The Barlow Endowment for Music Composition has awarded Narong Prangcharoen the $15,000 2013 Barlow Prize to compose a major new work for wind ensemble. In addition, grants to nine other composers totaling $60K were announced, as well as a $10K commission for a Chinese composer in partnership with the Beijing Modern Music Festival.
One of the names left out of my post last week was that of Sathima Bea Benjamin, who passed away on August 20, the same day as pianist Marian McPartland. Benjamin spent much of her time working as a political activist, in addition to serving as the manager and agent for her husband, pianist Abdullah Ibrahim. But she also remained active as a singer and recording artist herself, even though her own artistic accomplishments remained largely invisible.
We as a community have moved past the didactic “schools of thought” concept that shaped so much of the new music scene decades ago, but we haven’t splintered into an “every man/woman for themselves” concept either.
While the road of student life does end, it’s only as a runway does: as a necessary path to greater things above and beyond. After spending a great deal of time talking over this particular issue with participants in this summer’s Fresh Inc Festival, I want to share some thoughts on the most important things to keep in mind while transitioning out of student life.
An album of music begins at track one, but you start setting the scene long before this. Most musicians have some sort of a plan in mind for their next album. That plan should already include the cover. In this article, I’ll tell you why it matters and how to avoid screwing it up.
Repetitive music often gets maligned as background noise, encouraging passive listening, but it can also encourage the listener to actually confront the musical materials they’re faced with.
This edition of the NewMusicBox Mix contains a sampling of the many different sound worlds of jazz in 2013.
When you compose a piece of music it is something for which you are taking responsibility. I was reminded of this last week when I observed the final session of the first American Composers Orchestra/Mannes Summer High School Composers Intensive.
The conference is among the old guard of summer composer institutes and will celebrate its 70th anniversary next summer. Headed by Mario Davidovsky for nearly 40 years, the primary goal of the conference is to provide emerging composers with an opportunity to work with some of the best players from New York and Boston and to have their works performed and professionally recorded.
What was most striking about the PARMA Festival was its diversity; diversity within musical styles and event types, its combination of local, national, and international artists, and also its audience, which included a wide variety of locals–even some passersby who happened to see a poster on the street.
Three of the American music community’s most influential luminaries–pianists Marian McPartland and Cedar Walton plus author Albert Murray–passed in the first three days of this week. They, along with pianist-producer-composer-singer George Duke, whom we lost on August 5, should be acknowledged.
September is coming, with all of its promise and terror. Remember that it’s a marathon, not a sprint. You trained all your life for this stuff, and now you get to do it. Believe in your unique self; take some joy in what you’re doing.
This week, three unique keyboard albums caught my attention: Phyllis Chen’s Little Things, Jim Fox’s Black Water, and Timo Andres’s Home Stretch.
New Music USA has announced more than $1,200,000 in new awards made during the spring season through its grantmaking programs.
All of us, not just those of us who are involved with music, waste so much time dwelling on the past as well as trying to predict what the future is, when in fact the only thing we can really affect is the present.
A $150,000 Mellon grant enables the American Lyric Theater to expand its Composer Librettist Development Program from an annually offered 10-month period to a comprehensive three-year artist mentorship cycle. Plus newly acquired videoconferencing equipment ensures that composers and librettists from around the country can participate.
Tanglewood channels history at every turn, but it is not so much the history of the land it sits on, or the century’s worth of people who passed through it on its way to its current incarnation. It is the history of itself. The past that Tanglewood leverages is its own. It is a recursive monument.
I can see why the Bureau of Labor Statistics might combine music directors and composers, since neither occupation performs (at least for public consumption) on an instrument or sings in the execution of their occupation. But there are many reasons why this conflation of composers and music directors is inappropriate; our occupation deserves its own category.
Copyright regulations are intended to entitle the creator of a work exclusive rights for a period of time; currently 70 years beyond the life of the composer. Unfortunately, loopholes exist that obfuscate authorship.
We were asked to shed restrictions, open our ears, and return to a place of youthful excitement where we found our love of music; take risks, share that idea we’d kept to ourselves, and always say yes.
If you’ve read a few of my posts you may have noticed a common refrain of “context matters.” So I decided I would test out this hypothesis in a live setting and see if my cherished beliefs would hold true.
As a singer and instrumentalist who has worked in at least a dozen different musical genres, Caleb Burhans has always been drawn to the inner voices preferring to, as he puts it, “play second violin or viola than first fiddle.” This attraction spills over into his own deceptively simple, extremely meticulous musical compositions.
It’s refreshing to hear the bassoon edging it’s way towards the sonic foreground in contemporary music. Anyone with doubts about how cool the instrument can be has not yet heard bassoonist Rebekah Heller perform; in her hands, the oft-underappreciated instrument is transformed into a fierce creature that cannot be ignored onstage.
I must confess that to me the concern about the dwindling readership for music blogs is something of a tempest in a teapot, but then again I’m someone who is perpetually skeptical of best-selling novels, Billboard-charting albums, blockbuster movies, and highest Nielsen-rated TV shows.
