Composers Forum is a daily web log that allows invited contemporary composers to share their thoughts and ideas on any topic that interests them--from the ethereal, like how new music gets created, music history, theory, performance, other composers, alive or dead, to the mundane, like getting works played and recorded and the joys of teaching. If you're a professional composer and would like to participate, send us an e-mail.
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Just discovered that Alex Ross, as usual, has already said what I was trying to say below but much better (also, as usual). The Atlanta Sympony is doing Osvaldo Golijov's one-act opera Ainadamar next year and I searched through Alex's archives to see what he had said about it when it premiered at Tanglewood. This seemed especially on point:
His (Golijov's) works arouse extraordinary enthusiasm in audiences, because they revive music’s elemental powers: they have rhythms that rock the body into motion and melodies that linger in the mind. Golijov lacks the intellectual caution that leads composers to confine a quasi-tonal melody within knotty, twelve-tone-ish figures. Instead, he lets his melodies wing their way into the open air.
Which is another way of saying I gave it a 95, Dick. The beat was good and it was good to dance to.
posted by Jerry Bowles
10:07 PM
