Thus far I’m really enjoying the title work, by Zhou Long. In addition to the saxophones, it features Erhu, Daruan, and percussion in a piece that explores folk resonances and microtones in a finely sculpted modernist-tinged amalgam. Yen’s Chinatown lands on the other side of ‘town,’ stylistically speaking, but is equally fetching. Zesty minimal ostinati are juxtaposed against Sun Li’s vibrant pipa playing. It’s a postmodern audio travelogue that indeed captures its eponymous neighborhood’s energy and diversity. I’m still seeking out scores for the Tan Dun and Chen Yi works; more once I’ve had time to digest them.
In what are said to be all recordings premieres, the Chicago Classical Recording Foundation presents the excellent William Ferris Chorale under conductor Paul French in new works that show the centuries-old art of a capella choral music is far from dead – at least in Chicago. The featured works are Four Motets (1973) by Alan Hovhaness, Stabat Mater (2006) by Egon Cohen, Velum Templi (1998) by Paul Nicholson, Who Am I? (2007) by French himself, A King James Magnificat (2004) by Easley Blackwood, Scapulis Suis (1960) by Robert Kreutz, three pieces entitled Lyrica Sacra (1962) by William Ferris, Nunc Dimittis (2007) by William White, and Behold, My Servant (1973) by George Rochberg.
Rather than write an interminable review with a lot of technical terms that would bore both you and mef, I’ll just hit the high points. Hovhaness’ Motets are based on Biblical texts proclaiming the joy of trusting God and walking in His way. The first, “Blessed is the man” (Jeremiah 17:7) sets the tone for the others, which include “Help, Lord (Psalms 12), “Lord, who shall abide in thy tabernacle? (Psalms 15) and “The fool hath said in his heart” (Psalms 15). Beautiful harmonization and adherence to tradition make these brief works memorable. Cohen’s Stabat Mater refurbished this medieval affirmation of faith describing Mary’s sorrows as she beheld the Crucifixion. This setting of the canticle expresses grief in a moving way by having some of the voice parts hum quietly or vocalize an expressive “Ah” as a backdrop and contrast to the noble simplicity of the verses. Nicholson’s setting of Velum Templi (The veil of the Temple was torn), one of the traditional canticles for Holy Week, effectively uses clashing harmonies and a notable forte to dramatize the Gospel accounts of the shaking of the Temple and the opening of the tombs after the Crucifixion.
French’s setting of “Who am I?” taken from the posthumous papers of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the German theologian who was killed by the Nazis, uses a plain declamatory style with all voices coming together at the end to present this remarkable affirmation of one’s personal faith in bold relief. Blackwood’s King James Magnificat, the joyous hymn of praise attributed to the Virgin Mary in the Gospel of Luke, casts each of the ten verses in a different key and uses soft and loud phrasing and chordal harmony to emphasize the meaning of the words beginning with “My soul doth Magnify the Lord.” The work ends in a satisfying way with an exalted setting of the words often used as a coda to the Magnificat: “Glory Be to the Father, Son, and holy Spirit.” Kreutz’ Scapulis Suis uses slowly unfolding harmonies and mid-level dynamics to emphasize the words of Psalm 91, translated “He shall cover thee with his wings.” Ferris’ Lyrica Sacra (Sacred Lyrics), a grouping of three Latin motets utilizing Psalm and Gospel verses, use a variety of phrasings, speeds and dynamics to convey the meanings of the texts, which translate “He who eats my flesh and drinks my blood shall live in me, “”He who would follow me, let him deny himself,” and “As a lily is among thorns, so are you, my beloved” (Song of Solomon 2: 2).
Finally, we have White’s Nunc Dimittis (Now lettest Thou thy servant depart in peace), which tells the whole story of Simeon and his taking the infant Jesus in his arms in Luke 2: 25-35, not just the sentence beginning the old man’s declaration of joyous belief. White uses key, metre and tempo shifts to boldly convey the drama of the text. And Rochberg’s “Behold, Thy Servant,” commissioned by the Jewish Theological Seminary of New York, uses a fabric of echo effects between solo voices and the whole choir, hushed and loud tones, and chromatic and diatonic scales, to build an impressive climax to three affirmative texts from Isaiah that the composer prefaces significantly with the words of William Blake, “Ev’ry thing that lives is holy.” It concludes a program of testimony to faith that literally stretches cross the centuries.
‘Ten canisters of pressurized tetrafluoroethane over three weeks’ is a 7″ record by the Barcelona-based computer music project EVOL. This is their 100% first acoustic release, and it features 2 pieces for hand-held gas horns realized at the Music Research Centre, University of York, November 2008. Recorded using two Neumann U87 microphones and a Shure SM58 on custom-rigged pendulum. The record is made of red vinyl, just like the horns.
I teach this principle by likening it to gravity. Think of a ball. Throw it as high as you can up into the air. Then it stops and falls back to the earth. The height from the ground to that turn-around point is like the range of an instrument. A ball can’t be thrown up and then hover. So melody defies this and CAN hover, but the voice must eventually come down, as the tones in our sentences fall down. The opposite would keep a high note for a climactic dramatic purpose.
Rarely do tunes just ramp up and down a scale. They sashay and tease, jump and recover, and hover for effect. We breathe in sympathy to that tune and breathe when it does. Stravinsky once complained about the organ: “The monster never breathes.”
P.S. Susan reminds me that good organist DO know how to breathe. Which reminds me of our mutual late teacher, Elliott Forbes who, at Harvard when he taught species counterpoint, referred to the whole leap-recover thing like this: “From time to time one takes a lusty jump into sin and leaps–never larger than an octave–and one atones for that sin by recovering by step in the opposite direction.” I never thought of him as a hard core Christian, but I love the notion of melodic leaping as a lusty leap–it makes composing that much more erotic.
his just in from Mark Carlson. A dynamite piece for harp and a dynamite performance by Mr Griffiths.
The talented young Benjamin Creighton Griffiths performs “Fire Dance” from Petite Suite by David Watkins in a concert at the World Harp Congress in Amsterdam, July 2008.
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Feldmaus - Spaces Feldmaus creates ambient electronic music that threathen to float you physically into the clouds. Not being able to actually accomplish that feat, it is content to send your mind into alter states and a liberating calm. Feldmaus is actually a collaborative effort between sound artists Evgeny Shchukin and Alexander Tochilkin. The superb ambient album titled Spaces is a collection of their soundscapes using vintage analog machines to “cut, shape and mix everything up with some digital elements to create beautiful pieces of enchanting sounds”. This is above average music that is quite soothing. The duo is joined by Japanese guitarist Imachi Akira for some tracks. Highly recommended for both electronic and ambient fans.
Spaces is available in 320kbps MP3 from the Passage Music netlabel.
Download
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Jeffrey Ryan at the Western Canadian Music Awards Jeffrey Ryan at the Western Canadian Music Awards From Podcast: Sounds New .
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Nico Muhly: a wonder-boy winner at the Roundhouse Reverb Festival - Telegraph.co.uk (blog)
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Metropolis Ensemble Celebrates Avner Dorman Release - Mandolin Cafe
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Lou Reed to tour UK with Metal Machine Trio - The Guardian
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Review: Vermont Stage's "Souvenir" - BurlingtonFreePress.com
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The Residents launch world tour in Surf City - NBC Bay Area
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After 25 years, Vermeersch retires as music school head - The Villager
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With Metamorphosen, Brandford Marsalis continues to cement his legacy - Nashville Scene
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Chicago Underground: Into the Laptop-Jazz Vortex - Spinner
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Caramoor Announces Highlights of the 2010 International Music Festival - Broadway World
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Yo-Yo Ma, Emanuel Ax - Financial Times Yo-Yo Ma, Emanuel Ax Financial Times San Francisco is alive with new music this week, but the most eagerly awaited work arrives with a glance at the past. ... and more »
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36 Hours in Buenos Aires - New York Times
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Weekend Guide: Music - New York Post Weekend Guide: Music New York Post AVERY FISHER HALL: The American Symphony Orchestra plays the works of often overlooked avant-garde composer Henry Cowell. Tonight at 8 at Lincoln Center; ...
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Brian Eno, "Serious" Music and the BBC Radiophonic Workshop: Some Thoughts - Hartford Courant (blog)
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An Impractical Man - Strings Magazine An Impractical Man Strings Magazine “I am,” affirms the New York–based avant-garde violinist-composer- arranger-guitarist-mandolinist-et cetera when reached by cell phone at his three-story ...
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Hello, New York: Avant-Garde Eastern Europe - New York Times
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Giant Steps: The Survival of a Great Jazz Pianist - New York Times
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Helping the Sax Find a Classical Home - New York Times Helping the Sax Find a Classical Home New York Times An exception is a set of pieces by the Italian avant-garde composer Salvatore Sciarrino, who transcribed works from Gesualdo to Gershwin for saxophone ...
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Fresh stories, violin concerto highlight DSO's 'Classical Roots' - Detroit Free Press
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Fresh stories, violin concerto highlight DSO's 'Classical Roots' - Detroit Free Press
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ScrapArtsMusic fills Holland - Omaha World-Herald ScrapArtsMusic fills Holland Omaha World-Herald But Kozak's music also called to mind the music of composer Steve Reich , whose luminous, pulsating minimalist compositions pile one complex polyrhythm on ...
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How To Win At Blogging From a new-to-Miss-Mussel webcomic called The Doghouse Diaries :
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Helping the Sax Find a Classical Home - New York Times Helping the Sax Find a Classical Home New York Times An exception is a set of pieces by the Italian avant-garde composer Salvatore Sciarrino , who transcribed works from Gesualdo to Gershwin for saxophone ...
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Levine returns to lead BSO - Boston Globe Levine returns to lead BSO Boston Globe Those taut, jagged lines of Elliott Carter's music darting around the Symphony Hall stage could mean only one thing. ...
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Pierre Boulez celebrates 85th birthday with Cleveland Orchestra - Plain Dealer
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Helping the Sax Find a Classical Home - New York Times Helping the Sax Find a Classical Home New York Times The Poisson Rouge concert will also feature “Jesus Is Coming” by the Dutch composer Jacob TV, who uses Steve Reich -style sampling techniques to juxtapose an ...
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Hello, New York: Avant-Garde Eastern Europe - New York Times
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Dance review: Amy Seiwert and Company C: A-plus - San Francisco Chronicle
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The Symphony as a Vessel to Visit Other Worlds - New York Times
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Washington classical music and opera picks for February, March, April, May 2010 - Washington Post
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Gordon Getty
THE WHITE ELECTION:
Lisa Delan, soprano
PentaTone
Another winner featuring the charming presence of Lisa Delan! These 32 poems that Gordon Getty has set to music have the thematic and musical unity to constitute a real cycle. The subject is Death (the “White election” of the title), and the poems look at the subject subjectively from every angle. Getty organizes them in four Groups: 1, The Pensive Spring; 2, So We Must Meet Apart; 3, Almost Peace; and 4, My Feet Slip Nearer. A noticeable progression occurs as the poet delves ever deeper into the mysteries of life and death, which are not the diametric opposites we commonly imagine.
