Now that the dust has settled on this project, I’d like to say a few words about it.
The Grand Valley State University New Music Ensemble is a pretty amazing group.
A couple years ago they managed to blow everyone’s minds with a series of killer performances of Steve Reich’s Music for 18 Musicians, culminating in a critically-acclaimed recording for Innova. This year, they’ve done it again, releasing a new recording of Terry Riley’s In C along with 18 remixes by electronic artists from all over the spectrum (and world.)
I was honored to be one of those remixers, and even more honored to spend some time with the students in October and November. I visited GVSU, did a little teaching and provided live electronics for performances of In C with the group on their campus and at (Le) Poisson Rouge in New York.
Playing In C at LPR (photo: Hiroyuki Ito for The New York Times)
The press around this group makes a lot of noise about how their Midwestern pedigree makes them such an unlikely success story. Maybe some of that is true, but that’s the sort of narrative that sells newspapers; not CDs.
The real reason they’re successful is because they play the hell out of this music.
Go buy their stuff.
The reason people are surprised is that the people writing these articles are New Yorkers. Now I love NYC and I love New Yorkers, but the fact is that New Yorkers are as provincial as anyone else in the world. They THINK that they’re not because NYC is supposedly the center of the universe (totally untrue), but the fact is that most New Yorkers have hardly been anywhere else in the country and don’t realize that there are fabulous musicians everywhere.