By Dan Visconti
I don’t currently have any institutional affiliations so my commissioners are quite literally my employers for any number of months, which means that I am usually just a bit nervous to meet them.
By Colin Holter
Imagine, for a moment, that Structures 1a—a piece trotted out every year when undergrads have to be given a reductive and half-hearted introduction to integral serialism—went instead by the name An der Grenze des Fruchtlandes (or At the Edge of the Fertile Lands).
Huck Hodge and Paul Rudy, the two composers just chosen for year-long residencies at the American Academy in Rome, describe what the residency means to them and what they plan to do during their year abroad.
“I like music that establishes a sound and lets that sound live and breathe and expand and contract and evolve and die,” says composer Richard Carrick.
By Trevor Hunter
Stepwise‘s 43 minutes are brisk, never-dragging, and show two excellent musicians at the top of their game.
By Frank J. Oteri
Marina Abramović’s lessons for creativity strike at the core of what all art, including music, can be: the thing that liberates us. This is why those who seek to undermine personal liberty, like the fundamentalist insurgents in Somalia, feel so threatened by it.
This year’s composers, who were selected from an applicant pool of over one hundred, are: Matti Kovler, Hannah Lash, Eric Lindsay, Tamar Muskal, Ricardo Romaneiro, Christopher Stark, and Xi Wang.
By Joelle Zigman
I’m trying to draw connections between what seemingly different female musical artists from the early 1990s were saying, regardless of their music style and genre.
I understood that if I wanted to keep writing music under any circumstance like this for a long time, this piece had better be all I had to give. If not my best work, certainly my best effort. I felt that I was writing for my life.
By Dan Visconti
The sheer amount of stuff that is created during the course of an opera production is truly staggering.
By Sean Shepherd
Like many top American ensembles, the Philharmonic has fluctuated between worship of the glorious past (pretty damn good, no?) and the altogether messier business of interacting with these living guys (I’ll give it to them, we can be unpleasant!); sometimes the pendulum swings by the decade and sometimes by the week.
On April 19, MATA kicks off its 12th annual festival in New York City. Under the banner of “Young Composers—Now!” this four-night event at Le Poisson Rouge includes 14 world premieres— three of them MATA commissions.
In its 86th annual competition for the United States and Canada, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation has awarded 180 Fellowships to artists, scientists, and scholars, including seven in the category of “Creative Arts: Music Composition.”
I had little or no real appreciation for the constraints that blindness enforced upon my career choices, my creative development, and my entire musical evolution because, having never seen the world as the fully sighted do, I had no way of imagining any other world than the one in which I lived.
By Colin Holter
A slick application for getting to know and hear composers that also groups them into constellations and allows the user to fritter away his time on the internet? Sounds like solid gold to me.
By Sean Shepherd
One thing all composers, including myself, slowly begin to realize in the rather slow, often-wrenching transition from wide-eyed kid to seasoned pro is that art imitates life: it’s just not fair.
By Frank J. Oteri
The most experimental music, however impractical, often opens our minds to new possibilities and new modalities.
By Trevor Hunter
Considering how brawny Little Women putatively is, it’s conspicuous the wide range of response its capable of eliciting. This is because the members of the group are, in fact, quite smart about their music.
Composers James M. Brody and Franz T. Kamin were both killed in a car crash in Roseville, Minnesota, on Sunday, April 11, 2010.
[UPDATED with audio samples of music by both Brody and Kamin.]
The Pulitzer isn’t just about me or the Violin Concerto; it’s also about something that was reflected in the concert tonight: the myriads of folks who have taught me in various ways.
Jennifer Higdon has been awarded the 2010 Pulitzer Prize in Music for her Violin Concerto.
By Joelle Zigman
Upon first read, I was slightly annoyed by Walter Benjamin’s “Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” and Theodor Adorno’s “On the Fetish-Character in Music and the Regression of Listening” since it seemed like both essays were taking fairly simple concepts and using extremely verbose language to tell you things any composer could’ve told you.
Composer Sean Shepherd is back to blog his way through the world premiere of his first New York Philharmonic commission, These Particular Circumstances, as part of CONTACT!, the orchestra’s new music series.
By Michael Rickelton
I’m currently sitting in the Detroit airport waiting to return to Baltimore, which has given me some time to reflect on this unique experience I’ve had through EarShot.