By Colin Holter
Isn’t a class on rock music supposed to be more than just a class?
By Frank J. Oteri
Extremes, from whatever direction they emanate, inevitably yield limited possibilities.
By Joelle Zigman
What I’ve learned in conservatory classrooms is just as relevant as what I’ve learned at the Village Vanguard, or various popular music venues.
Chris Tignor and Slow Six have previously crafted an impressive catalog of gauzy, poetic music. Never an entirely ambient wallflower of a band, however, this time out they trade in some of the introspection and push their sound in a decidedly more visceral rhythmic direction.
By Dan Visconti
In all creative lives there’s a necessity to balance the internal and external
If a concert came along where over 80 or 90 percent of the concert’s costs were covered, would the administration of an orchestra jump at the chance? I’ll bet you they would!
The American Music Center has announced that Francis Thorne, Jack Beeson, Fred Ho, Meredith Monk, Esa-Pekka Salonen, Society for New Music, and International Contemporary Ensemble (ICE) will be honored at the American Music Center’s 2010 Annual Meeting and Awards Ceremony.
By Colin Holter
A cunning strategy: Build in some psychological headroom with pieces for which the audience will have to extend good faith, then fill in that space with pieces that are less conceptually foreign.
By Frank J. Oteri
The classical music business and the wine business in the United States have both traditionally marketed themselves on the elite and ultimately somewhat pretentious conceit of masterpieces whose unchallengeable provenance would be determined by aesthetes; but in a world where everything is relative, there are no masterpieces.
There is a fluid back and forth motion across continents and centuries that impresses when it comes to the work of Garrett Fisher. It’s showcased once again in his latest piece At the Hawks Well.
By Frank J. Oteri
This disc of music for guitar duo devoted to a broad range of composers, including work by composers not typically associated with the guitar, is pretty exciting.
By Dan Visconti
One of the most important things I have realized about writing for the orchestra and other large forces is that, just as with Lego and Duplo, large ensembles can’t really be handled like small ensembles simply blown up to scale; they generally call for much broader gestures.
By Colin Holter
A few objections to the Telegraph article on Philip Ball’s book The Music Instinct.
I get approached all the time by folks both young and old alike who are getting started in this crazy business. This is what I tell them.
By Frank J. Oteri
The obstacles that separate composer communities in this country are as much a product of our sizable (and not always easily navigable) geography as they are of a general lack of connectivity among composers on the whole.
With the issue of health insurance so much a mainstream focus at the moment, the Future of Music Coalition is conducting a musician-focused coverage survey. If you are a musician or composer and can spare 10 minutes of your time, the survey is here.
By Frank J. Oteri
Overall this collection of Lauten’s piano works is a wonderful portal back into an era when the Downtown New York scene promulgated a music that combined so-called compositional rigor with the energy of the nascent punk rock and new wave scenes.
The American Academy of Arts and Letters has announced sixteen recipients of this year’s awards in music, which total $170,000.
By Dan Visconti
This might seem trivial and obvious, but I compose the kind of music that I want to listen to myself, and also the kind of music that I’d want to play if I retained any meaningful facility on an instrument.
By Colin Holter
The funny thing is that even though trumping up a set of rules about music to justify instinctive musical preferences seems 100% phony and backwards to me, trumping up a set of assumptions about society to justify (or, better, explain) instinctive musical preferences seems like it could be quite a genuine and fruitful process, given that you’re willing to stand by those assumptions no matter their musical ramifications.
In The Savvy Musician: Building a Career, Earning a Living, & Making a Difference, composer and pianist David Cutler collects strategies and success stories from 165 composers and musicians working in these musical arenas and sprinkles them throughout this slickly designed A-to-Z guide covering everything from building up a career to planning for retirement.
By Frank J. Oteri
The lack of emphasis on homegrown repertoire is a nation-wide phenomenon when it comes to orchestras and opera houses, but could and would an audience support a full year-round season devoted to nothing but new orchestral music.
New York City Opera has announced the ten new operas that will be showcased in their annual readings of new works, the newly renamed the VOX Contemporary American Opera Lab.
By Alexandra Gardner
For those with a taste for ambient music and/or minimalism, this is a highly satisfying recording that employs the duo’s self-stated mission to “make you cry in a good way.”
