Nice piece by Anne Midgette in today’s Times about Ingram Marshall whose work I happen to like a lot. Put him down for your new “Underrated” column, Trevor.
Galen’s Take a Friend to Orchestra (TAFTO) piece is up today on Drew McManus’ Adaptistration blog. Good reading for a nasty, rainy day.
Frank J. Oteri will be interviewing Olga Neuwirth at the Philadelphia Center for Arts and Heritage tomorrow in a special one-on-one composer discussion produced by the Philadelphia Music Project. Details here. If you’re in Philadelphia and want to go and write about it, let me know and I’ll get you in.
Catch Corey Dargel on this week’s episode of Steve Paul’s Puppet Music Hall. The whole episode is ici and free.
Some good morning music for your dining and dancing pleasure. A nice piece called “Baile” by Argentinian composer Francisco Colasanto, played by Marco Antonio Mazzini, who thinks it may be the first and only work for contrabass clarinet and electronics written in South America.
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Our regular listen to and look at living, breathing composers and performers that you may not know yet, but I know you should… And can, right here and now, since they’re nice enough to offer so much good listening online:
Two pals-in-a-pod:
Alex Temple (b. 1983 — US)
I started composing when I was 11, on a family trip to Italy. My earliest influence was Bach, and after that, Hindemith, Prokofiev and Bartók. When I was 15 I discovered rock (by means of “Strawberry Fields Forever” and “I Am The Walrus”), and when I was 17 I discovered the experimental rock underground (by means of The Olivia Tremor Control, Kukl, Mr. Bungle and Thinking Plague). Those two discoveries got me interested in combining ideas from the scored-music world and ideas from the rock world, and since then I’ve been exploring various ways of bringing disparate materials together — not just rock and scored music, but really anything. I got my BA at Yale in 2005, and am currently working towards my MA at the University of Michigan, where I’m studying with Erik Santos.
Alex’s work is bright and fun, even in the slightly darker moments. There’s a kind of stream-of-consciousness to his music, where every few phrases may call up another style or bit of the past. Like listening to an excellent after-hours lounge pianist wandering through whatever flits through their mind, it all hangs together; just go along for the ride you’ll do fine.
Lainie Fefferman (US)
Lainie and Alex were at Yale together, and they share a lot of the same anything-goes spirit. She received her BA in music from Yale in 2004, studying with John Halle, Matthew Suttor, and Kathryn Alexander. She also snagged a second BA in Near-Eastern languages and civilizations, specializing in the religious chant traditions of the middle east. She studied Torah cantillation with Rebecca Boggs and Quranic chanting with Dr. Abd al Hamid. If I’ve got it right, she’s currently teaching at St. Ann’s School in Brooklyn.
Lainie’s music has a bit more of the purely “classical” focus, though that can just as easily mean the chromatic line or a bit of minimalist burble. Like Alex, there’s no problem as well if electric guitar, drum kit or laptop drop by. The musical play comes with some high concepts as underpinning — not surprising when your dad (Charles Fefferman) is one of the country’s most renowned mathematicians — but those concepts get out of the way once the music starts.
The big news out of Los Angeles this morning is that Gustavo Dudamel, the 26-year-old Venezuelan wunderkind, will replace Esa-Pekka Salonen when he leaves the LA Phil at the end of his term in 2009. Salonen plans to spend more of his time composing.
(I think I’m going to switch to mid-week from here on; people seem to like it.) Our regular listen to and look at living, breathing composers and performers that you may not know yet, but I know you should… And can, right here and now, since they’re nice enough to offer so much good listening online:
Tom Rojo Poller (b. 1978 — Germany)
Born in Osnabrück, Poller began his composition studies in 1996 at the Hochschule für Musik Detmold, continuing with Prof. Walter Zimmermann at the Universität der Künste Berlin (UdK). After an exchange year at the Royal College of Music London in 2003, he received his diploma and returned to Berlin where he’s just finished his postgraduate work. Since 1999 he’s also been studying German Literature, Philosophy and Musicology at the Humboldt-University in Berlin. Last year, as participant of the Global-Interplay-project, he attended conferences in Accra, Ghana.
Tom is especially interested in the temporal aspect of music (including polyrhythmical/polymetrical music); music theater — or more generally, various forms of musical representation; the relation between music and language; the philosophy of music (especially music and the emotions, music and understanding). His music is deeply rooted in the western European musical tradition, but is greatly influenced by its lesser known aspects (e.g. medieval and renaissance music, rhetorical aspects of baroque music).