I will leave aside the identity of the “dim companion” in the poems that seem to point to a definite love interest in the life of the semi-reclusive Emily Dickinson (1830-1886), who went to her grave a life-long spinster. Gordon Getty summarizes the case very succinctly in his program notes, and others have written at book length on the subject. Since death for Ms. Dickinson meant the spiritual reunion with those we have loved, it opened the portals to a new life, and was not at all life’s antithesis. The symbolism of white raiment, in which she dressed the last twenty years or so of her life, applies to both to the shroud and a wedding dress. She equates them with a ferocious optimism in such verses as “No more her patient figure / At twilight soft to meet, / No more her timid bonnet / Upon the village street, // But crowns instead and courtiers / And in the midst so fair, / Whose but the shy, immortal face / Of whom we’re whispering here?” Or consider, “Sufficient troth that we shall rise, / Deposed, at length, the grave, / To that new marriage justified / Through Calvaries of love.” Many other examples could be cited.
As scholars have observed, Dickinson’s poetry seems to spring from origins in church music, especially in the shape of her discrete four-line stanzas, though the flow of the thought often carries over between those stanzas, and they are not as foursquare metrically as many church hymns often are. Getty conjectures that Dickinson, who had studied voice and piano, must have set many of her poems to music for her own satisfaction. These “odd, old tunes” (her description) were certainly not intended for publication, which would have been out of character for someone who never sought to publish her poetry during her lifetime. In setting them to music, Getty confides, “I have set them, in large part, just as Emily might have if her music had found a balance between tradition and iconoclasm something like that in her poems.”
As played by Fritz Steinegger, the perfect partner for Ms. Delan in this recital, the piano accompaniment is ideally suited to the sense of the lyrics. It seldom takes the form of a florid line, but usually occurs in the form of widely spaced chords or even single notes, either quietly stated or powerfully expressed, depending on the emotion of the poetic line. Occasionally it becomes more florid, as it does in a poem that celebrates the reunion of mother and son in death after many years, he a recent casualty in one of the Civil War’s terrible battles: “When I was small a woman died, / Today her only boy / Went up from the Potomac, / His face all victory. // To look at her how slowly / The seasons must have turned, / Till bullets clipped an angle / And he passed quickly round. “ The vigorously extended piano introduction before the first stanza suggests the rapid call of bugles; in this case, the martial music is both unusual and appropriate to the idea of death as a victory over the unnatural pain of separation, numbed though it may be with the passing years.
Other lyrics do not embrace death with such enthusiasm. There is skepticism about it in such lines as, “The going from a world we know / To one a wonder still / Is like the child’s adversity / Whose vista is a hill. / Behind the hill is sorcery / And everything unknown, / But will the secret compensate / For climbing it alone?” Other poems contrast the poet’s curiously disjunctive perceptions of the two states, life and death: “And sometimes odd within; / The person that I was / And this one do not feel the same. / Could it be madness, this?” And sometimes she is struck by the odd discrepancy of feeling and perception between the bereaved and the departed: “I cried at pity, not at pain, / I heard a woman say, / “Poor child,” and something in her voice / Convicted me of me. // She’s “sorry I an dead” again, / Just when the grave and I / Have sobbed ourselves almost to sleep, / Our only lullaby.”
OF course, even a first acquaintance with Dickinson’s poetry gives you the impression that it is at the same time simple in form and very sophisticated, both in her daring use of approximate and vowel rhymes and in the way a simple declaration or a striking images can resonate with meanings far beyond the stave’s end. You can’t just set them to music and sing them without interpreting fine nuances of significance. To that purpose, Getty’s song accompaniments often continue beyond the last stanza, extending and amplifying the mood and purpose of he poem. And Delan’s vocal artistry is well adapted to expressing the shifting, swiftly surging emotion in such run-on lines as “The bell within the steeple wild / The flying tiding told: / How much can come, / And much can go, / And yet abide the world!” As a song interpreter she may well be unequalled.
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A Note On Composing While Under Constant Surveillance Since Lucky has found permanent day-lodging for himself underneath my composing desk, I've finally begun to understand Gertrude Stein's famous counter to Descartes:
"I am I because my little dog knows me, but perhaps he does not and if he did I would not be I."
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January 29, 2010
TCM Announces "The 15 Most Influential Movie Soundtracks" List - TV.com
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Google the site Search our articles archive Search for an event - Chicago Reader (blog)
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An Interview with Nicolas Joel - FranceToday.com
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Goldfrapp dives 'Head First' into '80s pop on new album - Entertainment Weekly
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20 High Resolution Photos From Martin Scorsese's Shutter Island - /FILM (blog)
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Pat Metheny Launches International "Orchestrion" Tour - Nonesuch Records (blog)
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Madison Opera's "The Turn of the Screw" - Isthmus
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Brian Eno, "Serious" Music and the BBC Radiophonic Workshop: Some Thoughts - Hartford Courant (blog)
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Amy Horvey: Interview
CD cover art
Interview
Amy Horvey, trumpet
Music by Scelsi, Arditto, Höstman, Purchase, and Horvey/Morton
Malasartes Musique
Quattro pezzi per tromba sola – Giancinto ScelsiMúsica Invisible – Cecilia ArdittoInterview – Anna HöstmanApparatus Inconcinnu s – Ryan PurchaseOverture to “The Queen of the Music Boxes” featuring Jeff Morton
This is not your typical solo trumpet disc. Some folks might dismiss a CD made up almost entirely of solo trumpet music, but when the most straightforward thing on a disc was written by Scelsi, I get kind of excited. Amy Horvey tackles exciting and provocative repertoire on this offering and nails all of it.
The Quattro pezzi by Scelsi kick off the disc and highlight Ms. Horvey’s chops and musicality. Her tone is dark and somber, her ability to connect the lengthy lyrical lines in each piece is uncanny, and the only thing that would make the performance better would be hearing her live. These are demanding pieces and she squeezes every nuance of music from them.
Cecilia Arditto’s Música Invisible
The next two works both feature spoken passages as well as played passages. Anna Höstman’s Interview relates to a larger work about trumpet soloist Edna White called “Queen of the Music Boxes.” The fragments of text coax listeners into an emotional world with very little said. The music that follows is sometimes playful, sometimes sorrowful, and Ms. Horvey communicates the text well without being too hammy or too stoic in affect. In contrast to the fragmentary Interview, Apparatus Inconcinnus by Ryan Purchase contains more of a linear narrative about remembering how to count by Russian author Daniil Charms. This humorous anecdote takes some serious musical terms and would be, of course, most effective in a live performance. The story holds the music together very well. My only quibble of this disc, if I have to have one, is that these two very similar works were programmed back to back.
The final work, Overture to “The Queen of the Music Boxes”, includes the electro-acoustic/circuit-bending/composer Jeff Morton working with prepared music boxes, toy instruments, and electronics. The composition is largely about Morton’s sound world of dreamy, lo-fi mechanical music making than it is Amy Horvey’s trumpet playing. When the trumpet melody does emerge, the dreaminess of Morton’s contraptions becomes more accompaniment than ambient. The whole piece projects an introspective mood and is the perfect sound world to close off the CD.
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And the nominees are…. here’s the list of all the classical music-related categories and nominees, and here are the composition-related categories and nominees. Let’s give a shout-out to the Boston Modern Orchestra Project Derek Bermel
I was able to spend some time talking with BMOP Artistic Director Gil Rose (audio here ), and BMOP violinist Gabriela Diaz (audio here ) about their experiences working with composers and about what music they are excited about… or at least were excited about back in October when we spoke.
I also noticed that Meet The Composer is making another push for their Music Alive program, which matches up composers with orchestral residencies around the country. There are not many of these residencies available, but if you work for an orchestra that’s thinking about creating a composer residency, you should visit the Music Alive site. The reason I mention all of this is because our friends at BMOP have a video up where Gil talks about their three-year collaboration with composer, Lisa Bielawa This link should also take you straight to that video.
Congratulations, BMOP!
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Back to back Bach How does the Arabian Passion According to J.S. Bach featuring Arab musicians, two jazz saxophonists, a string quartet and a Lebanese singer grab you? The Arabian Passion is the brainchild of Vladimir Ivanoff , who is the Bulgarian founder and music director of the culture straddling ensemble Sarband . Ivanoff sees parallels between the story of occupation and persecution in the Middle East in biblical times, as portrayed in Bach’s Saint Matthew and Saint John Passions, and the tensions in the Middle East today. The Arabian Passion is the result, a 're-interpretation' of sections from both Passions for Sarband, the Modern String Quartet and singer Fadia el-Hage .Jacques Loussier is famous for his Bach improvisations while Procol Harum’s A Whiter Shade of Pale is just one of many rock tracks that lean heavily on the master. But the thought provoking Arabian Passion is probably as off the wall as they come - as you can judge in my latest adventure in Chance Radio .Future Radio I am playing five sections from Bach's Saint Matthew and Saint John Passions in performances by the King's College Choir, Cambridge, and soloists and the Brandenburg Consort conducted by Stephen Cleobury back to back with Vladimir Ivanoff's Arabian re-interpretation of the same pieces. I don't think it's been done before, which I know is not a good reason for doing it. But it should make fascinating listening - Sarband's closing jazz meets Arabic instrumental re-interpretation of the chorale Jesus Ging Mit Seinen Jüngern from the Saint John Passion is a real killer. But don't take my word, catch Chance Music online on Feb 7 or listen to the podcast which will be posted with other Chance Music here after the programme is aired. And if an Arabian Passion is not enough there is Beethoven re-envisaged here .I bought the Arabian Passion online. Future Radio if Ofcom licensed and party to a PRS agreement . Report broken links, missing images and errors to - overgrownpath at hotmail dot co dot uk
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Musical Planets, and Real Ones - New York Times (blog) Musical Planets, and Real Ones New York Times (blog) Hans Graf, the symphony's music director, said there has been interest. In a brief chat after the performance, Mr. Graf said that conducting the piece so ... and more »
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Houston Symphony Brings "The Planets" To New York; Times Notices - Houston Press (blog)
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London Contemporary Orchestra at the Roundhouse - Telegraph.co.uk
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The UK's Love For New York Bands0 comments - Live4ever - The Britrock Daily
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Vermont contemporary music - Barre Montpelier Times Argus Vermont contemporary music Barre Montpelier Times Argus In addition, pianist Michael Arnowitt will perform a selection of György Ligeti's "Etudes for Piano" on Friday, Feb. 5, at 8 pm, at the Unitarian Church. ...
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Concert Previews | Philadelphia Inquirer | 01/29/2010 - Philadelphia Inquirer
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St. Lawrence Quartet at Kimmel | Philadelphia Inquirer | 01/29/2010 - Philadelphia Inquirer
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Levine returns from leave to lead BSO - Boston Globe
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Animal Collective - The Quietus The Quietus Animal Collective The Quietus ... a mysterious minimalist drive to its simple arpeggios, perhaps informed by the capital-M US variety, perhaps by Indian music ; perhaps by neither. ...
