Sequenza21

Composer Ann Millikan sent us a note yesterday.  Please let it be known: The great Quapaw-Cherokee composer Louis Ballard passed just around midnight at his home in Santa Fe, NM.  He was 75.  He was a dear man, and will be missed.  

Nice burble of activity going on here. Way to keep the fires burning, people. Robert Zimmerman’s learning how to take the heat over in the Composers Forum. Click on comments: some heavyweights are weighing in. A charming post from Jeffrey Biegel, who’s performing Lowell Liebermann in Germany. I wonder what all the Kool Kats in Deutschland think about our Lowell. Anthony Cornicello digs the five-octave marimba; Naxos’s hawking some Virgil Thomson; Jay Batzner’s uncovered a copy of the long suppressed video of Einstein on the Beach. Huzzah! Makes me long for a Lego Lohengrin. (Paging Robert Wilson!) And just below

A YouTube video of Reich’s seminal Clapping Music accomplished via juggling (Thanks to MySpace friend James Combs for pointing me to it). Imagine what they could do with 4’33” orDrumming?

Sometimes you don’t need to travel far to be where the hot stuff’s happening. We’ve got fresh action on a lot of fronts here at the ole dump. First stop: Composers Forum. Robert Zimmerman, a new voice here whose presence advances our already unstoppable progress through Dixie, finds the whole “I’ll be understood after I’m dead”-thing a bit ridiculous. But he knows a few famous folks these days who don’t. I think I’m going to go leave a comment . . . Back now. Moving on. Next: Lawrence Dillon has a reflection or two on Ned Rorem’s Our Town. And

I had never given a moment’s thought to music written for television until 1997. I was watching The Late Show with the great Peter Takács when he suddenly – in reference to Paul Shafer – said: “This guy’s a genius.” While there’s no reason the art of composing for television cannot be done ingeniously, I cannot at the moment think of a television composer who enjoys the status of “genius.” This is in stark contrast to film composers, a small gaggle of whom regularly get the G-word applied to them (Bernard Hermann, Toru Takemitsu, Ennio Morricone . . . ). But

Last time I wrote about the Argento Ensemble, they were taking their audience on a tour of contemporary French composers. On January 31st at Merkin, they extended their range a century and moved a bit northwest. This new program, entitled “Expressionism in Motion,” traced the legacy of Austro-Germanic Expressionism from Wagner and Schoenberg through Stockhausen to Wolfgang Rihm and Georg Friedrich Haas. Interestingly, Argento chose not to present the works in order of age. Rather, they arranged the pieces in order of increasing instrumental forces. The concert, then, began in the chronological middle with Stockhausen’s “Der Kleine Harlekin” from 1975.

An acquaintance of mine – a fellow student-composer – years ago once had the fortune to have an extended conversation with György Ligeti. Upon learning my friend was an aspiring composer, Ligeti said: “So you want to be a composer? You’d better go to lots of parties!” This anecdote comes to mind now when reflecting on the final concert of Juilliard’s Focus Festival. The Festival, which wrapped up last week, focused this year on Hungarian music after Bartók. Among the works on the final concert were György Kurtág’s Stele and György Ligeti’s Violin Concerto. My friends: the Violin Concerto is

Ecce Cor Meum Paul McCartney Kate Royal, soprano London Voices; Boys of Magdalen College Choir, Oxford; Boys of King’s College Choir, Cambridge Colm Carey, organ Mark Law, piccolo trumpet Academy of St. Martin in the Fields Gavin Greenaway EMI Classics 094637042427 That Paul McCartney was a member of the Beatles should be ignored for the next few minutes as you read the following. Our expectations are immediately met within the first thirty seconds of music: Bland choral writing, sophomoric orchestrations (not by McCartney, I assume), and predictable melodies that are served with cliché “lyrics” in English (interspersed with Latin). To

Courtesy of The Lyric Chamber Music Society of New York, I was able to hear last Wednesday three compositions by the Chinese-American composer Zhou Long (b. 1953). Long’s music had been recommended to me by composer Jeff Nichols, and the Lyric found room for it on an attractive program that opened with Debussy’s Cello Sonata and closed with Mendelssohn’s D minor piano trio. The players were the fearsomely solid Cho-Liang Lin (violin), Hai-Ye Ni (cello), and Helen Huang (piano).Two of Long’s compositions were “early” works from the 1980s: Taiping Drum (for violin and piano) and Wu Kui (for solo piano);