His website shows off all of these interests; his music page there is especially generous about providing quality listening to his already-amazing pieces (the recordings and performances are generally top-notch). This is someone to keep an eye on in the coming years.
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Tristan Fuentes (b. 1951 — Mexico), Joe Holmquist (b. 1951 — US)
The official word is:
Tristan Fuentes, born 1951 in Mexico City, is the son of a school teacher and barrister. His first ensemble experience was “Cherub Choir” as a five-year-old, and piano studies followed at age six. In the fifth grade he had the opportunity to join the class band. It was denied that he play trumpet but firmly suggested that he play drums. At age fifteen he organized his first combo and started playing professionally.
As a university student he pursued a dual track of classical music and rock & roll. In his mid-twenties he studied percussion, music theory, and composition at the New England Conservatory and suffered under the tutelage of Gunther Schuller. Upon his liberation with a Master of Music degree, he set upon a diverse life of people, places, languages, and art objects. His main compositional influences have been Terry Riley, John Cage, and Frederic Rzewski. His works are primarily for small instrumental ensembles, often including exotic percussion.
Fuentes describes his music as “liberated minimalism”. As a theory and composition student he was trained in the tradition of Paul Hindemith and the later serialists, while outside of class he was listening to and playing rock, jazz, and minimalist music. His works are characterized by catchy melodies and strong rhythms. Harmonically the music is tonal, with dissonance as the main device for creating tension between compositional elements.
Or…
Joe Holmquist was born in 1951 in Benson, Minnesota, a medium-sized community out in the west-central part of the state (in this case, medium-sized means 3,000 souls). There wasn’t much along the line of organized activities for kids, so it was common to participate in music organizations both at school and at church. “…At the time, I didn’t think I was learning anything in particular from those music activities, but I was!…”
His first ensemble experience was “Cherub Choir” as a five-year-old, and piano studies followed at age six. In the fifth grade he had the opportunity to join the class band. It was denied that he play trumpet but firmly suggested that he play drums. At age fifteen he organized his first combo and started playing professionally.
As a university student he pursued a dual track of classical music and rock & roll. In his mid-twenties he studied percussion, music theory, and composition at the New England Conservatory and suffered under the tutelage of Gunther Schuller. Upon his liberation with a Master of Music degree, he set upon a diverse life of people, places, languages, and art objects. His main compositional influences have been Terry Riley, John Cage, and Frederic Rzewski. His works are primarily for small instrumental ensembles, often including exotic percussion.
Holmquist describes his music as “liberated minimalism”. As a theory and composition student he was trained in the tradition of Paul Hindemith and the later serialists, while outside of class he was listening to and playing rock, jazz, and minimalist music. His works are characterized by catchy melodies and strong rhythms. Harmonically the music is tonal, with dissonance as the main device for creating tension between compositional elements.
Hmmm… The truth is what we will, right? And the truth is that Joe’s site, besides highlighting his excellence as a percussionist, kindly hosts a wealth of Tristan Fuentes pieces in MP3. Bright, propulsive and non-cheesily tuneful, They’re well worth getting to know.
Vienna born conductor and composer Peter Paul Fuchs died in Greensboro, North Carolina on March 28 aged 90. For an appreciation of his music by John McLaughlin Williams follow An Overgrown Path.
In 1973 my mother bought me my first toy piano at Harvey’s Department Store in Nashville. This is not quite the heartwarming tale of a little tyke that it might at first seem to be, since I was at the time a student at New England Conservatory, and she was getting it for me so I could play the Cage Suite for Toy Piano in a concert in Jordan Hall. It turned out that, completely inadvertently (only operating according to her generosity), she had got me the Steinway of toy pianos, a Schoenhut. I’ve continued to play the Cage over the years, and last summer my toy piano more or less just fell apart.
As I thought about buying a new one, it occurred to me that I should do an inaugural concert on it. I began to ask people to write pieces for me, and mostly they agreed to do.
The concert is on Sunday, April 8 at 8:00pm in the Marshall Room in the Music Building at Boston University (855 Commonwealth Avenue).