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The Durutti Column - Paean to Wilson 29 Jan 10:26 - Drowned In Sound
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Itzik Galili brings the National Dance Company Wales up North - Daily Post
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The Classical Music Network - ConcertoNet The Classical Music Network ConcertoNet Perhaps the Frenchman never joined the Boulez school (“He is not equal to our times,” said Boulez ), perhaps because his music is so personal. ...
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Click image to enlarge - Cleveland Jewish News Click image to enlarge Cleveland Jewish News Former Cleveland Orchestra musical adviser Pierre Boulez conducts the orchestra in a program of French music in celebration of his 85th birthday year ...
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James Levine delights in BSO return - Boston Herald
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New York Woodwind Quintet - IdahoStatesman.com New York Woodwind Quintet IdahoStatesman.com The performance for the Boise Chamber Music Series next week will include woodwind masterpieces by Pavel Haas, Elliott Carter and Paul Hindemith. ...
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[60]Project
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Coming Up Next :: 29 January :: Morton Feldman On our next program Friday, Morton Feldman’s Violin and Orchestra , a work from 1979, in honor of his birthday, which was on January 12th. He would have been 84. Feldman died in 1987
Morton Feldman: Violin and Orchestra (1979)
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Stalin & Me Thanks to a video featuring Michael Tilson Thomas and posted by Patty , Miss Mussel has discovered that she and Stalin have something in common. Thankfully, it is not the mustache. While Miss Mussel favours the Chick Corea/Bobby McFerrin version , really anything will do in a pinch.
The bigger question is however: does this association mean Miss Mussel is also in some way evil? The tiresome logic often goes that the liking by an Evil Person of a Neutral Artefact means ipso facto , that the Artefact becomes evil. The implication is often then, that the Appreciator of the now Evil Artefact is therefore evil by association. Like a poor grasp of human behaviour norms and an insatiable thirst for power is somehow catching.
This revisionist viewpoint does have its drawbacks. During his lifetime, Stalin was accorded outrageously sycophantic titles but, since she rejects outright the evil as H1N1 argument, Miss Mussel is therefore disqualified from snatching even a lumen of the adulation for herself. It’s a shame, really. Brilliant Genius of Humanity has quite a nice ring to it.
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from The Omniscient Mussel on Classical Music & Culture ,
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Friday Links It’s been crickets around here this month but things will be gearing up again over the next few days. Until then, here’s one last dose of interesting things on the interwebs. It’s a big issue this time, so pace yourself.
“Unlike the discipline of economics, and indeed unlike money – a lately-come tool we invented to facilitate trading at a distance – art is very old.” Margaret Atwood, our Al Gore for the arts, is in La Suisse this week to chat with the World Economic movers and shakers about t’arts.
“Wiesner’s tale turns back on itself to reveal its form, and to show that a story can be protean, metamorphic, and infinitely malleable. We have to co-construct it. Indeed, one of its boons is that, since there is no right way to read it, adults, too, are put to the test intellectually. The book can be seen as an unexpected lesson in the ethic of storytelling.” The New Republic goes all PhD thesis on postmodern bedtime stories.
Love is: imaginative, hand-crafted furniture that you can never afford to buy
“Wilson says he doesn’t know how much public money the council spends on having chewing gum removed from the pavement and thinks it’s been cut dramatically since the financial crisis: “It’s an opportunity!!” Chewing gum artist Ben Wilson spills all to Wallflower Dispatches.
Bubble wrap turns 50 this year and is a fun as ever.
“I also want a check made with regard to the incredibly atrocious modern art that has been scattered around the embassies of the world.” Tricky Dick as art critic.
“The interior of the Concert Hall is not just a crisis acoustically, it’s a crisis emotionally and spiritually.” Peter Sellars to the Sydney Opera House: unfollow.
“I feel disposable, used and insignificant.” A letter from Monica Lewinsky to one William Jefferson Clinton.
A Detroit murder mystery.
“Whilst he was playing to me, a favourite cat came in, upon which he immediately left his harpsichord, nor could we bring him back for a considerable time. He would also sometimes run about the room with a stick between his legs by way of horse.” The young Mozart is examined at the Royal Society in London in 1764
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Classical Music/Opera Listings - New York Times Classical Music /Opera Listings New York Times (Smith) CHICAGO SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA (Saturday and Sunday) Bartok is the unifying element of Pierre Boulez's pair of concerts with the Chicago Symphony. ...
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Conductor Pierre Boulez reflects on his legacy - Public Radio International PRI Conductor Pierre Boulez reflects on his legacy Public Radio International PRI When fellow contemporary composer John Adams called Boulez's music unemotional, Boulez shot back, saying Adams' "The Death of Klinghoffer" sounded like bad ...
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Album: Pat Metheny, Orchestrion (Nonesuch) - Independent
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January 28, 2010
ONE-MAN BAND: PAT METHENY UPGRADES A 19TH-CENTURY CONCEPT - El Paso Inc
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Thelema Trio: Neither From Nor Towards Thelema Trio
Ward De Vleeschhower, piano; Peter Verdonck, saxophones, and Marco Antonio Mazzini, clarinets
Music by Junchaya, Lee, Carpenter, Honor, Mazzini, Walczyk, and Benadon
innova records
Rafael Leonardo Junchaya – Tres Danzas Episkénicas HyeKyung Lee – Shadowing Keith Carpenter – The Devil His Due Eric Honour – neither from nor towards Marco Antonio Mazzini – Imprevisto Kevin Walczyk – Refractions Fernando Benadon – Five Miniatures
The Thelema Trio’s modular nature, even within the context of being a trio, is one of its primary strengths and they strut their stylistic, coloristic, versatile stuff with this collection of pieces. No two works share the same instrumentation nor do any of the compositions share the same sound world. The only performer not showcased with a solo feature of some sort is the pianist but Ward De Vleeschhouwer is a superb collaborative artist who can highlight his abilities within a chamber music setting. Peter Verdonck has excellent tone and energy on alto, tenor, and baritone saxophones and Marc Antonio Mazzini has a lithe and supple sound on standard or bass clarinet. Together, the two reed players have a perfectly communal sound quality.
Each piece on the disc showcases the Thelema Trio’s mercuriality. Rafael Leonardo Junchaya’s Tres Danzas Episkénicas is equal parts sultry, ethereal and playful. This work uses the most instruments overall with the reeds changing from bass clarinet to clarinet and use of baritone and tenor saxophones. Overall, these dances are attractive, slightly thorny pitch language and extremely well orchestrated.
HyeKyung Lee’s Shadowing is a canonic/imitative work for clarinet and alto saxophone. Long melodic lines weave in and out with sinewy and twisty motions. The blend between the performers is spot on and the whole piece has great long-term trajectory. The high climax reached early on in the work is the exact right music at the exact right time. Keith Carpenter’s raucous The Devil His Due for baritone sax and piano is a punchy, aggressive, and energetic toccata for the two instruments. Instead of the baritone sax being the “front man” of the piece, both instruments engage in funky rhythmic interplay.
The title track on the CD, neither from nor towards, is an extended rhapsody for baritone sax, clarinet, and piano written by Eric Honour. This obsessive piece spends a lot of time spinning its wheels (in a good way) where the music is, indeed, neither from anywhere nor moving towards anywhere. Long overlapping tones in the reeds and mid-range piano are broken by the occasional spiky piano accents in extreme registers. Gradually a melody emerges and by the halfway point we are in a soaring, melodic section. The soaring becomes frenetic, dies down, but then trashes around with one last outburst. If you were to drop in on any single section of the piece, you might wonder how it all fits together. But listening to the complete work, Eric Honour draws an excellent through-line. The programming for this piece is perfect since it showcases not only the coloristic blend between the reeds but also the rhythmic punctuation possibilities found in earlier works.
The only solo composition on the disc, Marco Antonio Mazzini’s Imprevisto sounds like music we aren’t really supposed to be hearing. The slow unfolding work for clarinet gives the impression that we are eavesdropping on the performer while they worked out musical/emotional stuff. This piece is haunting and captivating. Refractions, by Kevin Walczyk, brings back some playful and bouncy music back to the disc. The motoric repeated notes in the piano provide a platform for melodies and shapes in the alto sax and clarinet. The energy is constantly pushing forward, even when the music slows and becomes more tender. The light and springy material returns to close out the composition.
Finally, the Five Miniatures for baritone sax, bass clarinet, and piano by Fernando Benadon are delightfully quirky pieces that present a focal idea, perseverate upon said idea, and then vanish. Niether of the five movements feels underwritten and, while one might hear how each idea could become longer, I think it would destroy the chiseled nature of these pieces. There is a lot of fun and whimsy in their brevity, making this piece the perfect waft of light flavor after a satisfying meal.
Originally
posted by Jay Batzner
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MUSIC REVIEW: BSO's principal flutist is ready to move into the spotlight - The Patriot Ledger
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Bartók’s Folk
Bartók (fourth from left) in 1908.
The Institute for Musicology at the Hungarian Academy of Sciences has placed online a fairly amazing trove of materials relating to Béla Bartók’s pioneering work as a folk-music collector. The composer’s vast archive of Hungarian folk music has been digitized, and a fair number of his phonographic recordings have been uploaded in MP3 format. The search engine is a little tricky to use, but if you click the “+” sign under “Name of collector,” check the “Bartók Béla” box, and then enter the dates 1904 to 1905, you will see the beginning of Bartók’s work in the field. (Entries containing audio have a listing in the “Ref. no. of media” column.) The year 1907 is particularly significant; that summer, Bartók went into the Eastern Carpathian Mountains, in Transylvania, to gather songs from Hungarian-speaking Székely villagers. On that trip, he achieved a deeper understanding of folk style, which led to a transformation of his own musical language.
I’ve extracted several sample MP3s from the 1907 expedition. Here is “Menyecske, menyecske ” (“Bride, bride”):
/br/tamlap/BR_10706_01.jpg" target="_blank">Nekem is volt egy szeretőm” (“I had a love”):
Hungarian Folksongs from the Csík District (1907) may be particularly interested to hear the recordings on which the piece is based. Here is “Sír a kis galambom ” (“When my little dove weeps”), followed by a snippet of Piotr Anderszewski’s performance of the piano version (from his 2008 Carnegie Hall recital ):
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Originally
posted by Alex Ross
from Unquiet Thoughts ,
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Concordance later, but first a saxy song Composers Concordance
Their latest outing is a marathon show, Jan. 31st (6:00 pm doors, 7:00-10:00pm performance time at the club Drom
No less than 23 composers are on the bill: Roger Blanc, Thomas Bo, Luis Andrei Cobo, Charles Coleman, Dan Cooper, Larry Goldman, David Gotay, Patrick Grant, Franz Hackl, Don Hagar, Arthur Kampela, Alon Nechushtan, Daniel Palkowski, Milica Paranosic, Akmal Parwez, Joseph Pehrson, Gene Pritsker, Paola Prestini, Jody Redhage, Kamala Sankaram, William Schimmel, Andrew Violette, and Theodore Wiprud.
