Yes, we’re back! We never actually went away, it’s just that Make Music New York represents the final point of a months-long process of organization and mobilization, and so summer is a time for a little hibernation. That’s part of the process too, at least for the blog; lie in a cool, dark space for a while, let the images, memories and words stew around for a bit until they start to make some sense . . .

We hope all of you had a great time at MMNY, as we did. Each year seems to be a step forward in every direction, with more musicians, more venues, more styles and more special events (one of our brand-new special events was, unfortunately but understandably, not open to the public: on June 20, Rikers Island hosted Funk Island). There was far too much music for any group of people to take in. On the central North-South axis in Manhattan we were able to get to, the experience was great, even spectacular.

We began at dawn in Central Park for the Yoko Ono Secret Piece. The Park is surprisingly busy at 5:00am, with groups of people exercising, sprinklers running automatically and the ever present sound of cars on the surrounding streets. Still, it was lovely and stimulating to be there, and the impression was that the piece succeeded on Ono’s terms. It’s meant to define an environment where the individual is deeply conscious of the surrounding woods, and if the contemplative feeling that we carried around all day long was evidence, it worked.

Next stop, the entirely different environs of Wall Street, for GROUP and a tremendous performance of composer Louis Andriessen’s Hoketus. It’s difficult to play music outside, you have to work against either wide-open spaces or overly reflective echoes. The music was ricocheting across the street in an exaggeration of the hocket technique that Andriessen uses, but the power of the sound and the fabulous precision of the musicians made it work. It was great to see traders in their floor jackets wander out of the stock exchange to see what the hell was going on!

By this time, the early afternoon, it already seemed like a full day, but it was time to head back up to Central Park for SWELTER. Talking with Luke Jaaniste of Super Critical Mass a few days after MMNY, it turned out that up until almost the last moment the piece was struggling to come together. But on the lake it was a tremendous success. The combination of sight – musicians on the lake, facing outward like in a Caspar David Friedrich painting – and the sound of resonant horns reaching out to each other across the expanse of water, was indescribably magical. The lake and the Park belonged to the sound, and the aesthetic gesture took full dominion over the landscape. Stunning, and beautiful.

For us, the day came to an end up at Morningside Park, for a spectacular and deeply powerful performance of Inuksuit. We saw the indoor production at the Park Avenue Armory earlier in the year, but there was no comparison between the two. It’s a tautology, but witnessing the work outdoors explains why it is meant to be performed outside. The open space, the uneven vistas and broken sight lines are the perfect accompaniment to a piece that has a large-scale organization but inside which the musical events, the playing, happens with little coordination. It’s not random, but it is by chance inside that larger enclosure, and that is a cognate for what it’s like for us to sit or stroll through a park or down the street in a city. It’s John Cage’s idea, but without the extreme dehumanization. It was easy to call it beautiful, but what it really felt like was something that happened inside us and outside us at the same time. Towards the end, as the music diminishes, we could hear the birds in the park sounding out of the aural landscape. After the final notes of the piece itself, the crowd sat in a kind of levitating, sweet silence for a minute or so, before lauding composer John Luther Adams and musical director Doug Perkins with massive, and deserved applause. This wasn’t just a great MMNY event, it was one of the greatest musical events we’ve witnessed, anywhere, in many years.

There’s so much more to MMNY, and you can find clips, bits, pics and sounds from all over collected at our companion Tumblr.

Make Music New York bands and projects don’t just create the opportunity to listen to lots of great music; there are also composers who want their audience to be directly involved in helping make their pieces happen on June 21. One of these awesome opportunities will be Aaron Siegel and Larry Legend’s GROUP , in which an ensemble of iPhones will come together to create an engrossing soundscape on Wall Street.

The basic structure of the piece is that everyone who wants to participate downloads the GROUP app and then converges on a designated point in the city at a specific time (for MMNY, the corner of Wall and Broad streets). Starting from the beginning of the day, the app will produce range of tones (pitched electronic sounds) and as the designated time for the event itself draws closer, and all participants gather, the tones start to cohere, with the piece beginning at 12:45 on the dot. (This seems like a fascinating companion to Unsilent Night, from our friend Phil Kline. -editor).

