Wednesday, June 21, 2006
Open Ears in Gothenburg
Greetings from Gothenburg, Sweden, where I am attending the first-ever joint conference of three international musical organizations. I won't attempt to spell Gothenburg the Swedish way since I can't figure out how to code the diacriticals from this computer but to give you a sense of how wrong the English name Gothenburg is, the locals pronounce the name of this town as Yetaboory.
Indeed it is a different perspective here. I already wrote about finding internationalism through a bringing together of various specific locally-based nationalisms on NewMusicBox this week, but I thought I'd expound a little bit more here on local new music finds.
With all our talk about who the hot American composers are abroad and who the hot foreign composers are in the USA, it was quite a surprise to see that the only American composers whose music was available on CD at the main concert hall were George Chadwick, William Bolcom, Paul Moravec and Charles Wuorinen. The first was due to his advocacy by Neeme Jarvi who, as a one-time conductor of the Gothenburg Symphony, is something of a local hero. The latter three are the result of the strong presence in this town of Naxos which trumps Nonesuch, DG, and everyone else. I should mention a great seriues of talks yesterday about the music of La Monte Young, John Cage and Morton Feldman, and right now in the library I'm overhearing a conversation about Carter, Gershwin, Irving Fine and Alice Parker!
But the real sadness here so far has been finding such scant representation of Swedish composers. Aside from a few Alfven CDs and a generous helping of Stenhammar, whose name even graces the smaller concert hall in the main arts complex, finding music by local composers here has not been easy. Even the ABBA records in the pop record shops I've visited have been the export versions in English translation. That said, it is a great town for used record stores. I even managed tracked down some music from the newly independent nation of Montenegro.
posted by Frank J. Oteri
2:51 AM
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