American composer Tom Myron was born November 15, 1959 in Troy, NY. His compositions have been commissioned and performed by the Kennedy Center, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, the Portland Symphony Orchestra, the Eclipse Chamber Orchestra, the Atlantic Classical Orchestra, the Eastern Connecticut Symphony Orchestra, the Topeka Symphony, the Yale Symphony Orchestra, the Civic Orchestra of Chicago, the Bangor Symphony and the Lamont Symphony at Denver University.
He works regularly as an arranger for the New York Pops at Carnegie Hall, writing for singers Rosanne Cash, Kelli O'Hara, Maxi Priest & Phil Stacey, the Young People's Chorus of New York City, the band Le Vent du Nord & others. His film scores include Wilderness & Spirit; A Mountain Called Katahdin and the upcoming Henry David Thoreau; Surveyor of the Soul, both from Films by Huey.
Individual soloists and chamber ensembles that regularly perform Myron's work include violinists Peter Sheppard-Skaerved, Elisabeth Adkins & Kara Eubanks, violist Tsuna Sakamoto, cellist David Darling, the Portland String Quartet, the DaPonte String Quartet and the Potomac String Quartet.
Tom Myron's Violin Concerto No. 2 has been featured twice on Performance Today. Tom Myron lives in Northampton, MA. His works are published by MMB Music Inc.
FREE DOWNLOADS of music by TOM MYRON
Symphony No. 2
Violin Concerto No. 2
Viola Concerto
The Soldier's Return (String Quartet No. 2)
Katahdin (Greatest Mountain)
Contact featuring David Darling
Mille Cherubini in Coro featuring Lee Velta
This Day featuring Andy Voelker
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Thursday, December 27, 2007
Coattail Riding Water Carriers Are All Wet
Apparently typed in an all-to-brief moment of lucidity, an astute observation by NYT music critic Bernard Holland has generated much wailing & gnashing of dentures on our venerable home page.
Having made my own observation:
I see this in the art business all the time.
Having thoroughly depleted the ability to exploit the first-raters via season after season over-exposure (Cage & Feldman would be the examples here) well intentioned presenters (who, like today's media outlets, must ceaselessly feed the beast) begin launching valiant, earnest attempts to hype the coattail riders, water carriers and second-raters of long-spent movements as themselves being further exemplars of the genuine article(s). These attempts are always aided & abetted by self-interested "scholars & critics" who face the same pressures from within their own venues.
One of our regulars found it it neccessary to put me in my place with a bit of professorial Tut-Tutting:
To call any of them coattail riders or second-raters is to speak from a blinkered perspective, seemingly that of someone who knows the classical canon and not much else.
Leaving aside the gentleman from the Great State of New York's complete non-grasp of my own musical and aesthetic range, let me clarify my thoughts on his agenda mongering .
Anyone who doesn't grasp the simple fact that our verbal/intellectual modes of discourse & aesthetic expression consist solely of metaphors for physical phenomenon, to which we then apply retroactive (and often grandiose) significance, is operating from a severely blinkered perspective. In this case, promoting the work of Wolff (water carrier), Brown (coattail rider) & Cardew (cynical political opportunist) is the aesthetic equivalent of what environmentalists call "eating down the food chain" and its effects on art are exactly those seen in the physical world: a once fertile environment reduced to a desiccated ruin, barely registering on a wide, non-specialist public. Sound familiar?
The practice does however have a singular, highly seductive dimension. It provides vested parties with the material to build entire careers (and amass armies of toadies) to promote self-serving, pseudo-historical agendas. This is precisely the reason that real talent will forever be obliged to fight the established, institutionally entrenched, evaluative/critical institutions designed to keep the unending supply of secondary non-entities generated by major artistic movements in the spotlight.
posted by Tom Myron
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