LOCAL
“EVERY TIME I WRITE A PIECE, I FEEL LIKE I’M STARTING FROM SCRATCH.”
BEAT
{BY MARGARET WELSH}
Been to a local concert in the last decade? You’ve probably crossed paths with Hugh Twyman. Since 2004, Twyman has been documenting the local music scene on his HughShows website, where he posts artist interviews, reviews and — primarily — photos of the many local and touring acts he sees every year. This year, Twyman — with assitance from J Vega of the Wilderness Recording Studio — is branching out further, celebrating 10 years of HughShows with a monthly series of concerts he’s calling HughShows Live. After considering an all-day festival, he began to think instead about a series at local record stores. “I always loved to go to in-store performances, but there are hardly any around,” he says. A couple of stores showed interest, but it turned out that the folks at Eide’s Entertainment had recently built a stage on the third floor, which they had yet to use. “It was pretty much a perfect match,” Twyman says. The inaugural show features The Red Western, Paul Luc and Household Stories, and Twyman already has musicians booked through June. “It’s mostly indie pop, indie folk, indie rock — that’s what I like to listen to,” he says. And, since HughShows Live takes place in a record store on Saturday afternoon, it’s an opportunity for anyone to see bands that generally only play 21-and-over venues. This first show will also feature representatives from the Homeless Children’s Education Fund and the Greater Pittsburgh Community Food Bank, collecting donations of new school supplies and non-perishable food items. Currently, Twyman plans to run the series through the year, if not longer — there are still at least 30 bands and artists he’d like to include. Ultimately, as with Twyman’s website, the goal is to showcase the Pittsburgh music scene. “When I first started, I was more into the national bands and kind of dismissed the local bands,” he says. “But over the years, I’ve found that we have a lot talented people who are making incredible music. That’s what keeps me going.” MWELSH@PGHCITYPAPER.COM
HUGHSHOWS LIVE. 2-5 p.m. Sat., Jan. 11. Eide’s Entertainment, 1121 Penn Ave., Strip District. Free. hughshowsredux.blogspot.com
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Here’s looking at Hugh: Hugh Twyman {PHOTO COURTESY OF HUGH TWYMAN}
TWYMAN COMES ALIVE
BETWEEN
THE NOTES {PHOTO BY HEATHER MULL}
{BY ANDY MULKERIN}
M
ATHEW ROSENBLUM is looking at some sheet music, and he’s excited. For one thing, it’s sheet music unlike what you’d expect: Through most of the score, there’s no staff and no time signature, and the directions don’t say stuff like “andante,” but instead make references to emotions, non-musical ideas, animal sounds. They’re “graphic scores” written by American composer Burr Van Nostrand, and beside being innovative and experimental, they’re c l o s e t o R o s e n b l u m b e c a u s e Va n Nostrand served as a mentor to him when he was in school. Van Nostrand, though, went largely unnoticed for a great deal of his life, only finding something of a renaissance in recent years, with New World Records releasing his works on CD, and bigname critics like Alex Ross singing his praises. It’s easy for a composer, not unlike a pop songwriter, to toil in obscurity for a long time. And that’s a challenge Mathew Rosenblum has taken on, as a faculty member at the
PITTSBURGH CITY PAPER 01.08/01.15.2014
Keeping composed: Mathew Rosenblum
University of Pittsburgh and a well regarded new-music composer who is known for working with microtonality, tones that fall between the notes of the standard scale. In fact, he knew even in high school in Queens, where he grew up, that the kind of work he did might not gain him a ton of fame.
MUSIC ON THE EDGE PRESENTS H2 SAXOPHONE QUARTET PLAYING
MATHEW ROSENBLUM’S “MÖBIUS LOOP.” 8 p.m. Sat., Jan. 11. The Andy Warhol Museum, 117 Sandusky St., North Side. $10-20. All ages. 412-237-8300 or www.music.pitt.edu/mote
“A bass player who sat in as the director of our jazz band asked us all if we wanted to write for the jazz band,” Rosenblum, who started as a saxophonist, recalls. “I wrote a sort of way outside, free-form thing that was based on music
I was listening to at the time — the Jazz Composers Orchestra was what was going on in New York. And [the high school jazz band] played it, and it was kind of wild, and he took me aside and said, ‘I would get all your music played right now in this semester, because you’re never ever going to hear your stuff again.’” He laughs about it today, but that’s a sentiment often directed toward contemporary composers whose work is challenging; being a composer working off the beaten path, then, often involves not just writing music, but creating spaces where people can find it. That’s why Rosenblum and his Pitt colleague Eric Moe together run Music on the Edge, a series that brings chamber-music ensembles to Pittsburgh, usually The Andy Warhol Museum, to play contemporary works. Moe and Rosenblum first met in San Francisco when Moe lived there in the 1980s. “I had a new-music ensemble there,” Moe recalls. “We were always looking for the coolest stuff we could