Gene Pritsker, Composers Concordance co-director, talks about the concept for this presentation:
“We are exploring the relationship composers have with their instruments and how they go about writing music in which they know that they will be the performer. Dan Cooper and I talked about assembling a large group of composers and requesting a four minute composition from each. We are programming them back-to-back in a marathon setting and constructing a performance that highlights the composer as a performer: short compositions as vehicles for direct expression, from the composer’s mind to body to the audience.
We selected 150 composers and e-mailed them all on a secretly chosen day and time. The first 23 to respond to this e-mail were programmed for the event. We created a random criterion as opposed to a competition for choosing the participating composers, though all 150 candidates were composers whom we, the Composers Concordance directors, knew and respected.”
Tickets are $10, but there’s a two-drink minimum, so the later pieces are likely to start sounding all warm and fuzzy…
…………………………………………………….
Jan. 31st a full-music day in the city, at 3pm prior you could head to St. Ignatius of Antioch Episcopal Church (552 West End Avenue at 87th Street) to hear The New York Virtuoso Singers , The Raschèr Saxophone Quartet and conductor Harold Rosenbaum take on a concert of works for winds and choir. On the program is the US premiere of BMI Young Composer Award recipient Rafael Nassif ’s piece for for three choirs and three trombones [wait, I thought we were talking saxes here?...], and a world premiere by our own S21 contributor and great pal Rob Deemer , plus works by Stefan Thomas and Jouni Kaipainen .
Tickets: $20; Students and Seniors: $15 TDF vouchers accepted. Tickets available at the door one hour and 15 minutes before concerts, or call Ticket Central at 212-279-4200 . And there’s a 2pm pre-concert talk for you earlybirds, with the Raschèr Quartet.
Originally
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Your bow Sir Edward Going through the motions kills the emotions is a mantra that should be repeated by orchestral musicans before every performance. I was reminded of this when I switched on BBC Radio 3 yesterday afternoon a few minutes into the first movement of Elgar's masterly A flat symphony. Within a short time it was clear that something special was going on, inspired and intelligent conducting was matched by fresh and committed orchestral playing. I have heard the work literally hundreds of times, but after a few minutes I was marvelling once again at just how great a masterpiece Elgar created, rather than fuming at yet another gratuitous 're-think' of his music .Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra . Congratulations to everyone involved, including the engineers at Swedish Radio, for making a recording that allowed us to hear Elgar pure and simple . And, incidentally, Elgar played and conducted a lot better than in many recent performances by the once great BBC Symphony Orchestra under their never ending succession of guest and chief conductors. Based on that Swedish concert the BBC Symphony should snap up Marin Alsop as their next chief conductor when IMG Artists finally succeed in placing Jiří Bělohlávek in a top-dollar music directorship in the States .was also an American .Any copyrighted material on these pages is included as "fair use", for the purpose of study, review or critical analysis only, and will be removed at the request of copyright owner(s). Report broken links, missing images and errors to - overgrownpath at hotmail dot co dot uk
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Most-influential soundtracks - True/Slant Most-influential soundtracks True/Slant ... to the otherworldly music of Gyorgy Ligeti ; the sun, moon and Earth align perfectly to the thundering brass of Richard Strauss' Also Sprach Zarathustra. ...
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Why I love Ennio Morricone - True/Slant Why I love Ennio Morricone True/Slant Morricone's instinctually Hegelian approach to movie scoring is perhaps most widely known through his acclaimed 1986 music for Roland Joffe's The Mission. ...
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The Hundred-Dollar Nap
By Dan Visconti
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Control’s Been Seen..at the Jo Berg Airport The nice people at Chamber Music America have invited your humble correspondent (that’s me) to discuss “Using Social Networking to Promote Your Ensemble or Series” next Tuesday, February 2, at St. Peter’s Church, 619 Lexington Avenue at 54th St. from 3 pm to 5 pm. It’s free but seating is limited so to make sure you get a seat, you should contact Marc Giosi, Program Associate, by 12 noon, Monday, February 1st at (212) 242-2022, ext. 14; or mgiosi@chamber-music.org (The CMA folks are being overly optimistic, I suspect.)
Of all the things I know a little bit about, social marketing is one of my better topics, having started one of the more popular social media websites on the web. Not to mention the Sequenza21 community which is not huge but has one of the most loyal followings around. Come on over and I’ll try to say something useful about how to use the web to generate some promotion for your group or series. I seldom leave the house to go further than Starbucks so this is a rare opportunity to confirm that there really is a person named Jerry Bowles
And, I could use some examples to show of groups or musicians who have particularly nice pages on Facebook and MySpace or who have done something clever with YouTube. Ideas, please?
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What price BBC music coverage? The National Audit Office (NAO) is due to publish a report looking at how much the BBC spends on covering major sporting and music events. The corporation reportedly spent £1.5m sending 407 reporters and technical staff to cover the Glastonbury music festival last year ... The NAO said the report would look at whether the BBC provides value for money with its coverage - from BBC News website . what price the BBC Proms ?My header photo shows a small part of the BBC entourage at a Proms concert. It comes from my July 2006 article Summer in the City On An Overgrown Path . Report broken links, missing images and errors to - overgrownpath at hotmail dot co dot uk
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Quasar shows the joys of sax - Straight.com Quasar shows the joys of sax Straight.com It's a tough call for new-music enthusiasts, but those who choose the lesser-known option won't be disappointed. In fact, Kronos and Quasar are comparable ...
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Composer Derek Charke's Tundra Songs tapping a northern cool - Straight.com
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Events Calendar - Andover Townsman Events Calendar Andover Townsman ... Music Department hosts student recital featuring Won Yong Kim, oboe, Yonwoo Kim, violin, and Jinsoo, Lim, piano, performing works by Dutilleux , Poulenc, ...
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Music that overflows with optimism Rubbra's output reveals a unity on two levels: the musical, which is readily demonstrable, and the less easily perceived religous/philosophical, which overrides the musical and encompasses almost everything he wrote. It is universal rather than sectarian, an instinctive blend of the most spiritual and mystical elements of Buddhism and Catholicism. It led to a music that overflows with optimism and a sense of well-being, though the, at times, dramatic and conflictual aspects attest to the hard-won nature of that ultimate peace and reassurance. Edmund Rubbra's biographer Ralph Scott Grover writes in the 2001 New Grove . If Rubbra is known at all today, it is for his eleven symphonies and the violin concerto, all of which overflow with that 'optimism and sense of well-being'. But there is also some very fine and little known chamber music, including four superb quartets , that deserves to come out of the shadow of more fashionable twentieth-century compositions. The Dutton CD above comes from the adventurous chamber music group Endymion who also appeared on the excellent NMC disc of Elisabeth Lutyens music that featured here last year in print and as a podcast . A point of clarification at this point; the Dutton CD sleeve gives the performers as the Endymion Ensemble . There is (was?) a US group of this name . The UK band simply call themselves Endymion important work rehabilitating the music of York Bowen . The best known work on their rewarding CD of Rubbra's music is his Sonata for Oboe and Piano, Op. 100, which was written for Evelyn Rothwell (Lady Barbirolli). Other musical connections abound in this collection of the composer's chamber music. His Phantasy , Op. 16 is dedicated to Gerald Finzi . Dutch oboeist Peter Bree , who specialises in twentieth-century music (follow the path to Jules Röntgen ), commissioned and recorded the Duo, Op. 156. Arnold Bax's brother Clifford wrote the 1947 BBC radio play The Buddha for which Rubbra provided the incidental music, which became his Suite, The Buddha , Op. 64. Rubbra had a life-long interest in comparative religion, mysticism, and metaphysical literature. He briefly practiced Buddhism before returning to Catholicism . His output also included some very fine sacred choral music that is well worth exploring. This includes a Magnificat and Missa Cantuariensis for the Anglican rite, and a Latin Mass and motets. All can be found on the recommended Naxos disc by Christopher Robinson and the Choir of St. John's College, Cambridge below.The Year is '72 I am indebted to Leo Black's Edmund Rubbra Symphonist (ISBN 9781843833550). My copy was supplied by the publisher, Boydell & Brewer , at my request. Both Rubbra CDs featured were purchased by me. Any copyrighted material on these pages is included as "fair use", for the purpose of study, review or critical analysis only, and will be removed at the request of copyright owner(s). Report broken links, missing images and errors to - overgrownpath at hotmail dot co dot uk
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Chicago Symphony with Pierre Boulez stellar at Hill Auditorium - AnnArbor.com
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The List: January 28 - February 3, 2010 - Chicago Reader
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Guitarist Nicolella ranges widely, from delicate classical to edgy modern - Seattle Times
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Updates of Last Post and Announcements
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Wagner’s Moments versus Motives Due to the fact that recently I have spent a considerable amount of time driving, I decided that there could be no better opportunity to revisit the Ring Cycle . I was fortunate enough to see it staged last June at the Vienna State Opera and while there were some serious deficiencies in the production — such as the Brünnhilde — I found the experience of seeing the entire work again to be engaging, albeit tiring. Vienna’s Ring Cycle circa 2003 used to be presented in a most civilized manner: after a mid-week performance of Rheingold , the lengthier operas were held for Sundays starting in the late afternoon, allowing for sufficient time to enjoy a fortifying goulash prior to the experience (not unlike the American National Football League’s once-per-week schedule). This time around, they decided to go for a more intense schedule, presenting all four operas within the space of a week. I think I prefer the leisurely approach: in the week version, I felt as through I was running some kind of opera marathon, not once but three times. After seeing the entire cycle, I decided that it would be the ideal time to cement the operas into my musical memory by listening to them whenever possible. Pairing many hours in the car with the Ring Cycle was an ideal combination.
What has struck me in my most recent exploration of these works is their reliance on moments, a characteristic that I associate more with Italian operas rather than German ones. Virtually all of us are acquainted with these events in Italian works: consider the dramatic moments as Canio puts on his costume in Pagliacci , Cavaradossi recalls a rendez-vous under the stars, or Aida conjures up distant Ethiopia. In contrast, Wagnerian music drama is rarely discussed in such terms. Instead, there is a fixation on motives, particularly those that can be traced throughout the work and serve as clear signifiers of objects.
Yet Wagner’s works are equally dependent on moments to make them work. There is one key difference between a Wagnerian moment and an Italian one: Wagner relies less on the singer and considerably more on the orchestra. Moments are by no means unique to the Ring Cycle . Consider the return of Isolde in Act III of Tristan und Isolde : as she enters, we hear the same music that was played when the potion took its effect in the first act. However, this is no passionate acknowledgment of love; instead, the lack of resolution is heightened by the scurrying motive in the strings that abates only after Tristan sings, ‘Isolde,’ an echo of his response in Act I and his last utterance before succumbing to the wound inflicted by Melot. Unquestionably, the motives serve a crucial role in this scene, but the culmination creates an operatic moment that is no less effective than those of his Italian contemporaries.
