By Nora Kroll-Rosenbaum
More and more I find that notation reflects the action of creating new music. Beyond the speed of the creative process, notation can successfully function in many different capacities if its intention is clear.
The biggest reason for fans of culture to run out and see Music Makes a City, a new documentary directed by Owsley Brown III and Jerome Hiler, might be the core suggestion it makes: that when times get tough, the talented get bold.
By Frank J. Oteri
Many years ago I realized that I was more likely to remember a passage of my own music if I didn’t write it down than if I did.
Suddenly and inexplicably I am lost, Marin Alsop stops conducting, the audience is utterly silent; I think I say, “Sorry, I have to start the third movement again.”
This was the first time I’ve ever experienced Marin Alsop live in concert and what a dynamic personality she is; the performance is also wonderfully precise.
By Alexandra Gardner
On several occasions I have been gobsmacked by late-arriving inspirations that have rather drastically changed the form or some other aspect of a composition, definitely for the better. The ideas seem so obvious—when they finally show up!
By Dan Visconti
Good composers borrow. Great composers steal.
I really wanted to attend as much of the Ultima Contemporary Music Festival as humanly possible. I picked up an all-access pass (which can be purchased at any local 7-Eleven!) which gets me into eleven non-stop days of music.
By Colin Holter
Give some thought to your time management strategies: They may just save your hide.
Knowledge is power, and power is not something that composers have historically enjoyed. If you want to be in control of your circumstances instead of letting your circumstances control you, it might well be time for a different kind of education.
Composer Scott Wheeler is among the just-announced winners of the 2010 Classical Recording Foundation Awards. A total of four prizes will be presented at the foundation’s ninth annual awards ceremony and benefit on October 4, 2010, at Carnegie Hall’s Weill Recital Hall.
Kathleen Supové’s release on Major Who Media, The Exploding Piano, is aptly titled in that each work includes elements, both electronic and acoustic, that make the piano larger than life.
By Frank J. Oteri
What qualities in a performance make it seem faster or slower than its actual duration?
By David Smooke
Is Baltimore ready for a new music naissance?
By Nora Kroll-Rosenbaum
The role of great album artwork in enticing a listener into a great recording has changed.
The 11th Annual Latin Grammy Award Nominees have been announced, including five composers in the Best Classical Contemporary Composition category: Miguel Del Aguila, Sergio Assad, Lalo Schifrin, Orlando Jacinto Garcia, and Tania Leon.
By Ruby Fulton
The winners are announced on the final day of Gaudeamus Music Week 2010.
By Ruby Fulton
The festival is drawing to a close but the music keeps on coming.
By Ruby Fulton
Johannes Kreidler’s video Product Placements, “Night of the Unexpected” at Paradiso, and canal dragging for bikes.
Orpheus Chamber Orchestra’s Project 440 began with 60 composer candidates and will conclude with the selection of four Orpheus commission recipients who will be revealed in early October.
Ruby Fulton
It makes me wonder if rehearsing and performing are more like the same thing to a gamelan ensemble, as opposed to the Western model, where everything is meant to be performed perfectly in order to be deemed worthy of being put behind the display case in a museum fifty years later.
By Alexandra Gardner
I think that physical surroundings can play a huge role in one’s work; it can create the sense that what you are doing somehow fits into an historical timeline, even if you can’t quite see exactly how yet. It provides grounding, or a sense of belonging within the grand scheme of things.
By Ruby Fulton
Day three of the Gaudeamus Festival was even more music packed than the previous days, with three concerts in three different venues, and performances of eighteen pieces, including seven world premieres. Yowza!
By Dan Visconti
These comments are specifically aimed at those enrolling in colleges and universities, not because it is the only path available for a compositional education, but rather because the academic environment is often particularly confusing, full of distracting funhouse mirrors that tend to distort the problem of learning how to be a composer instead of illuminating it.