Steve Reich on Schoenberg, Coltrane and Radiohead. There is something oddly reassuring about the fact that Steve Reich lives in precisely the kind of house you might expect Steve Reich to live in.
The cab journey to Pound Ridge, the tiny town on the New York-Connecticut border that the composer has called home since 2006, passes a lot of rather grand homes built in various classic styles, from colonial to arts and crafts. Reich, by contrast, lives in what appears to be one of the area's few examples of modernism. Inside, the rooms are huge and white. There is beautiful mid-20th-century furniture. It is clearly the home of someone of refined taste. On one of the walls, there is a framed score of Clapping Music, Reich's 1972 attempt to apply his phasing technique – in which two instruments playing the same part gradually shift out of unison – to music that "needed no instruments beyond the human body". "Well, I take the Chuck Berry approach," he smiles. Reading this on mobile? Reading this on mobile? Unsung Symphonies Blog. Per Nørgård (1932-) has been Denmark’s leading modernist composer since the 1960s.
His fertile musical imagination has led to the creation of seven symphonies over the course of fifty years, the most recent premiering as recently as 2006. Nørgård's music is rigorously constructed but surprisingly approachable, in some cases even ecstatically enjoyable. Among the deeds Nørgård (pronounced "Ner-gore") is known for is the planning of large scale compositions around the same principles that would eventually be formalized in the idea of the “fractal” was even coined. The key to his prescient anticipation of fractals is his use of a specific music-composition device that he (and he alone) invented. Since 1959, a great deal of Nørgård's music has been based on what he called the “infinite series.”
Nørgård’s infinite series is actually an integer sequence produced by a relatively simple algorithm that “unpacks” a single musical interval. [Score Example: Measure 60]
Robert Craft explains writing about Stravinsky's homosexual affairs. Few would have imagined that more than 40 years after Igor Stravinsky died, the composer's sex life would be a source of renewed interest.
Robert Craft, a conductor and Stravinsky's longtime assistant, writes in his new book, "Stravinsky: Discoveries and Memories," that the composer had several homosexual affairs — including one with Maurice Ravel — during the years he composed his three great ballets, "The Firebird" (1910), "Petrushka" (1911) and "The Rite of Spring" (1913). If true, Craft's revelations pose tantalizing questions about Stravinsky's sexuality as it relates to his art. A towering figure in the history of music, Stravinsky was a private man who led a double life for decades, dividing his time between his wife and four children and his lover, Vera, who became his second wife. STORY: 'The Rite of Spring' is Igor Stravinsky's lasting challenge Craft's assertions have prompted criticism from some scholars. PHOTOS: Arts and culture in pictures by The Times calendar@latimes.com. Heather roche. The Power List: Why Women Aren’t Equals In New Music Leadership and Innovation.
I once had a conversation with my violin teacher that I will never forget.
I was at a crucial stage in my development as a musician. The path to a career as a professional violinist was becoming clearer to me, and my passion and talent were becoming more evident. I was in my lesson; I had a stack of music on the stand and several important auditions coming up. Turning to my teacher and mentor, I wondered aloud how viable this path was really going to be. “I would advise you to think very, very carefully about all of this,” she said grimly. I was fourteen. Scholarship.rollins.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1002&context=stud_fac. Measuring the Evolution of Contemporary Western Popular Music : Scientific Reports. To identify structural patterns of musical discourse we first need to build a ‘vocabulary’ of musical elements (Fig. 1).
To do so, we encode the dataset descriptions by a discretization of their values, yielding what we call music codewords20 (see Supplementary Information, SI). In the case of pitch, the descriptions of each song are additionally transposed to an equivalent main tonality, such that all of them are automatically considered within the same tonal context or key. Alex Ross: The Rest Is Noise. Jikken Kobo. Jikken Kobo Bétonsalon, Paris, France Jikken Kobo Ballet Mirai no Eve (Eve Future Ballet), 1955, performance documentation Jikken Kobo (Experimental Workshop) was founded in Tokyo in 1951, against the backdrop of a country traumatized by Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and suffering from postwar austerity measures.
This determinedly interdisciplinary group of 14 artists, musicians, choreographers and poets orientated themselves towards the pre-war European and American avant-gardes. Its members, many of whom were self-taught, worked individually or in groups, and their guiding interests included the piano work of John Cage, Martha Graham’s choreography, and the sculpture of Alexander Calder and Isamu Noguchi.