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/hatsune miku is electronica reaching a different pop audience

26 January, 2013
author: Adam Cuthbért, music, observations, sight, sound
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Everyone in America knows what American pop music sounds like.  Here’s what some pop music from a relatively large niche international population sounds like.

Hatsune Miku, the explosively popular pop singer who is literally a synth.

Hatsune Miku, the explosively popular pop singer who is literally a synth.

Downtempo/chill beat: (with some awesome Chinese violin)

Pop/rock ballad form:

And my favorite setting for Miku, trance:

Composed with electronic samples both recorded and synthesized, pop melodies are presented in a sonic palette about as wide as YouTube is big, with the common ground in the singer, Hatsune Miku （初音ミク）: a synthesizer in Yamaha’s VOCALOID software with an associative anime character as an avatar. Read More

Adam Cuthbért

13 December, 2012
author: Adam Cuthbért, music, reblogs, sight, sound
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Reblogged from Musicuratum:

In New York, operating in the realm between classical and experimental and electronic music that’s so well-established in that city, there’s a young composer whose music is – to resort for once to a much-misused word – ravishing in its smooth sonic beauty, Adam Cuthbért: it’s a quality that is pronounced in his piece “Rikai アダム・カスバートの「理解」,” included in the playlist, and even more evident, perhaps by virtue of the omission of the visual accompaniment, in the tracks he’s uploaded on his…

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A new friend from Amsterdam known only as Musicuratum, whom I met via the budding community of the newly and heavily upgraded Soundcloud, recently did me the biggest honor a composer can be done: he listened to ALL of the music I've posted on the internet. Seriously, I don't think even my mother has taken that time.  As if that wasn't enough to earn my eternal gratitude, he wrote this feature on his blog after we conversed for a while via Soundcloud's messaging system.

Do make time to peruse Musicuratum - I'm rather amazed with the sheer quantity of curated content his blog contains. It's yet another reason to join Soundcloud, and above all a really beautiful testament to the size of the body of good music that's out there on the internet, waiting to be discovered.

dog days: life is beautiful (and horrific)

7 October, 2012
author: Adam Cuthbért, reviews, sight, sound
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Prince (John Kelly) and Lisa (Lauren Worsham)

Let’s talk about Dog Days, because it’s a relatively rare circumstance for a piece of art to compel me to hop on a bus to New Jersey two weekends in a row. This post-apocalyptic opera was so dense with subtleties in the score and staging, topics of existential crises, and straight up gorgeous moments of performance, there was too much to fully absorb with just one viewing. But as I sit here trying to write about it, I’m finding it somewhat difficult to pinpoint what specifically lured me to a second performance.

And a bare warning for the rest of this post, I will be merciless with spoilers. It’s rather difficult to talk about the important stuff without spoiling the best scenes.
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bodies in motion

11 July, 2012
author: Jillián Robb, music, previews, sight, sound
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by Jillián Robb

Daniel and Adam wrote another piece.  That’s the short version, and it’s perpetually true.

Photo by Amanda Pitts

Daniel and several dancers involved in “Bodies in Motion.”

Daniel and Adam wrote a piece of music for the 2012 Cultural Olympiad, using orchestration for chamber orchestra, percussion, iPad, and Wii-mote, to be performed simultaneously by artists in three different countries.  That’s only the beginning of the long version,  and that’s the point where most people start to look at me funny.

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cellophilia breaks out in tribeca

15 June, 2012
author: Adam Cuthbért, reviews, sight, sound
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Soundcheck for Steve Reich’s Cello Counterpoint. Photo courtesy of Matt Frey

by Adam Cuthbért

W4 New Music Collective, a team of young composers fresh out of NYU, brought their Kickstarted Cellophilia production to the main stage of 92Y TriBeCa for a delightfully large crowd. Interested in curating themed shows full of newly composed pieces, the team chose the many faces of the cello as their topic of the night. With nine tunes on the program spanning nearly two hours, the show gave us a wonderfully diverse “how-to” on the cello as it explored different ensemble sizes (from one to eight), staging possibilities (on the stage and surrounding the audience), electronic integrations, and aesthetic possibilities of one of the most tried and true instruments of the Western music canon.
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