Considering the length of the Ring Cycle , it is astounding that Wagner created moments that are so sonically distinct that they can be remembered across operas. One of my recent favorites is the moment of Brünnhilde’s awakening in Siegfried (‘Heil dir, Sonne’), accompanied by a series of chords moving from an e minor to a C major, back to the e minor and then to a d minor. The passage stands out because of the unexpected progressions and the distinct orchestration in the winds and brass with harp accents. This sequence returns exactly twice more in the Ring Cycle . It is the first sound heard in Götterdämmerung (now lowered by a semi-tone) and, in what has to be one of the most poignant uses of a leitmotif in the entire work, when Siegfried suddenly remembers his love for Brünnhilde prior to his death and calls her name. The device is not unlike Tristan’s final ‘Isolde,’ yet here it creates a parallel with Brünnhilde in Siegfried since it is his own awakening from a spell.
Of the Ring Cycle operas, my favorite is Götterdämmerung , despite the fact that I am certain Wagner could have divided the acts more mercifully (the Prologue and Act I take two hours to perform). This was Wagner’s starting point and it is the closest to a conventional opera: we have a chorus in Act 2 as well as a trio; there is action instead of reflection (consider Act 2 of Walküre by contrast!); and all of the time-worn operatic themes surface such as tragedy, betrayal, and deception. Perhaps this is also why it features such unforgettable moments.
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January 27, 2010
Brad Mehldau to Hold Season-Long Residency at Carnegie Hall; First Jazz Artist ... - Nonesuch Records (blog)
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Preview calendar: Clubs and concerts for Jan. 28-Feb. 3 - North County Times
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Promise in partnership of chamber players, Shakespeare troupe - Access Atlanta
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Gala celebrates Carnegie Hall's 120th anniversary - The Star-Ledger - NJ.com
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Orange County's Philharmonic Society sets Dudamel, Japan festival for 2010-11 ... - Los Angeles Times
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01/27/10 playlist Owen Pallett ~ The Great Elsewhere Rachel's ~ Tea Merchants Bon Iver ~ Babys Birdsongs of the Mesozoic ~ Terry Riley's House Daniel Bernard Roumain (DBR) ~ Zachary's Dream ~ from In C Remixed Jeff Harrington ~ For Erzulie Dantor the last track above is part of a compilation to benefit Haiti which can be purchased here Amy Horvey ~ Overture to The Queen of Music Boxes Amy X. Neuburg & the Cello Chixtet ~ Difficult Fay Kueen 斐斐 ~ Pisces Monodrama Michael Gordon ~ Industry ------------- Interview with composer Derek Bermel discussing his Grammy nominated BMOP/sound recording, Voices.
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Phil Society of OC unveils ambitious 2010-11 season - OCRegister (blog)
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Polished Preternatural - New Haven Advocate New Haven Advocate Polished Preternatural New Haven Advocate Her right hand rested in her lap through the whole, long movement and her feet worked furiously, to distinguish all the different through-lines of the music ...
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STRAVINSKY: Pulcinella; Symphony In Three Movements; Four Etudes - Roxana ... - Audiophile Audition
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These New Puritans releases Hidden - MusicRemedy
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Gerald Carpenter: UCSB Percussionists Return with a Bang - Noozhawk
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Brad Mehldau Named Carnegie Debs Composer's Chair
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Miscellany: Palin on Brahms, etc.
Joseph Horowitz, one of the most formidable commentators on the classical scene, has a new blog at the ArtsJournal hub.
Amanda Ameer, another ArtsJournal blogger, recently hosted an absorbing online symposium on the tricky business of promoting classical musicians. The discussion begins here .
Last month, David Byrne caused a bit of a stir by calling into question L.A. Opera’s pricey Ring cycle and, by extension, the entire business of presenting music by “a bunch of dead guys.” Ethan Iverson vigorously responds , prophesying a new age of Wagnerian hip-hop.
Jeremy Denk is at it again , enticing Sarah Palin into the debate on Brahms tempi. The pianist previously interviewed Palin on the topic of Beethoven’s “Hammerklavier.”
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Carnegie's Next Season Features James Taylor and Seiji Ozawa - New York Times
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Morphoses to Perform at the Granada - Santa Barbara Independent
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Talking with composers, Canada and beyond - Sequenza21 (blog) Talking with composers, Canada and beyond Sequenza21 (blog) Five are with the most senior generation of international contemporary music “stars”: Pierre Boulez , George Crumb, Mauricio Kagel, Christian Wolff and ...
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Orange County's Philharmonic Society sets Dudamel, Japan festival for 2010-11 ... - Los Angeles Times (blog)
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Nico Muhly: a wonder-boy winner at the Roundhouse Reverb Festival - Telegraph.co.uk (blog)
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Sounds of Wasted Energy
Sound Clip: RnBn Energy by David Ceballos and Daniel Ludwig (12th Grade Sound Class).
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The Economy of Exposure: Publicity as Payment?
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The Cost of Climbing the Ivory Tower
By Colin Holter
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Conversations American Composers Orchestra has brought on George Manahan as their new Music Director but that’s not until next season. Fortunately you don’t have to wait until next season to hear the orchestra – they are performing THIS weekend in New York (Friday, January 29th – Zankel Hall. 7:30pm) and Philadelphia (Saturday, January 30th – Annenberg Center. 7:30pm) with Conductor Anne Manson . I was able to get her on the phone for a few minutes last night to talk about the program, you can listen to our short conversation here
The program includes two world premieres: Sebastian Currier’s Next Atlantis , inspired by New Orleans and written for string orchestra and pre-recorded sound, with video by Pawel Wojtasik; and Roger Zare’s Time Lapse , a piece for orchestra influenced by photographic techniques, commissioned by ACO as part of its Underwood Composers Readings for Emerging Composers.
Latin jazz innovator Paquito D’Rivera’s Conversations with Cachao is the centerpiece of the program, and receives its New York City and Philadelphia premieres in these performances. A tribute to Israel “Cachao” López, the Havana bass player who made Cuban Mambo a worldwide phenomenon, the piece is a double concerto featuring D’Rivera’s clarinet and alto sax in dialogue with the double bass, played by Robert Black .
I was also able to spend some time talking with Robert Black last spring about working with composers. It has nothing to do with the ACO concert this weekend, but if you want to listen to him talk about some of his experiences working with composers you can get the audio here
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Talking with composers, Canada and beyond Each generation of composers coming up through college is always a little dismayed to find their music history survey books fizzling out in their descriptions current composers. Maybe one compressed chapter at the end, with a jumble of names or the barest of thumbnail sketches. Half are already only half-remembered, and the other half are musicians you desperately want something, anything more from or about! Yet often somewhere out there beyond the curriculum, there’s another kind of book; one some dedicated fan, critic or participant created, providing fuller sketches and often interviews with the people that matter most to them in the here and now (one such that mattered greatly for me in the 1980s was John Rockwell’s All American Music ).
Another of my little quirks is a strong liking for a number of recent and contemporary Canadian composers. I have no idea how it happened — other than perhaps years of government funding and a certain image of some “outsider” isolation and independence — but to my ears Canada has produced a remarkably large group of surprising and creative musicians.
So I was very happy to see that one of the latest “catch-up” books on composers comes from a Canadian perspective. Paul Steenhuisen a fine Canadian musician in his own right, has recently published Sonic Mosaics: Conversations with Composers (University of Alberta Press, 2009) , a collection of interviews with (mostly) living composers from America, Europe and Canada.
We asked another Canadian musician and journalist, John Oliver , to review the book :
……………………………………………….
Sonic Mosaics is a book of interviews conducted by composer Paul Steenhuisen over a three-year period from 2001-2004. Over half of the interviews were commissioned by Toronto’s monthly, short-run music publication WholeNote on the occasion of a composer’s presence in the city for a premiere performance or CD release. Two were originally published in Musicworks magazine and the rest were conducted by Steenhuisen afterward to complete the book and attempt to represent more Canadian composers.
Steenhuisen gets full marks for disclosure: he reveals the shortcomings and strengths of the book in the introduction. Although the book contains a large number of interviews with Canadian composers, the author admits that it is by no means representative of the entire country. The reader is treated to six interviews with non-Canadian composers, three of which occur as a result of a composer’s appearance as a guest of New Music Concerts. Five are with the most senior generation of international contemporary music “stars”: Pierre Boulez , George Crumb , Mauricio Kagel , Christian Wolff and Helmut Lachenmann ; the sixth is UK composer Michael Finnissy .
Equivalent Canadian senior composers include R. Murray Schafer , John Weinzweig , Udo Kasemets , John Beckwith , and Francis Dhomont . Yet equivalent senior composers of Quebec and the rest of Canada are not represented. The rest of the interviews give a glimpse into the creative minds of primarily composers who reside in the province of Ontario. Place-of-residence analysis reveals that, of the 26 Canadian interviewees, 16 reside in Ontario, 6 in Quebec, 3 in British Columbia, and one in Alberta: not an accurate proportional representation. The reader may also note that over half of composers represented here teach at universities, an understandable bias given the author’s background and the general tendency in Canada for composers to gain a livelihood from teaching. If this represents only a subset of important Canadian composers, the reader’s curiosity will be aroused to seek out information about more as a result of reading this book. A second volume is in order.
Steenhuisen as interviewer asks probing, well-researched and varied questions that elicit from his subjects responses that vary from candid and revealing to evasive or predictable. Thankfully, the latter moments are few. Rather, we experience a conversation rich enough in detail to please the contemporary music enthusiast (though rarely theoretical and technical enough for the academic), and broad enough in scope to introduce those in the earlier stages of discovery to basic paradigms of the art and to some major international figures and a cross-section of Canadian composers, most of whom are interviewed for the first time in such a volume. The sense of speaking in confidence brings authority and depth to many of the interviews that a journalist would be less likely to reach.
Steenhuisen’s questions and style – sometimes probing, other times knowingly prodding the subject – create a text that never lags. The author states, again in the introduction, that “while trained in neither journalism nor interviewing techniques, I am instead a self-taught critic, and approached the interviews as an interested professional, with the goal that my own interests and perspectives on the work of the interviewee would overlap with those of other listeners.” This approach gives the reader a consistency of intent throughout the book, thus providing a book full of ideas about music, composition and the professional life, though few biographical details.
Considering the interviews’ length and generalist purpose, they are remarkably thorough. For example, we have a fine overview of the career of Pierre Boulez in 8 pages: “you should be autodidact by will, not by chance” and “I like specialists only for surgery and medicine, but not for music.” The personality of each interviewee shines out. Steenhuisen’s intends is to cover as much territory as possible. Among his many questions, Steenhuisen usually directs the interview toward the discussion of a specific work and its ideas and touches on the subject of social relevance by way of the topic of communication. Several of the senior composers have appeared in print in the past and are well-known in Canada, but may be new to non-Canadian readers. Entirely new information is contributed to our understanding of contemporary music in the interviews of younger generations. Among the most fascinating are Howard Bashaw , who speaks of pre-compositional planning, musical structure, the role of the piano, intimacy, exactitude, and performance energy; Michael Finnissy , whose continuous ramblings seem chaotic on the surface but clearly the work of a brilliant mind; and Chris Paul Harman ’s discussion of recontextualisation, self-criticism and self-distancing from the materials of music. Helmut Lachenmann ’s entire interview could function as a suitable introduction to the whole book, especially his description of his own music as creating a “situation of perception, which provokes you to wonder ‘What is music?’”
