ASCAP/CBDNA Frederick Fennell Prize Winner Announced. LA Phil Announces New Commissioning Fund. Classical Recording Foundation Names Composer of the Year.
Going beyond knowledge is required to make great art.
I’d be the first to agree that elevating the prescriptions implied by Straus and Forte to gospel status is unwise. But composing is not easy, and anyone who thinks otherwise is simply wearing blinders against the thorny and often paradoxical problems that necessarily accompany art-making.
How can it be possible to love music so much and yet have absolutely no involvement with dance, particularly Latin music whose primary reason for being is to get people’s feet moving?
Why is it that I can listen to the random repetitions of nature or urban environments and be endlessly fascinated, but cannot bring this same listening to the electroacoustic domain?
The United States Copyright Royalty Board has established new compusory royalty payment rates for downloads. André Previn has received the Gramophone Lifetime Achievement Award. Sherisse Rogers has won 2008 Thelonious Monk International Jazz Composers Competition. Philip Glass is being pitted against Pierre Boulez on a new BBC radio program. A blog has been created to remember composer Denise Broadhurst (1970-2008). The 7th annual Daniel Pearl World Music Days will take place throughout October 2008.
Maybe universities should consider The Complete Idiot’s Guide® To Music Composition in place of Straus’s Introduction to Post-Tonal Theory and Forte’s The Structure of Atonal Music. Seriously, do composers need to know that much set theory?
Ian McEwan’s novella Amsterdam is just too tempting a morsel not to discuss, especially since one of its major protagonists is a composer.
Matmos (a.k.a. M. C. Schmidt and Drew Daniel) sits at an intersection where musique concrète, experimental improv, electronic, and pop sensibilities freely rub elbows. We asked for their recipe for making music.
The new Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center on the campus of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York, is set to open on Friday, October 3, 2008.
The typical work day is eight hours and we’re supposed to sleep for eight hours; that means each day’s free time is essentially only eight hours long. But recordings take up somewhere between a 7th and a 10th of one’s free time on any given day, and concerts average at least a full one third.
Do those who worship really listen to the music that is being offered? We certainly hear from those who disliked the music, but do we hear from those when they are truly touched by it?
Working with severe limitations can be incredibly liberating.
Now that I’m more attracted to textural, diegetic music, dynamics have gone by the wayside a bit, and I think less about parameters like “tempo,” “register,” and “loudness” (not to conflate the latter with written dynamics) and more about parameters like “iconicity,” “intelligibility,” and “Staxiness.” That’s just how I’m living.
Isn’t the creation of art, whatever its aesthetics, ultimately about making icons?
Music critic Alex Ross is among the 2008 MacArthur Fellows along with violinist Leila Josefowicz, jazz saxophonist and composer Miguel Zenón, and composer-instrument builder Walter Kitundu.
I challenge myself to be “honest” as a composer, and I find it is one of the most difficult tasks, as not simply imitating in a world filled with music requires intense focus and discipline.
Schott Music has announced two signings of Stewart Wallace and Andrew Norman; Meet The Composer has announced the recipients of the 2008 COMMISSIONING MUSIC/USA program which will award a total of $180,000 to 21 organizations to commission 15 new collaborations; Harold Meltzer has been awarded the 2008 Barlow Prize; David Lang and Christopher Theofanidis join the faculty of the Yale School of Music; and the Reno Chamber Orchestra (Nevada) is the first orchestra to perform Joseph Schwantner’s Chasing Light, a work that will be played in all 50 states over the source of the next two seasons.
The list of guest artists gracing Gabriel Kahane’s new self-titled album reads like a Who’s Who of great indie/classical/pop/chamber wherever-you-want-to-file-it performers, musicians linked by a shared creative impulse.
Beginning this weekend, the Ogaki Biennale is once again upon us.
Indulge me as I descend, Orpheus-like, into the underworld of provisionally prescriptive theory in search of my harmonic Euridice.
Why do we keep insisting there can be such a thing as American classical music, as opposed to classical music that happens to be made in America?
It is difficult to assert national identity in creative work that endeavors to be iconoclastic.
In my view, a festival that strives to be broad and encompass many styles cannot ignore artists who use noise and volume as part of their aesthetic.
