Third Coast Percussion
MoMA Sculpture Garden
Thursday, August 9

Better than: Watching almost any contemporary DJ, since Cage was mixing vinyl and live radio with live performance before World War II.

Some 69 years ago in 1943 (more than a decade before the first issue of the Village Voice was published), a 30-year-old composer named John Cage made his debut at the Museum of Modern Art. What he presented, some wrote at the time, was described more as "noise" than as "music," but that may not have bothered him too much.

"Percussion music really is the art of noise, and that's what it should be called," Cage wrote, and that statement was quoted in the program for "Revolution: The Cage Century," a concert by Third Coast Percussion in the Museum of Modern Art's sculpture garden that served as the final event of Thursday's daylong John Cage Day celebration.

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WQXR has just released a beautiful YouTube video of rocker/poet/memoirist/artist Patti Smith talking about her top five favorite operas. The list is pretty traditional (Wagner, Puccini, Verdi) in the Western European sense; and, given her close collaborative relationship with Philip Glass, it's a bit of a surprise not to see Einstein on the Beach or (since romanticism seems to be her thing) even Satyagraha or Akhnaten. Still, it's a beautiful video of a musical artist explaining in very personal terms how music touches her. It's kind of fascinating for Smith fans and opera fans alike, and sweet to see how sentimental a rocker can get about Tristan und Isolde. Video below.

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Jason Crane is the creator, producer, distributor and host of The Jazz Session, an excellent in-depth interview show. This summer, Crane's taking the show on the road with the "Jazz or Bust" tour, a jaunt that, he told SOTC, was inspired by his wandering spirit, his desire to see jazz musicians in their homes, and his facing homelessness in New York.

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The Beastles, Boston-based dj BC's well-received (but ultimately unauthorized and subsequently yanked offline) Beatles-Beastie Boys mash-up, is now fully available online. In memory of Adam Yauch, Bob Cronin (dj BC's alter ego) has decided to face any potential legal wrath from publishing companies and repost The Beastles and its 2006 followup, Let It Beast.

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Philip Glass and Tim Fain Play Chamber Works
The Temple Of Dendur, Metropolitan Museum of Art
Saturday, April 21

Better than: Battling tourists to enjoy what may be the most beautiful room in New York City.

The Sackler Wing of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, containing the more than two-millennium old Temple of Dendur, is by itself one of the most stunning interior spaces in all of New York City, in this writer's humble opinion. On Saturday night, when it became the latest venue for celebrating Philip Glass's 75th birthday as the composer took to a Steinway (joined by the violinist Tim Fain), it also became apparent that it has some of the best acoustics for listening to solo instrumentation.

It's not just that the visual beauty added to experiencing Glass's chamber pieces. Glass's compositions, simultaneously modern and classical, created a nice juxtaposition with the space. Many of Glass's scores have combined a certain modernism with classical subjects (Akhenaten, Kepler, Dracula). The effect is that Glass can simultaneously fuse together a new perspective on an old subject—forcing the listener/viewer to examine the past in a fresh way—while also simultaneously tying various eras together in such a way that the challenges, ideas and struggles their populations once faced feel timeless and connected to the listener now.

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It's been a big year for composers and milestone birthdays. Sound Of The City has spent much of the year covering the 75th birthday celebrations for composer Philip Glass (which will continue next weekend when Glass plays the Temple Of Dendur with Tim Fain), and now it's time to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the birth of John Cage. Unlike Glass, Cage will not be here for the festivities—he died in 1992, in St. Vincen't Hospital —but his contributions to modern composition are every bit as important as Glass's.

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Steve Pyke

We've spent the past month publishing our conversations with East Village and Voice neighbor Philip Glass. For our last installment, we pulled a question out of our hat from our days traveling around the country in recording oral history in an Airstream trailer...

I spent a year working for the NPR StoryCorps project, and a question I saw people ask each other a lot at the end of interviews, which I found so fascinating to hear people from different walks of life, was just asking the person: what do you think love is? And I'd love to hear if you had thoughts on that.

Well that's a very interesting idea. That's a very interesting question.

We have very different dimensions of it, but I don't want to throw the question entirely back at you.

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The Park Avenue Armory on Friday night.

This year's Park Avenue Armory Tune-In Music Festival was dedicated to honoring composer Philip Glass (who, in turn, turned over a large chunk of it to honoring Allen Ginsberg). Sound of the City attended three of the weekend's five offerings, which closed out a month of musical events around the city celebrating Glass and his 75th birthday.

The Poet Speaks: Patti Smith, Philip Glass, Lenny Kaye, Jesse Smith, and the poetry of Allen Ginsberg
Park Avenue Armory
Friday, February 24

Better than: Every Occupy Wall Street musical act.

The Park Avenue Armory is one of the grandest, most amazing performance spaces in New York City, but Friday's performance began simply and intimately. Philip Glass and Patti Smith, two icons of a certain age, walked out onstage with their arms around each others' shoulders, like two old friends. The carpets in front of the stage, where people in the cheapest (and best) seats in the house, worked at recreating the environment, as Glass described to us, of his loft decades ago. Though a recreating, the effect worked.

What did not work—in fact, what would be an unfortunate undercurrent through out the festival—was the sound system. No one could hear poor Smith as she started to address the audience, who seemed surprisingly nervous to begin with and who looked downright spooked as people shouted, "Louder! Louder!! LOUDER!!!" at her.

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Throughout this month, in conjunction with our Feb. 1 cover story "Philip Glass, An East Village Voice," Sound of the City will post excepts of interviews with Glass and his collaborators, as well as reviews of several concerts celebrating his 75th birthday.

Today we dial back to longtime Voice music writer Tom Johnson. In our interview with Glass, he credited Johnson (who is also a composer) with being the only music writer covering the scene downtown when he was getting started, as "The New York Times, for example—they had a rule that they didn't review any art events below 14th Street... Believe it or not, that was a policy of the paper!" Glass has even reportedly told others that he believes Johnson coined the term "minimalism."

Before we head off to the Park Avenue Armory to see Philip Glass perform his epic, mammoth five-hour long "Music in 12 Parts" tomorrow night, we thought we'd take a look at Johnson's review of the same piece exactly four decades ago.

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"Make a note!" Glass in an old, rare endorsement for...Cutty Sark?

Every day this month, in conjunction with our Feb. 1 cover story "Philip Glass, An East Village Voice," Sound of the City will post excepts of interviews with Glass and his collaborators, as well as reviews of several concerts celebrating his 75th birthday.

In this segment of our interview, we discuss the intersection of economics, art and music. As we noted in our cover story, Glass started his recording company with a $1,000 loan from the Hebrew Loan Society. The landscape for such sources of capital has changed drastically since Glass first arrived in the city, and the reality of digital downloads (something Glass has largely accepted) has dried up many sources of revenue.

So how else is the artist to get paid for their work—especially in New York City? Glass says this if his music is used commercially:

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