Another great pleasure comes from comparisons among composers, and the echo of one composer’s ideas in another’s. To give just one example: the echo of Robert Normandeau ’s birth of the musical material from listening to the sounds in Barbara Croall ’s description of her way of composing; then the relationship of Croall’s attraction to the “imperfect”, “in-between” sounds to Lachenmann’s explanation of the use of such sounds as establishing “new contexts” for listening and composing. The book is full of such riches. A highly-recommended read.
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Slow Six - Tomorrow Becomes You - DOA Slow Six - Tomorrow Becomes You DOA Brian Eno, whose pioneering ambient music was largely inspired by classical minimalists Steve Reich and Terry Riley, is another standout. ...
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8 hours + 60 musicians = 1 sonic genome - Globe and Mail
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TALKIN' 'BOUT MY GENERATION - Cleveland Scene Weekly
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Pierre Boulez leads The Cleveland Orchestra in program featuring Mahler's Des ... - Cleveland Leader
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Eight hours, 60 musicians = a sonic genome - Globe and Mail Eight hours, 60 musicians = a sonic genome Globe and Mail But he also composed operas and orchestral works, and his compositional ideas have much in common with Charles Ives, John Cage and Karlheinz Stockhausen . ...
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XENAKIS AND JAPAN: THE INNER LIVES OF GHOSTS - Culturekiosque
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Love, life and crimes against humanity Jacques Brel has sold more than 25 million records worldwide. His songs, including standards such as Ne Me Quitte Pas ,On An Overgrown Path the incomparable Bernard Levin wrote : I sometimes think I would exchange all the music I have ever heard for real plainsong heard amid walls of stone. Solesmes which is famous for its Gregorian Chant , and supporters of Marshal Pétain , leader of France's collaborationist wartime government. In particular the name of French war criminal Paul Touvier kept cropping up.Milice Klaus Barbie the notorious 'butcher of Lyons'. In September 1946 Touvier was sentenced to death in absentia by the French courts for treason and collusion with the Nazis. He was arrested in 1947, but escaped and was on the run from 1947 to 1966 when the 20 year statute of limitations in France abrogated his death sentence.Saint-Joseph de Nice run by followers of the right-wing cleric Monsignor Marcel Lefebvre . During his time in hiding Touvier stayed in a number of traditionalist monasteries with musical connections including Solesmes and Fontgombault .main online Brel biographies make no mention of Touvier and my search on the official Belgian Edition Jacques Brel website against the term 'Paul Touvier' returned a result of 'There is no page matching your request!' the International Justice Tribune website Jean-Pierre Getti, the last of four examining magistrates on the Touvier case between 1989 and 1981, says: In 1967 Touvier gained permission from the singer [Brel] to produce a sex education record for children titled “L’amour et la vie ” - [Love and Life]. He [Touvier] told me that he had met him [Brel] when he was visiting Chambéry, by going and sitting at the restaurant table in his hotel and introducing himself with the words: “I am Paul Touvier, a condemned man.” L'Amour Et La Vie was released as the Philips vinyl LP seen above with the translated subtitle of 'Conception and birth explained to children ', and the producer is listed as 'Berthet'. Paul Touvier's wife's family name was Berthet and he was known to use the alias Paul Berthet . The sleeve says the record is a collaboration with the marriage guidance service of Grenoble, the nearest city to Chambéry where Touvier first joined the Milice. The sleeve note says 'This record is intended for parents and children alike. It is about the difficult subject of initiating young people into the "mystery of life" .'L'Amour Et La Vie is not listed on the official Jacques Brel discography but the Discogs website lists Brel, seen below, as singing the first track on side 2, Voir . The other tracks are sung by the Petits Chanteurs de l'Ile-de-France L'Amour Et La Vie was released by Philips, Brel's record label from 1954 to 1962. He recorded Voir for another Philips disc in 1962, so presumably the Brel song on L'Amour Et La Vie was a repeat of the 1962 track.L'Amour Et La Vie. 1967 may have been the year of the Beatles' Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds and Stockhausen's Hymnen , but the French press enthused about a new release featuring Jacques Brel, a children's choir and tracks such as Un Papa, Une Maman... Pourquoi? - 'A mother, a father... why? ' Franche Dimanche wrote of "parents speaking of their love and their children" and the Catholic le Pélerin said the the record "cannot be recommended too highly".corrobarated elsewhere , of Touvier introducing himself to Brel with the words ‘I am Paul Touvier, a condemned man’. But Touvier's account may not be truthful as he was known to be a convincing serial liar. A 1988 Le Nouvel Observateur articleLe Nouvel Observateur articles describes Touvier as Brel's secretary and says that he lived in Brel's villa in Saint-Pierre-de-Chartreuse from 1968 to 1971. An interview on the Europe1 website (no longer available ) with journalist and commentator Claude Moniquet dates the first meeting between Brel and Touvier as 1959: which means that Brel was closely involved with Touvier for at least eight years, a truly remarkable period for the war criminal to successfully keep his true identity concealed. unsubstantiated and speculative . Brel's biographer Olivier Todd , a member of Jean Paul Sartre's circle wrote that in politics Brel followed his heart rather than his head. Touvier himself said : "Toute ma vie n’a été qu’une énorme tromperie. Je crois bien que j’arriverais à tromper Dieu ! Qu’importe ! Je suis bien à ce point où Dieu et le Diable ne font qu’un !" Victor Basch and his wife Ilona. Basch was the former president of the League of Human Rights which in the 1890s had led the defence of Alfred Dreyfus , the Jewish French army captain falsely accused of treason.Jacques Tremollet de Villers , who later became president of the traditionalist Catholic organization La Cité Catholique Society of Saint Pius X founded by Monsignor Marcel Lefebvre sat beside Touvier throughout his trial and acted as his spiritual advisor.St Nicolas du Chardonnet , the Society of St. Pius X's chapel in Paris.L’amour et la vie was edited by Paul Touvier in April 1967. The following month Brel retired from touring after a final appearance in Roubaix, France, but he continued to work in the recording studio and in films and the theatre. Jacques Brel died of lung cancer aged 49 in October 1978.The Rule of St. Benedict requires that monasteries offer guests shelter without prejudice, whether they be war criminals or bloggers. But, that notwithstanding, I am grateful for the continuing hospitality and receptiveness of the contemplative orders.in the New York Times , but it makes no mention of Jacques Brel.Europe 1 websiteon the Radio Netherland Worldwide website .Le Nouvel Observateur archived articles of 3-9 Nov. 1988 and 1 June 1989 .Editions Jacques Brel - official website .L'Amour Et La Vie from Discogs website .Obituary of Touvier in the Independent is a well researched and balanced source with good background on the involvement of the Catholic church, but again no mention of the Brel connection.Brief biography of Touvier on the FranceInter website provides my illuminating quote.a Belgium blog .The Statement later adapted into a film directed by Norman Jewison and starring Michael Caine.1996 London Times Online article with its accusation that 'In 1967, when the statute of limitations expired for his crimes, Touvier emerged from his monastic hidey-hole to record a song about having sex with girls called L’amour et la vie, with Brel contributing backing vocals' . Presumably the Times had problems with the translation of 'un disque sur l'éducation sexuelle des enfants' . Oh, how the mighty have fallen.here . Photos of Brel in this article are publicity shots used in Barclay's 2004 compilation Brel Infiniment here .Holocaust Memorial Day . This date is the anniversary of the liberation by the Soviet Army in 1945 of the largest Nazi concentration camp, Auschwitz-Birkenau . Read about a little known Holocaust opera here .With thanks to Hérisson for invaluable assistance with research for this article and the always excellent food and drink. Any copyrighted material on these pages is included as "fair use", for the purpose of study, review or critical analysis only, and will be removed at the request of copyright owner(s). Report broken links, missing images and errors to - overgrownpath at hotmail dot co dot uk Version 0.5 26/01/2010
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Burkina Electric: 21st-Century African Music - KUAR
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Music review: Contemporary Music Players - San Francisco Chronicle
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Your Jazz Robot Overlords - Village Voice Your Jazz Robot Overlords Village Voice But neither does this record resemble the "impossible," "post-performer" music Conlon Nancarrow programmed on his piano rolls. Metheny is a thoroughly human ... and more »
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January 26, 2010
To Utopia and Back - Wall Street Journal To Utopia and Back Wall Street Journal Imagine a young German like [Karlheinz] Stockhausen discovering new music after 12 years of Nazi time. Can you imagine? The desire to get out of that! ... and more »
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Britten Sinfonia/Muhly/Collon - The Guardian Britten Sinfonia/Muhly/Collon The Guardian ... played by Muhly), and Steve Reich (the ensemble piece City Life). In Muhly's music , though, there seems more of Reich's rougher-edged sound than of ...
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BCMG/Knussen at the Wigmore Hall - Times Online
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Hitting the high notes - The Herald The Herald Hitting the high notes The Herald In 1979, in New York, different seeds were sown when Pierre Boulez , then music director of the New York Philharmonic, suggested to Daugherty that he should ...
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Sounds Heard: Collage New Music Performs Donald Sur
By Frank J. Oteri
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events The coming weeks are especially rich with concerts. Here's what I know so far:
Wednesday, January 27th Gare du Nord Paul Huebner , trumpet - Clemens Hund-Goeschel, piano
Wednesday, January 27th The Gershwin Hotel night of solo and chamber works of Feldman & Lucier.
Friday, January 29 Ultraschall
Saturday, January 30 Ultraschall
January 28, 29, 30 alt:neu --Quatuor Bozzini plays Kagel, Brand, Walshe
Friday, February 5th The Morgan Library and Museum JACK Plays the complete Xenakis quartets
Sunday, February 6th Stockhausen + Kagel Retrospektive
Monday, February 8th King's Place ELISION ensemble (see the previous post and associated links)
Tuesday, February 9th-Wednesday, February 10th Diapason Gallery
Saturday, February 13th On Foot , Craig Shepard walked 250 miles across Switzerland. Every day he composed a new piece, wrote it down and performed it on the pocket trumpet at 6 p.m. All concerts took place out-of-doors in public spaces such as squares, harbors, intersections, sidewalks, and mountain-tops. The performance features pieces and readings from the book.
***
Let me know if I've missed something, and I'm likely to add it to the list. I've only included events between now and the end of February. I know I already missed some great things that happened in the last few days. And there is more on the radar for March. But the line has to be drawn somewhere.
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ECHO Food Shelf Benefit Concert - BLC News & Events ECHO Food Shelf Benefit Concert BLC News & Events Specializing in the music of today, the Duo has been focusing on new music based on the folkloric traditions of various cultures. This year's tour presents ...
