of music that does not necessarily have a classical tonal center or regular meters. While skeptical at first, the participants were soon won over, and ended up revealing themselves to be children with "open minds and dedicated hearts".

The John Cage Prepared Piano Project was testing ground for a New Sounds Concert Series at Penn Academy, its mission "to create and nurture a need for contemporary art music in our daily lives." With its success came the formation of two new ensembles, both with flexible instrumentation, and a three-concert series planned for this coming spring. The second, performed by NakedEye Ensemble (faculty-based), slated for March 26, will include works by David Lang, Kengo Tokusashi, Luciano Berio, Louis Andriessen, and Kim Helweg. On April 18, the third concert will feature Barefoot Ensemble (student-based) in its first-ever concert of works by Charles Ives, Frederic Rzewski, Peter Hatch, Steve Reich, and John Pamintuan, this last a New Sounds commission for children's choir and ensemble.

But the first concert of the Series, scheduled for February 26, will be given by none other than Ju-Ping Song herself, Founder-Director of the Series, performing works by Cage, Stephen Montague, George Crumb, Peter Hatch, and Rzewski. In addition to her work at the Penn Academy, Ms. Song is a founding member of FLAMEnsemble, an eclectic and flexible group that organizes and performs in a yearly contemporary music festival in Florence. This year FLAMEnsemble's "Musica Esposta" at the Museo Nazionale del Bargello plans to include a non-stop "John Cage Day" on June 24, which, at last count, will feature nearly 50 works!

In addition to its regular concert series, future projects at the Academy include a biannual "Composer Portrait Series", commencing Spring 2010 with a live performance of Philip Glass's music to accompany a rare screening of Godfrey Reggio's complete "Qatsi Trilogy": Koyaanisqatsi, Powaqqatsi, and Nagoyqatsi. In the Spring of 2012, we'll feast upon an ambitious three-day John Cage Centennial Festival, featuring not only Cage's music, but also writings, artworks, and films.

It's going to be a wet and chilly whole week here in Seoul, while I write of a summer activity in Japan this coming May 2010.

Title: the 41st Regular Concert of KANKONREN*
Date : May 30th, 2010 (Sun) pm16:30
Place: Biwako Hall (Shiga prefecture, Japan)
Programme:
1st part: 6 works sung by each of the six choirs
2nd part: festival group of six choirs
PAMINTUAN: from Maior Caritas Op. 5
Nr. 1 Pater Noster
Nr. 3 Memorare
Nr. 4 Crucifixus
Nr. 6 Alma de Cristo
Nr. 14 Maior caritas

*KANKONREN is the abbreviation of KANsai gakusei, KONsei gasshou RENmei (The Choral Association of University Mixed Choruses), composed of choirs from six universities: Kansai University, Kansei Gakuin University, Doshisha University, Ritsumeikan University, Osaka University and Kobe University.

Special thanks to Masahiro Kishimoto for the details

Manila, Philippines (31 Jan 2010).  Brainstorming for the choir started about a year ago when over their usual dinner and bellini, Robert Delgado and John Pamintuan thought of forming an elite group of singers that would go beyond the usual thrust of competitions by amateur choirs.

Things even got better when Dean Acoymo of the UP College of Music suggested that the mandate of the group be: to constantly output new Filipino and Asian choral works, not only to edify Asian choral literature but also to present the ever-changing paradigm of Filipino compositions which always set a trend in the international stage.  It would then be the group's aim to create a strong movement beginning in Southeast Asia affecting the whole world.

And so The Chamber Choir of Asia is born, with much interest and eagerness coming from the invited singers, comprising the creme de la creme of the Philippines' choral music scene.  Once a month, internationally prominent Filipino conductors, composers and singers come together for two hours and sight-sing through the most terribly challenging and demanding choral music ever written and share with each other their musical intelligence, energy and soul.

