The “blue” of this piece doesn’t just come through in the flatted notes in Elliott Sharp’s guitar playing or the minor-key refrain in the rough timbres of trombone and baritone sax. It’s also the color that a wind musician’s face might turn upon attempting to recreate the harmonics, arpeggiated runs, and furious trills of Sharp’s… Read more »
An informal comparison of the resumes of applicants fresh out of doctoral programs in 2007 with the ones that got the baby-boomer American university composers hired back in the ’70s and ’80s reveals that you probably have to be better now than you had to be then.
Art music’s audience doesn’t seem so miniscule in an atomized cultural marketplace.
Chorus of the University of Utah and brass from the Utah Symphony conducted by Newell Weight Here’s another curio from New World’s ongoing project to reissue the back catalogue of the sadly discontinued Composers Recordings Inc. (CRI): a harmonically eclectic setting of the mass for chorus and brass composed by Vladimir Ussachevsky, who today is… Read more »
I really can’t understand why some people feel compelled to walk out of a concert while a performance is still going on; is anything really so unbearable?
James Kosnick, organ; David Walker and Rob Cross, percussion Here’s one for the oddest-instrumentation-you’ll-hear-this-month category: a work for organ and two percussionists. And such a combination can create some really ferocious sounds, all of which find their way into Virginia-based composer Adolphus Hailstork’s appropriately turbulent 29-minute response to the events of September 11, 2001. —FJO
Why do we try to prove music’s extra-musical worth, instead of valuing it for its own inherent qualities?
Miss those classical and jazz Grammy Awards flashing by at the bottom of the television screen while the Dixie Chicks and Christina Aguilera were entertaining the masses? Here’s the down and dirty recap of the categories that really count.
Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra conducted by Marin Alsop At the center of this five-movement work is a spare, tense and perfectly named section: “Sense of Doubt.” The alternation of heavy descending figures and light, shimmering sounds captures the uncertainty of Cold War-era Berlin that inspired the 1977 Brian Eno/David Bowie album and, in turn, Glass’s 1996… Read more »
The Future of Music: Whatever you do, just don’t clap at the wrong time.
David Gier, trombone; David Greenhoe, trumpet The piece gives its name to a CD of “Chamber Trios with Trombone.” Stemper’s note on the performance reflects a political edge (it was written in the “bewildering span of time between 9/11 and the Iraq ‘conflict’”), and the piece wildly veers from subtle to raging to comical. The… Read more »
Has anyone seen any whacked-out movies with a soundtrack that defies the film’s own context lately?
Mark Hill, oboe A joke, long circulated among woodwind players (how it ever made it back to me in the trombone section, I’ll never know): What’s the difference between an oboe and a clarinet? A clarinet burns longer. But on Alchemy (suggestive of a transformation by fire), oboist Mark Hill’s sizzling sound falls somewhere between… Read more »
New music is capable of asking the hardest questions and challenging the most deeply sedimented assumptions. Do you really want to go through all that on the bus? That’s why there’s no new music on my iPod.
There still exist archetypal “American Composers” and “European Composers,” an archetypal “American Audience” and “European Audience,” with roots in decades-old artistic movements, historical contexts, and sets of priorities. However effectively pluralism may be taking over the world, these old national differences are still with us in fundamental ways.
Latigo, a 2007 Grammy-nominated disc by Quartet San Francisco, features Latin percussion accompanying string quartet tangos and dances. Some of the tracks have odd ripples of “Oye Como Va”—congas and cowbells playing familiar patterns—but Cohen, the group’s first violinist, uses the quartet creatively to mirror the percussion instruments in his piece “Crowdambo.” Some fancy bow… Read more »
Do composers have the right, or even the ability, to determine the context in which their music gets heard?
Chris Becker creates extraordinarily vivid, almost cinematic, sonic landscapes from layering old field recordings with modern day electronics and contributions from a wide variety of improvising instrumentalists. On “Wake Up Dead Man,” Becker uses a chain-gang chant as a starting point for an extraordinarily eerie evocation of hard time. —FJO
Last month by coincidence one of my student’s endeavors was highlighted in Chatter’s Friday Informer. The project is a new music ensemble comprised and run solely by teens. No one over 18 allowed.
Matthew Gold, Eduardo Leandro, Tom Kolor, Matthre Ward, percussion; Paul Hostetter, conductor When confronted with an album titled Matrix, a compilation of chamber music by baby boomer composer Louis Karchin, one would expect to hear a big giant mound of integral serialism. Yes, there’s a fair share of atonal sonorities, but the longest work on… Read more »
Asha Srinivasan receives BMI’s first Women’s Music Commission, sound artist Douglas Henderson receives grant from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts. and Kristin Lancino is named G. Schirmer/Associated Music Publishers’ new vice president.
In a world of art school terrorists, what would Inspector Gadget do? Also, a birthday tribute to Phil.
It’s a truly ’60s flashback—to composer Soldier’s childhood specifically. Soldier seems to be pursuing some sort of intellectual mash up philosophy in many of the pieces included on this disc of chamber works—Baroque suites meet North American powwow dances, a bass flute player channels a young rapper—but in East St. Louis, 1968, Soldier takes us… Read more »
Nowadays, the only composers turned off by the academic establishment are those averse to writing dissertations. It’s not a matter of aesthetics or artistic differences anymore, it just boils down to laziness.
