Listen to the interview and the live recording here.

Q2′s second Re:Sound broadcast on Wednesday, October 26 at 7 pm will include songs from a live recording of Corey Dargel’s Hold Yourself Together performed by Dargel, James Moore, and Wil Smith at the 92Y Tribeca on October 20, 2011.

Go here to listen to the broadcast once it’s been archived.

Q2 Music presents the second Re:Sound webcast: a special, patchwork-quilt, virtual concert of those pieces which received the most votes over the second half of the American Composers Orchestra’s SONiC: Sounds of a New Century Festival 2011.  Hosted by Olivia Giovetti, tonight’s presentation features performances that took place at Symphony Space, Joyce SoHo, The Stone, 92YTribeca, Roulette, Joe’s Pub and the World Financial Center Winter Garden by a multitude of powerhouse new-music ensembles including Alarm Will Sound, International Contemporary Ensemble and Ensemble Klang.

Program (not in broadcast order, and subject to change):

• Sean Friar: Little Green Pop (Ensemble Klang)
• Konrad Kaczmarak: Points on a Line (Konrad Kaczmarek, piano and electronics)
• Marcos Balter: Edgewater (International Contemporary Ensemble)
• Corey Dargel: Hold Yourself Together (Excerpts) (Innovocal)
• Matt Marks: A Song for Wade (This is Not That Song) (Alarm Will Sound)
• David T. Little: Haunted Topography (Alarm Will Sound)
• Paul Yeon Lee: Echo of a Dream (American Composers Orchestra; George Manahan, conductor)
• Andrew Norman: Unstuck (American Composers Orchestra; George Manahan, conductor)
• Greg Breyer: Bahian Counterpoint (Greg Beyer, berimbau and tape)
• Tristan Perich: qsqsqsqsqqqqqqqqq (Tristan Perich and friends)
• Clint Needham: Color Study (Camerata Aberta)
• Christopher Stark: …And Start West (American Composers Orchestra; George Manahan, conductor)

Mos Def and Brooklyn Phil conductor Alan Pierson

Airdate: October 19, 2011

WNYC’s New Sounds Live and Q2 Music present a live recording of the Brooklyn Philharmonic from the Winter Garden at the World Financial Center performing music by Mos Def, Frederic Rzewski, Lev Zhurbin, David T. Little and Corey Dargel. The concert features a preview of the orchestra’s upcoming season, the first under the energized stewardship of their new conductor, Alan Pierson.  The audio is available here until October 19th, 2011.

Michelle V. Agins/The New York Times

Steve Smith wrote a feature profile on Corey Dargel for the Sunday, May 1st, 2011, edition of the New York Times.  As a bonus, the online version of the article includes streaming and downloadable versions of Corey’s new EP Last Words from Texas.  Below is the text from the article, and here is a PDF of a scan of the newspaper.

A VOICE WHERE ROMANCE AND DYSFUNCTION MEET

by STEVE SMITH

“ARE you really going to ask me that?” the composer and vocalist Corey Dargel inquired near the end of a sprawling conversation one recent evening, his measured tone briefly betraying impatience and resignation. What bothered him was being asked how he felt about his constant characterization as an artist whose work concerns bridging the gap between classical and popular music. Though not inaccurate, the description has become convenient shorthand, warding off deeper investigation of his work.

“It’s not something I think about,” Mr. Dargel said. “When I sit down to write, I don’t think, ‘All right, I’m going to write a piece that’s 20 percent jazz and 40 percent indie rock,’ or ‘I’m going to write an indie-classical piece.’ I don’t even define my audience when I’m writing something.”

But the question, however esoteric, points to the way Mr. Dargel’s work has in turn been defined by audiences and critics alike. At the age of 33 he has built a profile as a writer of distinctive art songs that show his compositional ingenuity and his knack for pop-inspired directness, all delivered in his smooth, deadpan baritone. His lyrics, almost exclusively self-written, deal whimsically and sympathetically with romance, dysfunction and, often, their intersection.

“Corey writes catchy, sweet-sounding songs that contain hidden difficulties, both in their subjects and in the music itself,” the composer Judd Greenstein wrote in an e-mail. New Amsterdam Records, the influential new-music label Mr. Greenstein helped to found, has released two albums by Mr. Dargel. “His songs are like Trojan horses, using their surface charms to get past your emotional defenses, then delivering their subtle, nuanced messages on repeated listens,” Mr. Greenstein added.

