Wendell Morris Logan, an extraordinary composer, distinguished professor of music, and the principal driving force behind the establishment of the major Center for Jazz Studies at the Oberlin Conservatory of Music, died at the Cleveland Clinic in Ohio after an extended illness.
Montana composer Christopher Stark has been named the winner of American Composers Orchestra’s 2010 Underwood Commission of $15,000 for a work to be premiered by ACO in a future season.
By David Smooke
My attempt at creating a simple piece resulted in a fast microtonal composition for singing violist playing scordatura while using extended vocalizations.
By Frank J. Oteri
If you are more concerned with yourself when you listen to music, are you really listening?
thingNY’s experimental opera ADDDDDDDDD takes rapid-fire, largely spoken-word lyrical content and plays it out across multiple streams of content flashing by at warp speed.
By Joelle Zigman
I haven’t really been following the online debates about “alt” classical, which, from what I understand, have been heated, and wide ranging and possibly talked to death at this point; for me, it’s all about being organic—being honest about your core influences without being tacky or artificial.
By Dan Visconti
While it’s certainly worth emphasizing the fact that a great many composers create works outside the traditions of notated music (and that others still engage in that noble practice of hand-calligraphy), it’s staggering to consider that perhaps 80 percent of all that passes for “new music” has been run through either Finale or Sibelius.
By Colin Holter
Maybe American composers born toward the end of the 20th century will ultimately be deemed collaborators or capitulators, implicated in some now-acceptable moral crime.
Ben Hackbarth, a product of UC San Diego now working at IRCAM in Paris, is a composer dealing with acoustically and electronically generated phenomena while seeking out meaningful artistic experiences in new territories.
By Frank J. Oteri
If something as sensitive and complicated as a fully functional human organ can be copied in a machine, so can a bar of 24-karat gold, a $5000 bottle of rare cognac, any kind of food or clothing, and any formerly irreplicable singularity; in short, nothing will be rare and nothing will be unique.
By David Smooke
My composerly advice: listen to everything possible.
If Corey Dargel’s output has always been the work of a singer-songwriter who engages in heady compositional strategies, he completely ups the ante with the two song cycles that constitute his latest recording, the double-CD Someone Will Take Care of Me.
By Joelle Zigman
With the dominant trends in American education being “standardized curriculum, rote memorization, and nationalized testing,” what is the best course of action for children’s music education?
By Dan Visconti
Seeing someone turn into a blueberry in a quasi-realistic way via movie special effects taps into different creative opportunities and challenges than doing so with live singers and orchestra.
By Colin Holter
My biggest problem with Joseph Straus’s Introduction to Post-Tonal Theory is that it trivializes 20th-century music by making the clean, unworldly, relatively simple pitch-math out to be “the thing” of the pieces he examines.
There are as many ways to be caught up inside of a melody as there are melodies themselves, and each of them loops itself into our internal hardwiring in a different way.
By David Smooke
Ideally, we can reach a state where our firm foundation of hard-won and prodigious knowledge provides us with the freedom to tweak systems, to challenge rules, to be deliciously, humanely, courageously, and satisfyingly wrong.
By Frank J. Oteri
No matter what you attempt to do, you will leave certain identifiable signs and these are beyond your control.
The bass clarinet-wielding San Francisco-based duo Sqwonk, comprised of Jeff Anderle and Jonathan Russell, dive into both the supercharged and the potentially off-the-wall nature of instrument multiples with their CD Black.
By Joelle Zigman
UNDER St. Mark’s presented Gertrude Stein’s 10-15 minute nonsensical play, White Wines, five times, serving a glass of white wine to match each performance; by the end of show I felt like—possibly—there was a chance I might’ve actually understood what was going on.
By Dan Visconti
Before spending all of last week composing against a metronome beat (whether thinking, playing, or entering music), I was unaware that I tend to compose in an imagined tempo range, a vague limbo that sometimes was too wide a range.
I’ve achieved enough success that my day job currently supplements my income as a composer, but I could not have accomplished the things I have accomplished had I been living in New York.
By Colin Holter
I really do care about reading articles that adumbrate something mystifying about new music. Please write more of them!
Robert Palmer exerted an influence on the development of American music far greater than his current obscurity would suggest: he founded the doctoral program in music composition at Cornell University, which was the first in the United States (and quite possibly the world), and generations of Cornell composers remember his gentle, kind nature, his infallible ear, and his probing intellect.