The concert includes–in addition to the Cage–pre-existing pieces by Kyle Gann, Eve Beglarian, Richard Whalley, and Dai Fujikura (for toy piano and violin pizzicato–the violinist will be Peter Zazofsky). There are new pieces, which will be having their first performances, by Lyle Davidson, Pozzi Escot, Stephen Feigenbaum, Michael Finnissy, Philip Grange, John Heiss, Derek Hurst (with electronic sounds–i.e. on my boombox), Matthew McConnell, Matthew Mendez, Nico Muhly, Ketty Nez (for toy piano and piano–Ketty will be the pianist), Dave Smith, Jeremy Woodruff, William Zuckerman, and me (for clavichord and toy piano–the clavichord player will be Peter Sykes). (I’m pretty sure that’s everybody.) The pieces are all really good and all really different from each other.
I hope you can come to this (what can only be described as an) unusual concert.
(A little early this week, as I might be out on the weekend) …Our regular listen to and look at compositions and performances that you may not know yet, but I know you should… And can, right here and now, since folks are nice enough to offer so much good listening online. Time to sit in on a few “first moments” in musical history:
George Gershwin & Paul Whiteman : Rhapsody in Blue – Original 78rpm Acoustic Recording (1924)
Made shortly after the premiere performance, and a year before the electric microphone came into use. The two records are on different pages: record one is here, and record two here. I can’t do any better than give B. Stockwell’s commentary from the Archive.org site:
“This is an edited performance, with cuts made to fit the 15-minute work onto two 78-RPM discs. Total time is under 9 minutes, but the cuts are pretty smart ones. This work was originally written for a large dance band, the way you hear it here. This isn’t ‘Symphonic Jazz’. It’s authentic 1920’s style — completely different from the bloated ‘violins and cellos’ versions that we’re used to hearing. You can hear the banjos in this version. Gershwin plays the piano part and the performance is fast fast fast. The opening clarinet glissando wails and breaks off into reedy laughter. This is SO different from the the syrupy swooning you now hear. The sound isn’t spectacular — the microphone wasn’t invented until the next year, 1925 — but these 78s are still pretty well transfered. The recording of Rhapsody in Blue was a hit. In 1927 the same group — again with Gershwin but now with a microphone — made another recording. Paul Whiteman had a quarrel of some sort and walked out of the recording session. They recorded anyway, with another conductor — Nathaniel Shilkret, I think — taking over. Whiteman was happy to promote the recording as his own, nonetheless. The electric version is better recorded but it lacks, well, electricity. Everyone, including Gershwin, just punches it harder in 1924.”
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Percussion Music from Lou Harrison’s Collection of 78rpm Acetate Records
An absolutely fascinating audio document, this 1971 KPFA broadcast by Charles Amirkhanian presented extremely rare recordings of percussion music from the composer Lou Harrison’s (1917-2003) personal collection. Especially important are the acetate disks of a concert given by John Cage’s percussion ensemble at the Cornish School in Seattle on May 19th, 1939.
Cornish (still there and going strong; as a college student in 1978 I caught Cage himself at a tribute concert in the same hall, performing some of his Sonatas and Interludes) was where Cage found a job accompanying dancers, and it was there that he founded his first percussion ensemble and experimented with the prepared piano. (The stage in the Cornish performance hall was too small to accommodate all his percussion during a dance performance, so Cage came up with the idea of turning a single piano into its own percussion “ensemble”.) The performers heard include Cage, his then-wife Xenia, and the dancer Doris Dennison. (there has to be at least one more, quite possibly Lou Harrison himself. The photo here shows Lou, John, and Xenia behind, Doris and Margaret Jansen in front).
The pieces on these recordings represent the core of the West-Coast experimentalist group (I know, I know, Harry Partch; but he was off on his own very different journey): Lou Harrison’s Counterdance in Spring, Henry Cowell’s Pulse, two movements from Cage’s own Trio, Johanna M. Beyer’s Tactless and Endless, William Russell’s Three Cuban Studies, and again Harrison with his Fifth Simfony. You just can’t get much closer to sitting in on the roots of this exciting period.
The remainder of the broadcast features a 33rpm disk that captures a 1948 performance of Harrison’s Canticle #3, introduced and conducted by Leopold Stokowski during a concert at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City.
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On a personal note, I’ll mention the release of my own new CD, The Composer Plays IV: Works for Imaginary Piano, on the NiwoSound label. Along with my performance of Stravinsky’s Piano-Rag Music, the CD collects a number of my works that feature piano: either solo, doubled, or with recorded sound.
