#22 — THE LATEST ON CANNOPY
Jim White, Detlev Glanert, The Knights and more!
Dear Reader,
Thank you for tuning into the Cannopy Newsletter — your one-stop shop for everything under our big tent! We’ve been having some great conversations across our three coverage packages (more information on these packages below), beginning with The Knights, a Brooklyn-based classical ensemble that’s rewriting the script on what a mid-sized orchestra can do. Other highlights include drummer Jim White’s debut solo album — released at the age of 62 — likewise upending expectations of what a drum album can sound like. On the jazz front, we spotlight one of CANNOPY’s own illustrators, Kalya Ramu, whose day-job as a jazz vocalist has yielded a new single titled “Hold Me Close”. In the visual arts, we explore an ecocritical history of minimalist art and touch down in Gwanju to see how a Korean-Russian artist is mixing folklore and feminism.
As an independent outlet, we rely on the support of readers like you to continue our in-depth conversations with global artists across various art forms. Please subscribe for free to our three newsletter packages, and consider becoming a paid member for full and exclusive access to new artists profiles and our archival content. —Michael Zarathus-Cook | Chief Editor
A great deal of competing factors would have to align before we notice a sea change in how large orchestra’s leverage their resources towards more intimate and spontaneous musical encounters. In the meantime, we can look at the examples set by the growing list of small-to-mid-sized ensembles punching above their weight without losing hold of a peculiar administrative looseness that trickles down into the overall vibe of their concerts. That is the sweet spot that The Knights — a Brooklyn-based orchestral collective ─ have carved for themselves, with some compelling results. —Keep reading
Speaking with German composer Detlev Glanert, one gets the feeling of speaking to an artist at large, and a poet at heart. With passing quips such as “I have doubts about simple music,” and “I don't reinvent the wheel, but I'm interested to travel,” his penchant for the written word is apparent. This penchant derives perhaps from his prolific output as one of the foremost opera composers in Europe—his latest, The Jewish woman of Toledo, premiered at Dresden’s Semperoper this February, with Robert Carsen in the director’s chair. That’s just one of the notable debuts for the tireless composer this year. —Keep reading
Kalya and Valério came together for an artist-on-artist session ─ a format you’ll be seeing more of across Cannopy ─ and dissected the anatomical layers of “Hold Me Close”. Going back to the inception of their creative duo, and the introduction of Christian’s woodwind layer, they likewise discuss loose path towards a possible album in the future—and the beauty of just enjoying these one-off singles in the moment. —Keep reading
At the base of a stairway cut from a stone wall in the village of Cully, Switzerland, is a glass enclosure resembling a large mid-century pill, balanced on a thin steel plinth. Inside, at the time of writing, is a diptych of symmetrical ears in acrylic under glass. In the right ear (our left) is a butterfly at rest beside the canal's entrance, with wings like inverted auricles. Third Ear by Sarah Margnetti is 16 x 24 cm, but because of its miniature setting in the Kunsthalle Marcel Duchamp (KMD) at The Forestay Museum of Art, it imposes itself on any passerby who stoops to view it. —Keep reading
As a media artist and experimental filmmaker, Colby Richardson has forged a path that defies conventional categorization. Embracing the ubiquity of everyday devices, he imbues them with unexpected purposes and transforms them into artistic instruments. From harnessing the native functions of iPhones in capturing video to unleashing the transformative power of Microsoft PowerPoint, Richardson breathes new life into familiar tools, revealing their hidden artistic potential. —Keep reading
What does it mean to be an empowered woman, and what role can femininity play on the world stage across cultures? Expanding from a robust cannon of portraits, painter Marina Ogai devises soft, sensual, and defiantly feminine abstract compositions. As a contemporary Russian painter based in South Korea, Ogai’s diverse cultural experiences have attuned her to the impact of contrasting cultural norms and awoken a passion for advocating against barriers rooted in gender inequality. Working within the collective bid to dismantle the patriarchy, Ogai forms an imaginative space based on folklore and stories from her ancestral homelands, exposing hidden narratives of beautifully brave and fierce femininity. —Keep reading
There are quite a few unique features to drummer Jim White’s All Hits: Memories. For one, the thirteen songs on the album average a length of about 120 seconds—ranging from short kinetic explosions of sound to full atmospheric orchestrations. For a drum album, it is noticeably un-drumlike, at least in the conventional sense of what a kit can do and what White has done across three decades of collaborations with the like of Cat Power, Mary Margaret O’Hara, PJ Harvey, Bill Callahan, Bonnie “Prince” Billy and others. A decidedly unconventional concept album is, of course, not novel, but sifting through the layers of All Hits will reveal to the listener an album that isn’t trying to be unconventional. For White, it came easy. From the experimental song-lengths, synthetic arrangements, and meandering percussions that staggers all over the album’s soundscape—all of it felt seemingly effortless and native to a musician that’s embodied a lifetime of hits across kit and keyboard. —Keep reading
During the 1960s, the glossy surfaces and industrial fabrication of minimalist painting and sculpture heralded a radical new approach to the usage of materials in art. What’s been left unsaid in the history of minimalism – and is an increasingly pressing concern today — are the extractive processes that produced many of minimalism’s iconic materials, such as aluminum and the crude oil byproduct, Plexiglas. There are two contemporaneous pieces that can help excavate the ways the process of extraction has materially informed minimalist art, and point towards an ecocritical revision of its history. —Keep reading
Ask Houck and he’d tell you that “Revelator”, which opens the album, is probably the best song he’s ever written. Long-time listeners of Phosphorescent might bristle at the thought that anything new could top the sprawling list of songs that feature Houck singing with this spleen in that jaded and frayed tenor he’s perfected over the last twenty years. First-time listeners might hear in Revelator a hint of the “sad dad rock” that’s become the fashionable detour for once-raging troubadours now climbing gently into their forties. —Keep reading
CANNOPY is a collection of nine genre-specific newsletters across three packages.
— The Performing Arts Package brings you these 3 newsletters:
1) Hubs & Huddles, covering performing arts organizations
2) Ensemble, covering artists in classical music and opera
3) Ellington, covering jazz artists
— The Visual Arts Package brings you these 3 newsletters:
4) Spaces, covering gallery and exhibit venues
5) Materials, profiling various mediums of expression in the visual arts
6) Studio Session, profiling visual artists and the ideas that inspire them
— The Alternative Arts Package brings you these 3 newsletters:
7) Alt.itude, covering global artists working in alternative music
8) Arts & Letters, covering the art of the written word
9) Homegrown, covering Canadian artists working in alternative music
That’s a lot of newsletters! We know it’s hard to keep pace with all of these newsletters, so we created this Cannopy Newsletter that brings you highlights and latest posts across all of our publications. This compilation also reflects our mission to bring a broad outlook on the arts under one umbrella. That said, we also want to prioritize the art forms you love the most. So please consider subscribing to the packages that speak to you the most. While most of our content is behind a paywall, we also occasionally publish pieces for free, and every article features a free preview so you know what you’re subscribing to.
You might have noticed that none of the newsletters above cover, film, dance, or theatre—we’re working on it! Our forthcoming Soundstage Package will feature three newsletters: In Focus (film), In Motion (dance), and 4th Wall (theatre). This fourth package will complete the 12-tone collection of genre-specific publications that we call CANNOPY. We’re really really really excited for this final installation—our subscribers here will be the first to know when it launches!
As always, we’d love to hear from you about your reading experience and things you’d like us to change to make this platform better tailored to your tastes, needs, and interests. Please use the comment or chat features on Substack, or respond directly to this email, to share your thoughts with myself and our team.