I had the privilege of being part of a test run of the piece a few months ago. I don’t want to give too much away but I can report that it is most definitely an engaging, unique experience. I was keenly aware of the tones emitting from our devices and how they made a sonic background to spaces we passed through on the test site at Brooklyn Bridge Park. Once we had gathered, it was interesting to see the range of reactions to the piece. Aaron led a great discussion afterwards where he looked for feedback from all of us. It was cool to see Aaron and Larry so open to people’s thoughts and obviously invested in having the development of the piece and the app be a rich, collaborative process.

A couple of weeks ago, I had a chance to follow up with Aaron and hear about the further development of the app as well as the origins of the piece. Based on the feedback from the test, Aaron and Larry have been working to give the piece a greater dynamic range, once participants have converged, to build towards a dramatic ending. Aaron has also focused on further differentiating the pitch material of each device in order to expand the harmonies and spatial relationships among the ensemble. They are also exploring the spatial opportunities of the ensemble through developing more consonance and more dissonance. It sounds like the test, the feedback, and more thinking and experimentation has led to interesting revisions to the piece.

GROUP is a natural extension of Aaron’s previous explorations of the connections between sound and space, both through research and composing music. Examining the history of sound installation in his masters thesis, The Mobile Listener: Sound in Public Space, Sound as Public Space as well as creating such pieces as Science is Only a Sometimes Friend, Aaron has spent years building his understanding of how these various physical and aural properties can build on one another to create new experiences and ideas for the composer, performer(s) and audience. In his work, he deals with the ways in which making music in public spaces, instead of a concert hall, allows the composer more agency in redefining the performing environment.

Aaron came up with the idea for GROUP a couple of years ago but needed a tech partner to help him realize the vision. He mentioned the idea to Aaron Friedman of MMNY, who put him in contact with Larry. The pair has been working together for the last year or so to create GROUP. It’s always cool to see two creators from different disciplines (although Larry has a background in sound engineering as well) coming together to produce something new. And in making the piece, Aaron is consciously engaging with the ubiquitous presence of technology in our everyday lives constructive ways. GROUP is not just another app, another way to use an iPhone, but an opportunity for technology to realize new, creative experiences.

GROUP will take place at the corner of Wall and Broad streets. at 12:45pm on June 21. You can download the GROUP app and learn more about the piece here: soundofgroup.com

The latest in New York City public electronica is this: you can hear Times Square remixed.

The Times Square Alliance has just come to the end of a spring project, calling on each and any to make a Remix of the Crossroads of the World. Participants recorded sounds with their smartphones (and the project included a geo-tagged map of the sound sources) and turned those materials into their own mixes. All the sounds the participants recorded were available to everyone to use.

Remixing! It’s not just for DJ Spooky anymore! The point I made previously about the ubiquity of personal computers is even more relevant to smartphones, and having that little music production platform/musical instrument in your hand is more valuable for a lot of people than just having a phone. Why just talk/text/email when you can record audio, edit the files and develop a multitrack sequence with them (the examples are iPhone only just because that’s what I have). The audio file I made from my Make Music New York wanderings last year was entirely an iPhone production.

MMNY is participatory, it’s about you grabbing your axe and making your own music. And your axe may be a phone – there’s an app, and a piece, for that. At lunchtime on June 21, down on Wall Street, anyone with an iPhone can take part in making a piece of music called GROUP (Tom will have more details on this to come). Participating in GROUP means being musician and audience at the same time.

Of course, anyone with a smartphone can participate as recordist and remixer, and I want to encourage that. Checking out music today, whether it’s at Brooklyn Bowl or Carnegie Hall, means taking pictures, movies and capturing audio (surreptitiously!), and indulge to the max at any MMNY event you catch this year. We love collecting your pictures and video at Flickr and You Tube, so how about some audio? Queue up those samples, fire up those editors, beat-makers, trackers and give us your experiences, remixed.