Composer and professor emeritus at the University of North Carolina, Roger Durham Hannay died January 27, 2006, of complications during surgery. He was 75.
Love, contour/interval serialism, Franz Ferdinand, and amusia…explained.
There are all sorts of “hey, listen to this!” moments on the new Other Minds release of work by that master maverick of the piano roll, Conlon Nancarrow—early works, late works, never released material, interview excerpts. Study No. 51 dates from 1992. (The 3750 is a joke title Nancarrow offered—surely coming from the man punching… Read more »
Uptown and Downtown are historic terms that are completely meaningless when applied to modern composition today.
Sarah Cahill, piano There have been a lot of gamelan-inspired compositions by American composers over the past century, but few Western composers have absorbed the language of Indonesian music as originally as Evan Ziporyn. He does not merely find a way to fuse cross-cultural elements, but rather uses both Eastern and Western classical traditions, as… Read more »
The American Music Center announces the recipients of both the Live Music for Dance and the Henry Cowell Performance Incentive Fund programs.
Opera Today
Tobias Picker and Mark Adamo revel in the staggering resources of the world’s most opulent art form.
If you’ve traveled down the svelte roads of rural Ireland, chances are you’ve been stuck behind some slow farm equipment or held up by a herd of cows. Marc Johnson’s Shades of Jade album is the perfect accompaniment to such scenes. The leisure melodies forge their own deliberate pace—don’t bother honking the horn because you’re… Read more »
At home, I drink red wine while hearing things like the three carefully intertwined lines of counterpoint in the fourth movement of Mozart’s Divertimento for String Trio all the time, but being able to do so during a live performance makes the music breathe differently.
This disc is a phenomenal testament to Carter’s work this side of the millennium—Dialogues (2003), Boston Concerto for orchestra (2002), ASKO Concerto (2000), and the Cello Concerto (2001)—though you might lament that they chose to use British forces for most of this record (even the Boston Concerto—a BSO commission!). The Cello Concerto features the beloved… Read more »
Since posting my report on Golijov’s Ainadamar (“Fountain of Tears”), I’ve been trolling around Internetland reading more about what others have thought of the production. The most striking report came courtesy of The Standing Room, which took critics and fellow bloggers to task for failing to comment on the political implication of the piece.
Jane Ira Bloom – soprano saxophone & live electronics, Jamie Saft – keyboards & electronics, Mark Dresser – bass, Bobby Previte – drums and electronic drums After being subjected to a Kenny G Christmas album ad nauseum, the last thing you probably want to hear in January is a soprano saxophone. That is, unless it’s… Read more »
In which we do our best to avoid the powdered-wigged one’s birthday and highlight less over-exposed genius where we find it.
A disc of solo violin music which opens with works by two Armenians, anchored by a Hindemith sonata, with some Augusta Read Thomas and Leif Segerstam thrown in for good measure—what to make of all this? No matter, because somewhere in the middle of it all, David Felder’s Another Face still manages to drop the… Read more »
We here in NYC have been arm wrestling each other for the last of the tickets to Osvaldo Golijov’s “opera” Ainadamar (“Fountain of Tears”)…
Almost a decade ago people used to look at me funny when I said something like: Anybody can compose music. Why does everybody think it’s so difficult?…
You’re probably well familiar with Chamber Music America, an organization dedicated to the niche field of chamber music. What you may not realize is that there are a vast number of musicians, especially young people like myself, who are in the dark about such organizations…
What today’s composers can learn from Mozart and Def Leppard.
Moby Dick is Peter Westergaard’s fifth opera which, coupled with the fact that he also directed the Princeton University Opera Theatre during his more than 20 year career there, perhaps begins to account for his mastery of the idiom. Granted, Westergaard has picked himself a doozy of a subject for operatic treatment. There’s just something… Read more »
Having given a short introduction to the world of commissioning agreements, Edward Ficklin is back to have another go at the question—this time to discuss some of the same issues as they apply to collaborative works.
Czech National Symphony Orchestra conducted by Paul Freeman Like father like son? Half a century ago Dave Brubeck created a sound that fused a classical music sensibility with immediacy and trappings of jazz as well as a penchant for making oddball meters groove. His son, Chris, carries on the family tradition in works that have… Read more »
I’ve been thinking a lot recently about John Cage’s final definition of music, which is an extremely compact two-word koan: sounds heard.
This must be a classical music completist’s dream: a composer’s entire oeuvre for solo piano conveniently packaged on a single compact disc. The composer in question is Roger Sessions, and the music collected here spans 50 years, nearly his entire compositional career. Like Sessions’s orchestral pieces, these works are dense and expansive. The music runs… Read more »
Trimpin: Archival Investigations, housed through February 24 at the Jack Straw New Media Gallery, is a retrospective view of some of the artist’s best known pieces from the 1970s and ’80s—works which mark him as a master mixer of computers and traditional acoustic instruments.
