What do composer anniversaries achieve? 2013 will be a bumper year for composer anniversaries, with Wagner, Britten and Verdi among those vying for media attention. But what do composer anniversaries actually achieve? Received wisdom tells us that they fill concert halls and woo radio audiences, and as a result ‘raise the profile’ and ‘increase awareness’ of the birthday boy in particular and classical music in general. But there is another view that says these anniversaries achieve little more than further raising the profile of already highly visible composers at the expense of those more deserving, while in the process providing a nice little earner for record companies, concert promoters and other intermediaries. As an example the Britten100 celebrations are being fronted by Albion Media, an international PR and media agency that also represents orchestras, musicians and media owners - a volatile mixture of interests that could, possibly, encourage hagiography at the expense of more balanced critical reassessment.
Ignore the Conductor. By Alex Ross The New Yorker, May 10, 2004. When Timothy Andres was seven, his father, a computer specialist, brought home a teach-yourself-piano computer program. Andres was done with it in three weeks. He is now a freshman at Yale, and his musical progress is still accelerating. For one thing, he is a formidable pianist who has the measure of Charles Ives’s towering “Concord Sonata.” What happens when you tell your emo-listening, hip-hop-dancing, ironically “American Idol”-analyzing classmates that you are a classical composer?
Andres is making his way through the labyrinth of possibilities that the last century left behind. Composers grow up with the idea that music is a game of heroes. “There’s some truth in that,” Andres said, when I outlined this syndrome for him. I sought out Andres not to anoint him the “next big thing”—it is far too early to tell about that—but to find out what young composers like him were doing, dreaming, and fearing. Beers with Alarm Will Sound | Proust Eats a Sandwich. In this age of ridiculous celebrity, it was a treat to knock back a few with some of the members of Alarm Will Sound after their concert Thursday night. It was doubly so not only because we got to discuss music with artistically driven performers we respect – come on, I get to do that all the time – and not only because I’m usually in such a rush after shows to either a) relieve a babysitter and/or b) do my write-up, but because we left the bairn at home with his grandparents and were seeing the show for pleasure and enjoyment, allowing us the privilege to stretch time and live like it was 2010 again.
Our drive to Columbia, MO, had been accompanied by podcasts from NPR’s “Fresh Air” with Terry Gross. We listened to an interview with Brad Pitt, who is, coincidentally, an almost-graduate of the University of Missouri. Personally, I’d be more interested in having coffee with Gross, but I wouldn’t turn down an invite to drink beers with Pitt. Like this: Like Loading... Moondrunk for a Century: A History of the Pierrot Ensemble. Hanns Eisler’s Palmström—for speaker, flute (doubling on piccolo), clarinet, violin (doubling on viola), and cello—is easily mistakable for a better-known work. Thirteen years after the premiere of Pierrot Lunaire, at the request of his teacher Arnold Schoenberg, Eisler composed a companion piece for the same instrumentation (minus piano) as that modernist masterpiece. Pierrot itself is a deeply ambiguous work, full of biting satire and mocking seriousness; Palmström takes this a step further, parodying the parody.
The forty-five second “Notturno” mimics the bloodrush of Schoenberg’s “Galgenlied” (“Gallows Song”), but with comically low stakes: Palmström takes paper from his drawer. Besides being a fine bit of Second Viennese School homage, Palmström is an early participant in a hundred-year musical heritage, one still unfolding today: the Pierrot ensemble. Let’s begin at the beginning. Pierrot Lunaire premiered on October 12, 1912, and immediately caused a sensation. Notes 1. Five 'Classical' Pieces That Blew Dan Deacon's Mind. Terry Riley's Radical Openness to Sound. Nico Muhly » Hindi Classical. This blog post is a result of many months of casual thought and casual conversations, boiled down into a perhaps more casual than usual blog post.
Maura Lafferty graciously agreed to sort of have an organized discussion between our two blogs, so I would encourage you to read her post before you read mine. My online life is wide-ranging but a little bit curated. I try really hard to stay actively involved with my friends on Facebook — and by friends, I mean people I know outside the context of that social network. I follow a few hundred people on twitter, and I actively follow a few dozen blogs about music, linguistics, computers, art.