Initially confined to downtown clubs and alternative spaces in New York, Mr. Dargel’s career has built serious momentum during recent seasons, and this month brings three high-profile engagements. On Tuesday Mr. Dargel will reprise selections from “Removable Parts,” a 2007 cycle, for a New York Festival of Song program assembled by the composer Phil Kline. “Say Yes,” a new group of songs, will have its premiere on May 11 during the MATA Festival. And on May 23 the string quartet Ethel will accompany Mr. Dargel in an ambitious recent work, “What Might Have Been,” during the Tribeca New Music Festival.

“I’m constantly worried that I might be boring, so I might bring that up every once in a while,” Mr. Dargel said, laughing gently, near the start of an interview at a restaurant in Carroll Gardens, Brooklyn, where he has lived almost exclusively since arriving in New York in 2001. He hardly needs to worry. Lean and wiry, with a cleanshaven head, a penetrating gaze and a placid smile, Mr. Dargel is arresting even before he speaks, let alone sings.

The child of musical parents in McAllen, Tex., a town chiefly notable for its proximity to Mexico and its exorbitant health-care costs, Mr. Dargel felt the creative urge from an early age. During childhood piano lessons, he said, he preferred to offer his own creations rather than laboriously practice music composed by others.

Epiphany turned up, against all odds, in a shopping-mall record store. “There were probably like 10 or 15 classical CDs in their classical music section, and one of them happened to be ‘Tehillim’ by Steve Reich,” Mr. Dargel said. “I don’t know why, but I picked that one up, I think because it had a photo of a living person on the cover, and not some work of art from the Romantic period. That was my first exposure to any music written after 1900, basically.”

Newly aware that composing could be a serious pursuit, Mr. Dargel enrolled at 17 in the Interlochen Arts Academy, a fine-arts boarding school in Michigan. But there was another, more pressing reason to leave home.

“One of the reasons that I left Texas was that I was gay, and there was no one out or openly gay at the time,” Mr. Dargel said. “My parents would not have accepted that I was gay, and in fact, when I came out to them, tried to get me to go to rehabilitation therapy. Before I came out to them, I left and went to Interlochen Arts Academy, because I thought that that would maybe be a place where I could meet other gay people.” (Mr. Dargel added that he now has a healthy relationship with his parents.)

After Interlochen he spent a year at the University of Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music, then moved on to the Oberlin College Conservatory in Ohio to study with Pauline Oliveros and John Luther Adams. Mr. Dargel emphatically cited Mr. Adams as an enduring mentor.

“His and my music could not be more dissimilar,” Mr. Dargel said, “but he had a respect for what I was doing, as I did and still do for what he’s doing. He was able to meet me where I was and to get me to ask the right questions about what I wanted to do and what I was trying to do.”

Mr. Adams returned the admiration. “I worked with a lot of remarkable young musicians there, but he was certainly among the most remarkable I’ve ever worked with anywhere,” he said of Mr. Dargel, who was already mixing avant-garde impulses, Neo-Classical clarity and pop-music influences.

“In particular I think I heard the Smiths and Morrissey in what Corey was doing,” Mr. Adams said. “But I also thought I heard the troubadours and the trouvères.”

After graduating from Oberlin, Mr. Dargel moved to New York with his partner, Yvan Greenberg, a lapsed composer turned stage director and graphic designer. The move hastened a decisive shift in Mr. Dargel’s compositional trajectory.

“I knew I was moving to New York, I didn’t know a lot of people here, and I knew that I could sing,” he said. “I started to write lyrics that I felt somewhat confident about. I had the equipment to make and sing my own songs without having to rely on other musicians, and I just felt like that was a pragmatic thing to do.”

Mr. Dargel’s earliest New York songs, like “Accutane” and “Little Blue Pill,” sound like quirky, kinetic indie pop, with rubbery keyboards, chittering drum machines and darkly playful lyrics about physical infirmities. In time he used a laptop computer to fashion accompaniments that could sound paradoxically natural. (Asked what composing programs he uses, he wryly suggested “spyware.”)