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If you have to bear the exiles' fate In the fireplace, a fire is burning. Listen carefully children, Learn children, have no fear, Children, you are going to grow up, If you, my children, Holocaust Memorial Day . This date is the anniversary of the liberation by the Soviet Army in 1945 of the largest Nazi concentration camp, Auschwitz-Birkenau , the first name in the list of camps above. My photos show the Mémorial de la Déportation Georges-Henri Pingusson's haunting design predates Daniel Libeskind's much better known Jewish Museum in Berlin by thirty-nine years.Oyfn Pripetchik - In the Fireplace . German singer Jutta Carstensen's CD of Yiddish songs and Klezmer music made with Ensemble Trielen for the inimitable Ad Vitam label was one my personal highlights from the 2009 releases. You can hear Jutta Carstensen and Ensemble Trielen performing Oyfn Pripetchik in the podcast of my recent A World of Music programme .Jutta Carstensen and Ensemble Trielen's CD of Yiddish Chants and Klezmer music was bought online. All photos are (C) On An Overgrown Path 2010. Report broken links, missing images and errors to - overgrownpath at hotmail dot co dot uk
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Read This
By Frank J. Oteri
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Wild tones A few years ago, having become frustrated with my own over-slow tempi and clumsy tone while reading through Stravinsky's Sonata , I just had to hear the piece played once well and at tempo. I forced myself to listen to one recording after another. I was mostly disappointed by the performances, but one recording stood out, and — to me — it was a complete surprise. It was that of pianist Earl Wild, who has just died at the age of 94.
I was surprised becaused Wild's name was not one that someone involved in new music would immediately think of, moreover it was a name that I associated with the showy virtuoso end of the big-name classical music establishment, not territory where musical sensitivity is always valued, but that association was a mistake on my part. Sure, he was a flamboyant stage presence and sure, he was a Liszt specialist, but he was a Liszt specialist who could handle all of Liszt, which means not just the fireworks, but also the reveries, lugubrious gondolas, and bird songs. To handle such a range, a pianist needs not only fluency and velocity in passages of great density, volume, and complexity, but has to give those dense sections a coherent composite form and clear harmonic rhythm, and has also to be able to make single, isolated tones come alive in sparse textures at minimal dynamics, being sensitive to how each new attack influences the instrument's ensemble sound, gathered and developing under keys held open or the pedal, a near-impossible balancing act.
What has that got to do with performance practice for Stravinsky? The default setting for Stravinsky performance is usually "dry", but for me, Wild's recording and the experience of hearing works by Jo Kondo — whose own musical identity was very much shaped by Stravinsky — being recorded by the ensemble L'Art pour l'Art under the composer's supervision absolutely were convincing arguments that the quality in question was discretion not dryness, that single tones could and should be shaped and allowed to blossom and resonate. (As Kondo put it “I am interested in words more than in sentences, in sentences more than in paragraphs, in paragraphs more than in a whole page. Thus, it could be said that in music I am more concerned with each sound than with the phrases they create.”) Wild's Liszt-grown technique turns out to have been perfect for this style, giving elegant harmonic shape to passages of great velocity as well as bringing out the internal activity of individual tones.
Wild was probably the last survivor of the great house pianists from the days when American radio stations took live classical music seriously. His initial popularity was no doubt due to his recording of Rhapsody in Blue , but his association with American music of the mid-20th century was broader than that and, if the evidence of a Sonata which shares the Stravinsky recording means anything, he was no slouch as a composer for the piano himself, not just turning out the kitsch required for television appearances and I have also read that he was also an active transcriber, a serious musical activity in its own right, also with a Lisztian origin. It will be interesting to hear if other pianists now take up Wild's music.
(BTW: This chat (on YouTube) with Wild is a blast; you'll never think of knitting the same way again.)
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Future of Folk concert... Soar Bridge Inn . Photos and possibly review to follow - off to London on Thursday for a couple of days - Peter Brotzmann ticket booked for the Cafe Oto that night...
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Happy birthday, Pierre Boulez - Detroit Free Press Happy birthday, Pierre Boulez Detroit Free Press He is the éminence grise of the European avant-garde: His abstract, atonal and radically systemized music defined the cutting edge for a quarter century ...
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The JACK Quartet, experimental and then some | Philadelphia Inquirer | 01/26/2010 - Philadelphia Inquirer
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The JACK Quartet, experimental and then some | Philadelphia Inquirer | 01/26/2010 - Philadelphia Inquirer
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Master Class with Johannes Moser and Phyllis Chen Presented by Columbia ... - Bwog (blog)
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The JACK Quartet, experimental and then some - Philadelphia Inquirer The JACK Quartet, experimental and then some Philadelphia Inquirer More extreme were works by Wolfgang Rihm and Matthias Pintscher that use sound sparingly. Rihm's seven-movement 1976 Quartet No. 3 sometimes showed its age ...
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Dance review: Morphoses/The Wheeldon Company - San Francisco Chronicle
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Getting Off the Assembly Line Your generous responses to my little outburst about being tired of blogging certainly made it clear what most useful direction this blog can continue to go in. I may be out of ideas I haven't expounded, but my file cabinets and hard drives are still chockablock with music that's not in general circulation, and listeners are eager to have their experience widened. If I do no more than satisfy that longing, I will have felt that my trip to this planet was not in vain. If I become in the process sort of the Dick Cavett of avant-garde music, so be it.
One of the themes of my life has become something I never expected. I've based some large part of my career around documenting recent music not adequately represented by its score notation. It started with Nancarrow. His scores contain all of his notes, of course, but many of them, especially the late player piano studies, don't provide as much explicit rhythmic notation as is actually inherent. After some brief acquaintance with Nancarrow's music I formed a theory that, even when it looked like he was rather intuitively splashing notes onto the page, there was always some underlying tempo and even isorhythm to which everything referred. Some painstaking analysis with a little plastic millimeter ruler quickly bore me out, and I found further confirmation when I was able to consult his punching scores - from which he made his final scores, but omitted the messy tempo-grid information.
Since then I have stumbled upon a wealth of music whose score notation, if it exists at all, doesn't adequately represent it. I reconstructed Dennis Johnson's November from the recording and score fragments, and have spent time transcribing improvisations by Harold Budd, Elodie Lauten, and others. I've reconstructed some of Mikel Rouse's ensemble music from parts and mathematical models. Harry Partch's music is indecipherable as to pitch unless you know the various tablatures of his instruments, and, in the case of his Kitharas, I'm told that you can't figure out the music without knowing how to play the instrument.
Lately I've finally been studying a rather sketchy 392-page score to Meredith Monk's 1991 opera Atlas that she was kind enough to give me years ago. Meredith refuses to have her singers learn music from notation because it detracts from a lively performance; she prefers to sing their lines and have them sing them back, as in Indian music. The Atlas score pretty much contains the instrumental parts verbatim, but some of the vocal parts are left blank on the page, indicating that they were to be developed in rehearsal. Scores to two of the most beautiful sections, "Choosing Companions" and "Agricultural Community," contain no vocal parts at all. The "Ice Demons" music, when compared with the recording , shows how precise some of her notation is, how free it is in other places, and how free the singers were to ignore it in either case:
The whole score is a fascinating document of Meredith's working method. Occasional passages are blanked out, omitted in rehearsal, and where the vocal rhythms (heard here ) are exactly notated, the actual performance is often much freer:
It's difficult to imagine improving on the unconventional notation of the "Shing Way" section, in which the singers sit in a circle and pass each pitch or figure linearly from one to another (recording here ):
I don't know whether, since 1991, Meredith has made a nicer, more complete score of Atlas , but why should she? This was adequate for a series of stunning performances, and it represents a starting point for the piece, not an end product in itself. Some musicologist could certainly prepare a nice final score using this and the recording as guides, but this one tells more about Meredith's working method than an engraved Universal Urtext ever could.
The lack of scores is a big issue for studying Robert Ashley's music as well; or rather, the discrepancy between his spare working scores, his "production notebooks" as he calls them, and the information overload on the recordings. Years ago when I analyzed Improvement: Don Leaves Linda with a class, Bob kindly gave me the complete MIDI files for the piece, but correctly warned me that they wouldn't be much help. They were used to trigger events in primitve 1980s software that no current computer still supports, and it's only here and there that one finds telling correspondences between the MIDI and the recording. Translated to notation, the MIDI files look something like this:
It's possible that some tracks triggered only markers heard by the performers through headphones, and not by the audience.
More typically, Ashley's actual scores contain the libretto marked out in numbered lines, surrounded by harmonic or melodic notations where needed, like this page from Dust :
Ashley takes on the problem of how someone else could perform his operas in an article called "Style and Technique: Performance Practice," which is collected with his other writings in a dazzlingly huge and mind-challenging new collection of his writings from MusikTexte titled Outside of Time: Ideas about Music , which I will surely be writing more about later. "The solution," he writes,
is to get all of the operas recorded in a finished form in the most recent format (now, compact discs). Anybody who wanted to produce one of the operas could work from the compact disc, which represents the way the opera is to be performed and how it is supposed to sound. Except for the rhythmic treatment of the words, which remains a notated constant, there is no score from which to make the orchestra. As I have said, the studio production notes for any opera will make little sense in the future, even if I could decipher them now, because they refer to instruments that will be long gone.
He talks about a student writing a dissertation on Perfect Lives , to whom he had to explain that a score did not exist.
...about two months later I got in the mail a very accurately transcribed orchestration of the first episode of Perfect Lives , "The Park." This is how it should be. The person listened. This is how jazz musicians learn jazz. This is how most of the people in the world learn the music they play. [p. 190]
Like Ashley, Mikel Rouse has a ton of MIDI information in his scores that can't be deciphered without access to his hardware setup, and can only be documented by reference to the recording. The "chromaticism" in his unpitched percussion parts in this measure from Dennis Cleveland is a dead giveaway:
I also have a pile of one- or two-page scores by David First that I hope to get to someday, marked with little more than noteheads and plus-or-minus-cent numbers. The following page seems to comprise the 15-minute entirety of his piece Distance Receives Permission to Enter from the album Resolver :
You can listen along and follow the whole piece here . I doubt there's much danger of someone taking the score and arranging a performance independently.
Finally, here's an intriguing passage, with Totalist rhythms, from Glenn Branca's Symphony No. 6 for electric guitars, back from his pre-musical-notation days:
In a way there's a mirror image here, within academic discourse, to 12-tone music. Twelve-tone music and its related forms inspired an immense music-theoretical literature devoted to explaining how the music, opaque as it often is to the ear, is made, and by extention how it is to be heard. Minimalism and its related forms are likewise inspiring a new literature in musicology, for scholars simply trying to document what the music consists of. Famous pieces can be reconstructed from recordings. Partch's scores get published in just-intonation-notation transcriptions. Even Steve Reich's celebrated Music for 18 Musicians was apparently notated so idiosyncratically that younger composer Marc Mellits had to do considerable work on the score to make it publishable by Boosey and Hawkes.
The music is worth analyzing. But it is not the composer's responsibility to make it available for analysis - it is his or her responsibility to successfully bring it to performance. If more is needed for teaching purposes, there are musicologists. As Cage would have added: use them.