I follow them in a slightly old-fashioned way: they’re all tabbed, rather that RSSed, so I have to manually see if anybody has updated. One thing that hasn’t been expurgated from my feed is a relentless and sort of obsessive focus on genre that people constantly throw around. I realize that this comes from, in part, the printed (or formal?) Yes gawd! In Defense of “Indie-Classical” | Maura Lafferty. Justin Davidson, that eloquent observer of classical music culture and fierce advocate for healthy criticism, recently described how “opera fans have strong opinions, which they often express in incendiary terms.
It’s an art of exaggeration, and it provokes rhetorical extremes.” One has only to take a quick peek at any of the discussions on NewMusicBox, Sequenza21, Adaptistration, or even Nico Muhly’s blog to understand that this phenomenon is not limited to opera fans – one might say it’s a prerequisite for entering a music conservatory. This was in evidence a few weeks ago, when I shared an article by Ariel Hyatt , a guide to creating the perfect pitch for musicians who don’t fit into easy boxes that resemble the styles the mid-90s record labels trained us on. She describes the importance of having a distinctive, descriptive pitch that musicians can use to quickly create interest and understanding in their work, a tactic that reinforces the value of labels like “indie-classical.”
Audiences hate modern classical music because their brains cannot cope. “…it is often the quietest person who achieves the highest degree of ecstasy.” | Mae Mai. Reading one of Eric Edberg’s recent posts reminded me of the quote in the title of this blog post. Oliver Leaman, in his book “Islamic Aesthetics”, describes the role of the audience of musical performances (in the context of a discussion of audience response to the great Egyptian vocalist Umm Khulthum) under a section titled “The role of the audience in music” (Leaman 2004, 107): To a degree the audience reacts as it has seen Sufis react, and this is often in a rather wild and free way.
Yet in many of the leading writings on the topic the Sufis stressed the significance of remaining quiet and contemplative when listening to music, and if the music and dance throws one into ecstasy then obviously we might act wildly, but when when that stage is over we should be quiet and still, physically and mentally.
As al-Ghazali puts it, in the Iha’ ‘ulum al-din it is often the quietest person who achieves the highest degree of ecstasy (wajd). I like that. Like this: Like Loading... The Science and Math of "The Beatles: Rock Band" - William Weir | It's Alive! The other day I had a story in the paper about the "Beatles: Rock Band" video game Unfortunately, I didn't have space to include much about the technology behind the making of the game, or a conversation I had with Jason Brown, a mathematician from Nova Scotia whose mad math skills have answered some long-standing questions about the Beatles' music.
Rock Band was created by Alex Rigopulos and Eran Egozy, both of whom came up through MIT's Media Lab in the 1990s and were students of hyper-instrument guru Tod Machover. The basic ideas behind the game are rooted in their work as students - Rigopulos' master thesis was on how gestures could manipulate music, while Egozy's involved the interaction between musicians and computers. Writer David Kushner has a great story in IEEE Spectrum on Rigopulos and Egozy and the technology they've used for the video game. When a Rock Band player messes up on "lead guitar" for, say, "Something," the original guitar track by George Harrison drops out. The five myths about contemporary classical music. 1. It all sounds like a squeaky gate There are two sides to this. First, there's the simple fact that much of the music being written now by composers for choirs, opera houses and orchestras has as many, and sometimes more, tunes than anything by Beethoven or Mozart.
For sensuous, harmonious reverie, listen to recent music by John Tavener or Arvo Pärt; for sheer, abundant tune-smithery, look no further than those masters of choral, regal and festive vocality Paul Mealor, Eric Whitacre and John Rutter. But none of this is what the "squeaky gate" critics mean. 2. Balderdash. 3. This is one of the real things that puts many listeners off, the idea that to be able to understand Harrison Birtwistle or Judith Weir, Pauline Oliveros or Howard Skempton, you need to have a working knowledge, and preferably a PhD, in music history from plainchant to Prokofiev, and/or you need to be part of a club of contemporary music groupies. 4. 5. Ah, yes: here's the rub. . * What are the composers' favourites? yMusic: Joyful Virtuosity For 'Spinning On Air' : Deceptive Cadence. YouTube New York pocket orchestra yMusic performs "A Paper, a Pen, a Note to a Friend" by Shara Worden at WNYC.