Jumping into the first wave of what I’m sure is to become common practice, no physical copy of the CD will be offered for sale in stores; it will only be available to subscribers at both eMusic and iTunes (the link is to eMusic; the CD is not “live” on iTunes yet, but will be soon — not only in the US, but iTunes Europe, Canada, Japan and Australia as well. iTunes folks can simply search “Steve Layton” to find the complete list of my available CDs in their country). For those who want something in their hand to read, complete liner notes for the CD can be had as a free downloadable PDF file (300 kb) from my own website. Enjoy!
Our regular listen to and look at living, breathing composers and performers that you may not know yet, but I know you should… And can, right here and now, since they’re nice enough to offer so much good listening online:
Katharine Norman (b. 1960 — UK, Canada)
Katharine is a British-born composer, sound artist and writer, currently living about as far out West as you can get on Pender Island in BC, Canada. Prior to this “slightly alarming” (her words) change of direction she was Director of the Electronic Music Studios at Goldsmiths, University of London. She now supports the composing habit by freelance writing and some teaching. She’s composed instrumental music, music combining instruments or voices and digital media, and purely electronic work. Her music makes frequent use of documentary sound – conversation, city sounds, birds etc. – in a way that perhaps invites new appreciation both of the ‘real world’ and of the concert hall. Increasingly, she writes about music, in particular electroacoustic and electronic music. Her book of experimental writings on recent electronic music (of many kinds and approaches) entitled Sounding Art: Eight Literary Excursions through Electronic Music was published by Ashgate in 2004.
“I have been enthralled with sound as a means of expression ever since I discovered my violin playing made my parents cry (for all the wrong reasons). I started composing not long after, and in the last ten years or so have become more and more interested in the sounds that surround us, and what they can mean in different contexts. Although I remain fascinated by what computers can help me to do with sounds, technology is the least of my concerns – I’m trying to get somewhere, although happily the goal keeps moving. I’ll take whatever transport seems appropriate at the time, whether that’s works for sound alone, or piano pieces, or words on paper. But I will probably never write for solo violin.”
Katharine’s very welcoming site has a lot of peruse-worthy nooks and crannies, including some interactive pieces made especially for the web. The MP3 download section is being reworked, but luckily a lot of the recordings are parked at the SONUS website as well.
Ryan Brown (b. 1979 — US)
Ryan is a San Francisco-based composer and performer, most frequently combining the two in the “rock chamber ensemble” OOGOG. His formative years were spent playing rock and jazz guitar in various bands before beginning formal musical studies at the age of 17. These early years continue to heavily influence his approach to composition, “[pushing] the ensemble sound beyond the Western classical realm” (Josef Woodard, Santa Barbara News-Press). He holds degrees in composition from Cal State Long Beach and the San Francisco Conservatory of Music and has studied with Dan Becker, Robin Cox, Michael Gordon, Martin Herman, Scott Johnson, David Lang, Steve Mackey, and Julia Wolfe. Recent commissions include music for violinist Todd Reynolds and the SFCM Guitar Ensemble. His work our friend adam for alto sax, electric guitar, electric bass, and piano received its East Coast premiere on Philip Glass’ MATA Festival at the Brooklyn Lyceum on March 20th.
Ryan’s generous “downloads” page will give you all kinds of listening, including the MATA piece for all you East-coasties who stayed home. (Be sure not to miss hearing the maniacally demented boogie-woogie piano of Oogog Says Hello.)
Why a String Quartet? What is it that has given it its exalted reputation and mystique? Why have so many composers regarded it as the perfect medium of expression, though it is perhaps the most demanding to write for? And why do distinguished artists often prefer to work as a team in a first class quartet rather than make bigger money as, say, orchestral leaders? Music means different things to different people: but for those to who music is an intellectual art, a balanced and reasoned statement of ideas, an impassioned argument, an intense but disciplined expression of emotion – the string quartet is perhaps the most satisfying medium of all.
These are the words of Elizabeth Maconchy (above) who was born one hundred years ago on March 19th 1907. She wrote a remarkable cycle of thirteen string quartets that were influenced by Berg, Bartok, Janacek and her teacher in Prague, Karel Jirak. But despite its obvious merit Elizabeth Maconchy’s music remains scandalously neglected. Which prompts On An Overgrown Path to ask, how important is a composer’s music?