When confronted with names of people I’d never heard of in the voting booth this morning, I suddenly felt a kinship with the imaginary folks in so many classical music critics’ articles who feel bewildered by unfamiliar names in a record store or on a concert program.
Tracy Silverman, electric violin; BBC Symphony Orchestra conducted by John Adams One of the most exciting live performances I attended a year ago was the Los Angeles Philharmonic under Esa-Pekka Salonen doing John Adams’s The Dharma at Big Sur in L.A.’s Disney Hall with electric violinist Tracy Silverman. What made it so exciting for me… Read more »
ICM Sells Classical Music Division; Kernis Signs New Three-Year Contract with the Minnesota Orchestra; Art of the States Goes Indie; Bush Nominates Six to NEA’s National Council on the Arts; FCC Discussing Media Consolidation
What is perfect, or (as it is also called) absolute, pitch? It is relative, not absolute, and anything that is relative is not “perfect.”
Like a torch song from another planet, Bonnie Barnett’s sultry voice teases the ear with garbled gibberish. It’s doesn’t matter what the hell she’s saying, it’s all in the delivery. As the nonsense syllables cascade by, one gets the sense that the pensive melody’s derivation is special delivery via some deep state of trance. Ken… Read more »
Label yourself (and your Honda) in support of new music.
Claudio Jacomucci, accordion Japanese-born composer Akemi Naito claims that her initial attraction to the accordion was its timbral similarity to the traditional Japanese sho. But the sho, a mouth organ related to similar instruments in China, Laos and northern Thailand, goes back centuries before free reed instruments were developed in the West. So don’t expect… Read more »
Why do composers discount music’s surface level? Maybe the key to deeply engaging listeners lies at the most uncomplicated, superficial level of musical expression, the facade that hides all that ungainly counterpoint and harmony.
Concerts celebrating Steve Reich’s seventieth birthday are being staged around the globe this year so I thought it would be fitting for western Michigan to contribute to the party. But first, a field trip to set the tone.
On this new Albany release, the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players team up with Chanticleer to record composer Pablo Ortiz’s Oscuro, a work they jointly commissioned. Oscuro uses madrigals as a jumping off point to illuminate dark-themed texts by poets Francisco Alarcón and Amado Nervo. The contrapuntal treatment of lines like como loca flor, en… Read more »
No composer has the power to force a listener to approach his or her piece in a particular manner. On the other hand, how can a composer write for an audience with a potential infinitude of ways to listen?
From electronics to Romanceros, Mario Davidovsky is not an adherent of any system, although his music is respectful of cultural traditions that go back millennia.
Philadelphia Virtuosi Chamber Orchestra conducted by Daniel Spalding George Antheil earned the moniker “bad boy of music” from both the title of his hyperbolic autobiography and from his early exploits as a composer, which included shocking audiences with tone clusters, airplane propellers, etc. Four generations later, most of the shock value has waned—is anything shocking… Read more »
When does early music really end?
Guitar Gabriel, born Robert Lewis Jones in Georgia on October 12, 1925, grew up the son of a legendary bluesman. After WWII, he criss-crossed the country performing in old-time medicine shows, Dixieland bands, and for burlesque acts. In the 1990s, however, interest in his music grew and earned him spots at big-name clubs, halls, and… Read more »
True improvisation is simply the act of making things up.
Misha Dacic, piano What do you get when you cross Morton Feldman’s obsession with consecutive minor seconds with an expressivity more along the lines of Schoenberg? Ladies and gentlemen, allow me to introduce to you John Van der Slice’s Solo for Piano. This puppy is kind of weird looking, but still very cute and playful.… Read more »
Classical music and the eternal undead.
Nathaniel Bartlett, marimba You might assume a disc including compositions by Augusta Read Thomas and Steve Reich back-to-back to be somewhat disjointed, if not downright disconcerting, but marimbist Nathaniel Bartlett makes the juxtaposition sound not only natural but inevitable. And, according to his program notes, this was his goal, which makes highlighting just one track… Read more »
Despite everything those elitist connoisseurs keep telling you, classical music is not inherently superior to all other genres of music.
Danny Elfman’s Serenada Schizophrana conjures precisely the sort of fantastical aural world you’d expect from the composer—he is, after all, the guy Tim Burton rings up when he needs a soundtrack. In this case, however, it was the American Composers Orchestra that commissioned the six-movement work from the largely self-taught composer. (This recording, however, is… Read more »
Who are these hypothetical composers that choose the aesthetic math problem over the big sheet of newsprint on which to finger-paint?
In recent years, Portland has earned a reputation as one of the capitals of indie rock, but the city also reverberates to a surprisingly robust “new music” / postclassical music undercurrent.
Despite the fitness savvy titles, Christian Wolff’s series of Exercises aren’t formulated to inspire the local gym’s spinning class. In this music, like much of the composer’s oeuvre, something seems eerily missing. Melody, rhythm, and harmony sound aloof to one another’s presence, creating a tentative atmosphere of happy accidents. These mishaps usually err on the… Read more »