"It was as if the gods decided to take a break and go down to earth, and play frisbee while singing their music," said an observer.  And of course, the night is not complete without a scrumptious fare, care of the group's dear partners Clawdaddy and Crustasia, through the support of Red Crab Managing Partner, Raymund Magdaluyo, himself a choral enthusiast having sung with the Ateneo College Glee Club.  If music be the bond of our souls, let food be the bond of our hearts.

The group munches about 17 new pieces over the short rehearsal and would have digested a total of about 50 new titles by  John Pamintuan and new arrangements of Asian folksongs by Robert Delgado until the launching concert 11 April 2010 (details TBA). 

As Artistic Director Jonathan Velasco so aptly puts it, "life without music is a mistake; resistance is futile."

postscript: the day after this was published, we received about 480 fan mails and 7,000 hits on our website from 21 countries!  Thank you all for your interest in The Chamber Choir of Asia!  At the moment, membership is by invitation only and will be open to Asian conductors by June 2010.  During the second season concert in September 2010, five conductors from Japan, Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, and Indonesia will perform with the group in the world premiere of a commissioned work from Vytautas Mishkinis.


(click on photo for a larger view)

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In celebration of Robert Schumann's 200th birth year, (1810-2010) Rudolf Golez (pianist) and John Pamintuan (baritone) team up to perform Fantasiestücke Op. 12 and Dichterliebe Op. 48. The concert  series commences in July 2010 in Baguio, followed by recitals in Cebu, Bacolod, Manila, and capped off by performances in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland.  A compact disc recording containing the two long works will also be released.

Fantasiestücke, Op. 12, are eight pieces for piano, written in 1837. Schumann titled the work inspired by the 1814 collection of novellas Fantasiestücke in Callots Manier by his favourite author, E. T. A. Hoffmann, and dedicated it to Fräulein Anna Robena Laidlaw (1819–1901), an accomplished and attractive 18-year old Scottish pianist with whom Schumann had carried on a brief flirtation.*

Dichterliebe, 'The Poet's Love' (composed 1840), is the best-known song cycle of Robert Schumann (Op. 48). The texts for the 16 songs come from the Lyrisches Intermezzo of Heinrich Heine, composed 1822-1823, published as part of the poet's Das Buch der Lieder. Following the song-cycles of Franz Schubert (Die Schöne Müllerin and Winterreise), those of Schumann constitute part of the central core of the genre in musical literature.*

*from wikipedia

Feb 22-25 Seoul, Taegu
Feb 26 Dichterliebe rehearsal
Feb 27 The Chamber Choir of Asia (TCCA) rehearsal
Mar 4-8 Osaka, Kyoto, Kobe
Mar 11-16 Singapore, Indonesia
Mar 22-24 Recording for Sisters of Mary
Mar 25 Dichterliebe rehearsal
Mar 26 TCCA rehearsal
Mar 27-April 7 Germany
April 9-14 TCCA Launching Concert and National Convention
April 15-20 Singapore, Indonesia
April 22-May 18 New York, Pennsylvania
May 20-25 Singapore, Indonesia
May 26 TCCA rehearsal
May 27-30 Osaka


glimpses

of summer:
June - New York, Malaysia, PCDA National Convention
July - Shaoxing, Baguio
Aug - San Francisco, Bacolod, Osaka, Kobe
Sept - Cebu

of autumn:
Oct - Spain
Nov - Germany, Austria, Switzerland

I just received word from Mr. Masahiro Kishimoto from Osaka tonight that six mixed choirs from Japan are coming together in a concert and performing my music in July.  And everybody knows what this means... Yeah! summer parteeh in Nippon!  Although I will also be in Kobe in two weeks, but who will ever get tired of visiting Japan?!

Seriously, it is an honor that KANKONREN, composed of six university mixed choirs in the Kansai area, have chosen to sing my pieces.  Thanks so much to Panamusica (represented by Mr. Satoshi Hattori and Ms. Hideko Hirata), my official distributor of partitur and CDs in Asia, for making my music available to a very wide choral audience!

(click on the logo to redirect to Panamusica site)