More recently Mr. Dargel has focused on works meant for live collaboration, some involving elements of theater and dance. Kathleen Supové, a pianist of flamboyantly stagey inclinations, is integral to “Removable Parts,” a heartbreaking work inspired by people longing to become amputees. Mr. Dargel created “What Might Have Been,” a breezy meditation on nostalgia and its obsolescence, as part of a Brooklyn Philharmonic fellowship. The overtly homoerotic “Say Yes” he wrote to sing with the quartet Dither. “It’s me and four dudes playing electric guitars,” he said, emphasizing “dudes” in a manner suggesting an image as likely as spotting Mr. Dargel in a football scrimmage.

Mr. Dargel is writing for other voices now as well. He composed the epigrammatic “Last Words From Texas,” based on the statements of death-row prisoners, for Mellissa Hughes, a busy, versatile soprano. (He had also recorded the work himself.) And Ms. Hughes will play a role in “The Three Christs,” Mr. Dargel’s opera in progress about people with Messianic delusions.

A persistent inclination toward risky subjects, Mr. Dargel realizes, was shaped by his early feelings of doubt and isolation. “I really do almost always try to find a topic or subject that at first I find sort of off-putting or alienating, or at least difficult to relate to,” he said, “and then do enough research into it to where I empathize with people who are in these situations or have these conditions. And I try to find ways of letting audiences see how they’re connected to these characters.”

Eine Kline Nachtmusik: Phil Kline and Corey Dargel Get Vocal
Monday, May 02, 2011

Our parent station WNYC proved this in 2006 when they commissioned Kline’s John the Revelator, a modern mass designed for the cathedral-like space of the Winter Garden. And even though I’m of the wrong religious persuasion, I’ve been finding special resonance in this work coming off of Holy Week (and, for my team, Passover).

On May 3, Kline adds another feather in his cap when he curates NYFOS Next, a New Music arm of the New York Festival Song and part of the Baryshnikov Arts Center’s Movado Hour. Joining Kline are three generations of contemporary composers with an alarming talent for writing vocal works, including Meredith Monk, friend of the show David Lang and our postmodern Schubert, Corey Dargel.

Dargel joins us online at 4 pm for a live chat about writing for the voice and performing as a vocalist — and how those two components coalesce in works like Removable Parts, which was featured on Dargel’s 2010 album for New Amsterdam, Someone Will Take Care of Me. Join us in window below, tweet your comments and/or questions beforehand with the hashtag #q2new, or leave them as comments at the bottom of the page.

We’ll hear Removable Parts — an opus that is the culmination of extensive research on Dargel’s part and speaks to how we navigate relationships (not to mention art song) in the 21st Century. It’s one half of Dargel’s splendid 2010 release, Someone Will Take Care of Me, which is Q2′s Album of the Week (you can nab a free download from this disc below). Also on the menu is a special live recording from the 2009 Bang on a Can Marathon of Kline’s John the Revelator, designed to appeal to saints and sinners alike.

]]> http://automaticheartbreak.com/2011/04/composers-at-play/feed/ 0 http://automaticheartbreak.com/2011/02/live-recording-of-other-peoples-love-songs-on-wqxr/ http://automaticheartbreak.com/2011/02/live-recording-of-other-peoples-love-songs-on-wqxr/#comments Thu, 10 Feb 2011 14:19:15 +0000 admin http://automaticheartbreak.com/?p=1450 The amazing Damon Whittemore of Valvetone recorded and mixed the entire Ecstatic Music Festival Marathon concert for WQXR/Q2.  If you go there, you can listen to each act.  Here’s a stream of my set, performing Other People’s Love Songs with NOW Ensemble and accordionist Nathan Koci:

photo by Stephen Taylor

On the indie-music reviews site Adequacy.net, Nicolay writes about his top 5 albums of 2010.  This is what he says about Corey’s album Someone Will Take Care of Me:

This is a two-disc set from the post-classical splash-makers New Amsterdam Records, which compiles two of Dargel’s song cycles: “Removable Parts,” a collaboration with pianist Kathy Supove on the topic of voluntary amputation; and “Thirteen Near-Death Experiences,” an ironic meditation on hypochondria and pathology with the International Contemporary Ensemble. It’s the latter that interests me most, in which Dargel’s customary soundworld – electronic cross-rhythms, skittering piano obbligato, and deadpan despair that lies somewhere at the intersection of art song, early Magnetic Fields, and Momus – is re-scored for acoustic chamber ensemble and drum kit, and holds itself, coyly, just short of anthemic. (Or maybe I’m just into flutes this year?)

Franz Nicolay photo by Miles Kerr