Thread: April 21st to May 1st: The 34th Annual Cleveland Thyagaraja Aradhana Festival

Cleveland Ohio is the scene of America's biggest Karnatak Festival, and the biggest one outside of India itself. Takes place sometime around Easter each year. Ekutcheri and iCarnatic will be offering both free and paid webcasting services throughout the festival.

anyone new to Indian Classical Music should check it out, I think you'll like the freshness of improvisation in compositions that has sort of died out in Western Classical over the last 150 years.

http://www.aradhana.org/

Originally Posted by chee_zee

anyone new to Indian Classical Music should check it out, I think you'll like the freshness of improvisation in compositions that has sort of died out in Western Classical over the last 150 years.

I'd say improvisation made a slight comeback in Western classical from about the mid-20th C onwards. If you think of improvisation, aleatory and indeterminancy in performance as being of the same genus of real-time composition, then guys like Cage, Cardew, Brown, Stockhausen etc turned towards freer forms. Often the performers have little more than some lines on a page with no reference to pitch or duration, leaving a lot of the outcome down to the musicians. Then there were groups like Musica Elettronica Viva and AMM who were pure improv. The nadir for improvised classical would be around the end of the 19thC/early 20th.

it's dead again though, when's the last time you saw any of those names at the london, new york, or vienna philharmonics? about the only improv is during the cadenzas of concertos

Originally Posted by chee_zee

it's dead again though, when's the last time you saw any of those names at the london, new york, or vienna philharmonics? about the only improv is during the cadenzas of concertos

There is more to classical than just what the big philharmonic orchestras play. That's like judging all Indian music off of Bollywood soundtracks or Bhangra because they are the most popular.

I don't think a lot of those guys were really making music that could be performed by those orchestras anyway and certainly weren't writing too many formal concertoes with cadenzas. Modern classical is so splintered now that it's impossible to categorise much of it except for the obvious stuff like Part, Higdon, Adams, Golijov etc that are clearly rooted in tradition.

I'm not saying most new classical contains improvisation, just that there exists plenty that gives lots of room to the performers and the overall sound is dependent on this freedom.