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
Of course, scores like these pose a pedagogical problem. They depart from the universal paradigm for what a score is: a linear continuity on bound paper which contains all the information needed to replicate the piece in performance. The central core of the composition teacher's job is to teach a student how to write self-contained music for strangers to play. Students have often told me the goal as other teachers have stated it to them: your score should be so detailed and self-explanatory that you can mail it to an ensemble in Japan who are unfamiliar with your music, and they'll be able to send you back an accurate recording. Of course, I find this ideal illusory at best. I've sent pretty clear scores to friends who know my work well, and shown up for rehearsal to find energy levels and tempos all wrong, even with dynamics and metronome markings quite explicit. The truth is, traditional musical notation is at best never an entirely efficient transmitter of an imagined musical sound object. The participation of the composer is omitted at everyone's peril.
The other truth is, music is not necessarily an imagined sound object (though in academia it is often assumed to be only that). Often it is the result of a process, and emerges only in rehearsal. And the intense conformity to expectation involved in learning to make a detailed conventional classical score is a great reiner-in of imagination and individuality. I see my students wrestle, touchingly, with this problem every year. Some of them are eager to write for orchestra and other conventional classical ensembles, and they want to be taught to notate by the book. Others are used to working in rock bands and alone and with friends, and they have effects they want to try out, experiments they want to conduct in rehearsal, parts that they want to leave to improvisation, rhythmic effects that just won't conform to a notated meter. Some of them come up with pretty idiosyncratic notations, but they play the pieces and get what they want. Then they decide that they can't resist that opportunity to write for orchestra for their senior project, and I have to explain at great length what they can expect to achieve with a conventional orchestra in 20 minutes' rehearsal. They want to put radios in the orchestra, have the players shake boxes of metal debris, improvise with the orchestras at different tempos under two conductors, and so on. (We did manage an amplified toy piano in the orchestra one year.) But the classical performance paradigm is an assembly line, and much of composition pedagogy is involved with teaching them, and limiting them to, what can be achieved by players basically sight-reading what's been plopped on their music stands. I never push - but some of them decide not to curtail their individuality for the assembly line, and I applaud them after they make the decision. It takes courage.
As one disaffected young composer recently wrote to me about his crucifixion in the academic milieu, "There is no career success outside this horseshit, and no artistic success within it." That's pretty close to the truth. But in the long run Ashley and Monk and Rouse have managed pretty enviable artistic lives by working outside the system. It takes a kind of relentless heroism.
So you don't like the words Uptown and Downtown: fine. But if you deny the existence of this division in order to erase from your consciousness the fact that some of the most creative and original of recent composers have gone outside the classical paradigm to escape its stultifying limitations, then you delude yourself. Our new music suffers more than anything, I think, from a relentless conformism pushed on young composers in the name of "professionalism," and conformity does not excite audiences. Perhaps we can begin by de-fetishizing the printed score and admitting that it is only a tool, and not always a complete or even necessary tool, that it can sometimes be thrown away once the music exists. Making scores like the above examples available as models for how to go outside the norm, and analyzing the music that goes with them as best we can, may be a start.
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'U' hosts landmark orchestral gathering and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra - Michigan Daily
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Music review: Johannes Moser and Phyllis Chen sound off in Malibu - Los Angeles Times
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George Crumb
BAD DOG:
Bridge Records (DVD)
American composer George Crumb, as we learn early in this delightful video, was born on “Black Thursday,” October 24, 1929. He’s been an unsettling influence for people with fixed ideas about music ever since. Reasoning that we all have different DNA and life experiences, he states, “I have to distrust any school of composition that eliminates the persona of the individual composer.” Certainly, his footprint is different from that of other carbon-based life forms in the music profession. In this program of performance and interview, Volume 14 in Bridge Records’ George Crumb Edition, we get to know the composer in a very personal way. He may have his idiosyncrasies, but he is also utterly without pretence and filled with earnestness to communicate to his audience in a way that some of our other contemporaries would do well to cultivate.
Crumb is relatively well behaved in this program. There is no “spoken flute,” no pouring glass marbles into an open piano or any other aleatoric (i.e., random) technique. In fact, in Eine Kleine Mitternachtmusik (A Little Midnight Music), the major work for extended piano in the middle of program, he is at pains to notate precisely what he expects of the performer. In this instance, it is pianist Robert Shannon, who does a fabulous job realizing a score in which he is required to play the piano in non-traditional, percussive ways involving considerable open-piano techniques.
The work is so-named because it consists of ruminations on Thelonius Monk’s ‘Round Midnight. Other composers have fooled around with the strings inside the piano, but none, I imagine, as well as Crumb. Shannon is continually on his feet, plucking or striking the strings with his hands or using them to play arpeggio like figures and palm clusters that impress the listener with their flights of fancy reinforcing the prevailing mood of the piece. From time to time, he strikes the metal crossbeams with a yarn-covered mallet, the repeated notes adding an eerie quality that enhances the nocturnal theme. (He does all that in addition to playing the keyboard without the benefit of a bench.) All these techniques serve the real purpose of extending Monk’s familiar main tune through a series of nine ruminations in which it drifts in and out of our consciousness like a dream without losing its character. In the process, we encounter mysterious block chords, mischievous staccato figures, nightmare distortions, forte passages, ringing triads, rocking or falling triplets, tritones, and even, in 6: Golliwog Revisited, an affectionate parody on Debussy’s famous Cakewalk, complete with that composer’s impudent dig at Wagner’s “Tristan” chord!
A special treat on this program is vocalist Tony Arnold. We hear from her first in Three Early Songs from Crumb’s 18th year: “Let It Be Forgotten” and “Wind Elegy” (texts by Sara Teasdale) and “Night” (Robert Southey. In case you haven’t noticed, a fascination with the night runs through Crumb’s music.) The composer himself terms these deeply felt early works, which he dedicated to his future wife Elizabeth Brown, reminiscent of Barber and Rachmaninov, though a close listening reveals his own “latent fingerprints.” More mature works heard here are a lively “Sit Down, Sister” (2003), based on the well known African-American spiritual and featuring the talents of all four members of the ensemble, and Apparition (1979), originally written for the unique voice of Jan DeGaetani and here rendered with the greatest vividness and luminosty by Arnold and Shannon. The latter-named work is based on extracts from Walt Whitman’s “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d.” Significantly the verses are from the sequence in the poem known as the “Death Carol,” and not the Lincoln elegy with its rich symbolism of the drooping star and the song of the thrush that has inspired most of the other composers who have treated the subject. Tony Arnold’s pure tones, her cleanly rendered melismas, and her unfailing sensitivity to the meaning of the text, all serve to convey Whitman’s paean to Death as the central point between life and a return to the universal life force.
And, yes, there’s broad humor in this program, primarily in two excerpts from Mundus Canis (A Dog’s Life) entitled “Fritzi” and “Yoda” and inspired by canine members of the Crumb household. Both are deft portraits that capture the personality of their subjects. Yoda, the fluffy white Bichon Frise that we see on the cover (I actually thought it was a stuffed toy until I watched the video) is characterized by scampering guitar passages and rasping percussive sounds, ending in the words “Bad Dog,” spoken by Crumb, which give the program its title. But a curious ambiguity persists: is Yoda the naughty dog of the title, or is it Crumb himself?
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January 25, 2010
The Southern Theater In Partnership With The Weisman Art Museum Presents Bryce ... - Broadway World
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American Composers Orchestra Appoints George Manahan Music Director - Melodika.net
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So Percussion brings minimalist music to the masses - Straight.com
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All Music: On Four-Star "Orchestrion," "Metheny Exceeds Expectations, Perhaps ... - Nonesuch Records (blog)
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The Accidental Music Lesson
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Music for Multiple Basses and The President of the United States Florent Ghys has a new CD coming out on Cantaloupe on Tuesday. To mark the occasion and the upcoming The Union is in a State address by President Obama, we offer this sample of Florent’s handiwork.
/8974425">Music for Multiple Basses, and the President of the United States from Bang on a Can on Vimeo .
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MusicNow's Boulez program rounds off month-long tribute in style - Chicago Classical Review
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The Two Best Things I’ve Heard in Weeks 1. Kyle Gann recently posted Carolyn Yarnell’s piano piece The Same Sky on his blog. (Click here and scroll down for the link to the recording) He calls it “one of the most fantastic keyboard works anyone’s written in the last 20 years” and I have to agree. Kathleen Supové is the pianist, and she tears it up.
2. Swedish electronic rock duo The Knife was commissioned by a Danish performance company called Hotel Pro Forma to write an opera about Charles Darwin. The result, which was premiered in Copenhagen in September 2009, is called Tomorrow in a Year , and based on the material available on the web it looks extraordinary. Here’s The Knife’s Olof Dreijer talking about the project on the band’s website: “At first it was very difficult as we really didn’t know anything about opera. We’d never been to one. I didn’t even know what the word libretto meant. But after some studying, and just getting used to opera’s essence of pretentious and dramatic gestures, I found that there is a lot to learn and play with. In fact, our ignorance gave us a positive respectless approach to making opera. It took me about a year to become emotionally moved by an opera singer and now I really do. I really like the basic theatrical values of opera and the easy way it brings forward a narrative. We’ve approached this before in The Knife but never in such a clear way.”
Here’s “The Coloring of Pigeons:”
d.com/theknife/colouring-of-pigeons">Colouring of Pigeons by The Knife An album of music from the opera is slated for release on March 1st, 2010. I don’t see anything about plans to bring the production to the United States, but a guy can hope.
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University of York degree results - The Press, York University of York degree results The Press, York Doctor of Philosophy in Music : Abhay Adhikari, George Christofi, Daniel John Edgar, Christopher Brian Macklin, Judith Ring. Master of Arts in Community ...
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Malkki, New World bring extraordinary focus to Finnish music - South Florida Classical Review
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Contemporary Music Festival at Berkshire Music School - iBerkshires.com
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RPM Challenge I just signed up for the RPM Challenge. The basic idea is to create a 10 track or 35 minute long album during the 28 days of February. Having a certain amount of street cred as an electronic composer, I think it will be easier for me to do it than if I restricted myself to acoustic instruments. I am, however, going to attempt to write, rehearse, and record at least one work for me to perform with electronics. Attempt is the key word.
February is, without a doubt, one of the worst possible months for me to do this. I have a lot going on, including a week long tour with Ensemble Ilusis. On the other hand, why the hell not? I grow tired of those who shoot down interesting and challenging ideas before they even start. I want to try new and different things, to challenge myself and grow, to not be staid and sedentary. I could list all the reasons why I shouldn’t the RPM Challenge and, as I think of it, the fact that my mind is making excuses is precisely why I SHOULD do it.
So here it is: You see this gauntlet? You see me throw it on the ground here? What are you gonna do about it? What do you have to lose? Do what you will, just don’t tell me all the reasons you aren’t going to pick it up.
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Temporary Notes (16) could be written out as dotted-eighth sixteen. At some point — again, musicologists: have at it, this is your job, not mine — this convention gave way to a more logically consistant — if less stylish — reading of both triplets and dotted note values, so that the same notated rhythmic ensemble would have the sixteenth following the dotted eighth played one twelfth of a quarter note later than the last note in the triplet. As a piece of practical advice, consider this: Unless you specify the earlier convention in your scores, which may be musically useful , players will now expect the later reading.
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Group's strengths play more to contemporary than older music - Sydney Morning Herald
