Is a little bass and drum in the mix the key to hooking ears?
What does it say about a new music performance when priceless equals free?
Music is a very central part of the clothing store experience, but maybe there could be better music for such an environment than the music most clothing stores choose.
Performed by the Martinu Quartet There’s a real smorgasboard of musical styles in the string quartets of Elliott Miles McKinley, which is as fitting for someone who studied with William Bolcom as it is for the son of William Thomas McKinley who, according to the booklet notes accompanying this CD, was named after Elliott Carter… Read more »
How do you teach fundamentals to students who are already writing big, large-scale works without squelching their imaginations? Do you rein them in? Do you let them run wild?
Ars Nova Copenhagen and Percurama Percussion Ensemble Because of its roots in improvisation and aleatory performance techniques, Riley’s iconic work In C has always had, at its heart, a sense of ebb and flow—one that overrides the more mechanistic tendencies that would later become a stereotype of minimalism. This recording, conceived by Ars Nova director… Read more »
Stacy Garrop wins first $10,000 Detroit Symphony Lebenbom Award; the John Cage Trust finds new home at Bard College; and works by Hillary Zipper and Christopher Trapani have been selected for performance at the 2007 Gaudeamus Music Week, to be held September 3 through 9 in Amsterdam.
The week in media shows us how new music is both more and less popular in ways we never even imagined.
Joshua Gordon, cello; Randall Hodgkinson, piano Those wonderful tone clusters that Henry Cowell allegedly invented actually surfaced in the lush hyper-Romantic solo piano music of Leo Ornstein several years earlier. They are one of the delights of Ornstein’s early chamber music as well, including the first of his two cello sonatas from 1915 featured on… Read more »
Does new music always have to be so, um, new? A little inventive non-innovation goes a long way too.
Sebastian Currier has been awarded the $200,000 Grawemeyer Prize for Music Composition for his quintet Static, a 2003 work for flute, clarinet, violin, cello, and piano.
James J. Pellerite, Native American flute; Moravian Philharmonic conducted by Lawrence Golan The traditional Native American flute is an extremely expressive instrument, but it is almost invariably played unaccompanied. So it’s great to hear Comanche composer David Yeagley’s single movement concerto, Wessi vah-peh, and the other concertante works featuring Native American flute with a symphony… Read more »
A critical look at three recent music books published by the MIT Press: Computer Models of Musical Creativity by David Cope; Sweet Anticipation: Music and the Psychology of Expectation by David Huron; and Gareth Loy’s Musimathics: The Mathematical Foundations of Music, Volume One.
Excerpted from Computer Models of Musical Creativity by David Cope.
One of the things I’m looking forward to most about getting older
(actually, one of the only things I’m looking forward to) is the right
to be as intellectually and creatively lazy as possible.
Erin Lesser, flute Need another 4 minutes and 33 seconds to round out your solo flute recital? I’ve got a little suggestion: Tristan Murail (who did you think?). On this new recording by the Argento Chamber Ensemble, the composer’s moody flute solo, Unanswered Questions, clocks in at a purely coincidental 4:33. But the similarity to… Read more »
While initially my wife and I were extremely excited about an iPod (after all, our society instills in us the desire for the latest technological innovation), the charm wore off as soon as we talked about what music we would put on it.
Dutz is a percussionist, specializing in mallet and hand-played percussion, so it’s especially interesting to hear his treatment of woodwinds and strings on this album. On “Spongy Bark,” the pizzicato he introduces in the cello carries over to staccato in the oboe and clarinet, and you can faintly hear clacking keys as the woodwinds run… Read more »
Whether it was as a violinist on a jazz scene that had precious few violinists or as an African-American composer in a classical music scene exhibiting few but growing numbers of black composers, his gift and passion for music made Leroy Jenkins (1932-2007) seem to simply dive in and make himself at home.
There’s nothing more revealing than borrowing colleagues’ MP3 players; it can be a revelatory window into their psyches, not only for what they listen to, but how they listen and organize.
Greg Gisbert and Ron Miles, trumpet and flugelhorn; John Gunther, alto sax, soprano sax, flute, didgeridoo; Peter Sommer, tenor sax, soprano sax, flute, clarinet; Gary Smulyan, baritone sax and bass clarinet; Alex Heitlinger, trombone; Mike Abbott, guitar; Jeff Jenkins, piano; Mark Simon, bass; Paul Romaine, drums; Manavihare “Mimy” Fiaindratovo, percussion Once the warble of the… Read more »
John Zorn wins Columbia’s $50K Schuman Award; Thomas Hampson honored by Society for American Music; New World Records officially acquires CRI catalog.
Is “classical music is not dying” the new “classical music is dying”?
Hearing Charlemagne Palestine’s magical approach to the piano live is one of the great “have to be there” experiences. As wonderful as his all-too-rare appearances on recordings have been, none really captures the total experience: in which his maniacal minimalist solo piano pyrotechnics are often accompanied by a sea of teddy bears and a snifter… Read more »