The New York-based mini-orchestra yMusic champions music by young composers whose work combines the complexity of classical music and the tuneful, rhythmic energy of pop. The ensemble consists of six virtuosos: Hideaki Aomori, clarinet, bass clarinet; CJ Camerieri, trumpet, French horn; Clarice Jensen, cello; Rob Moose, violin; Nadia Sirota, viola; and Alex Sopp, flute, piccolo. Each of these players is often busy playing with orchestras, chamber groups, and cutting-edge pop acts such as Bon Iver, The National, Björk, David Byrne, Grizzly Bear, Antony and the Johnsons and Sufjan Stevens. In this session, recorded in the WNYC Studio for our program Spinning On Air, yMusic performs some of the pieces that appear on its album Beautiful Mechanical.
"Beautiful Mechanical" by Son Lux "A Whistle, A Tune, A Macaroon" by My Brightest Diamond "Proven Badlands" by St. Nadia Sirota: Composers-Who-Like-Other-Composers. String Theatrics and Violin Semantics « Classical Music is Dead* Musical Dim Sum: Five Chinese Composers In America : Deceptive Cadence. Hide captionCelebrating Chinese New Year, last year, in New York's Chinatown.
Matej Krajcovic/iStock Celebrating Chinese New Year, last year, in New York's Chinatown. Happy New Year — Chinese New Year, that is. Today marks the first day in the Year of the Dragon and, according to the Chinese calendar, the end of the winter season. The Chinese think of it as their spring festival. Today also marks a different kind of festival, a week-long celebration of Chinese music and its Western intersections. In the mid-1970s, after the Cultural Revolution — which aimed to strip China of capitalist and Western elements — young Chinese composers streamed back into the reopened conservatories.
Below are five such musical adventurers, each of whom came to America to explore Western music styles, fusing them with their own ancient traditions to create vibrant new music that has had its own influence on classical composition. Have a favorite Chinese composer or piece of music? Contemporary classical: A primer. So here, O fictive reader, are answers to some of the questions that, over the years, I’ve heard you ask. These answers are the equivalent of a one-day tour of a major metropolis, pointing out a few highlights to give you a general sense of the landscape of living composers, hoping that you’ll return to visit, in depth, whatever grabs your interest. This is not a “best of” guide, but rather an aide to orientation: Whatever your individual taste, these are pieces worth exploring. 1.Why should I care about minimalism?
Minimalism is a frustratingly incorrect term for a compositional approach that developed in the second half of the 20th century and that, in hindsight, turns out to be the most important contribution the United States has made to the field of composition. “Minimalism” is a flawed term because most of the composers associated with it — notably Steve Reich and Philip Glass — reject it.
Ah, but it is. 2. They can, and they do. 3.What about the younger generation? 4. Contemporary music trends: The new niceness, aesthetic brutalism, and spectralism explained. Last season maestro Alan Gilbert and the New York Philharmonic filled Avery Fisher Hall for György Ligeti's berserkly comic, highly noisy opera Le Grand Macabre, written between the '70s and '90s.
Here's a sample. The audience was largely made up of the youngish and hipish, which can't be said of the usual operatic performance. They went nuts over the opera, which they probably called the "song. " A few years ago when the Boston Symphony put on Edgard Varese's Amériques from the '20s, a sort of slowly accumulating orchestral traffic jam and one of the most fuck-you pieces ever written, much of the audience was also conspicuously youthful and enthusiastic.
So are the responders on YouTube. From these points I began to ponder yet again, in a new decade of a still-new century, the state of more or less "contemporary" classical music, the state of noisy music, et al. Let's start with some context. It can be tricky to separate out the truly new from the second-hand or shallowly trendy.