Thursday, March 31, 2005
New Prize in Montreal, New Sounds in Dallas
 Kent Nagano got his big break in 1984 when Olivier Messiaen picked him to become Seiji Ozawa's assistant for the world premiere of his opera Saint Fran�ois d'Assise. Nagano, music director of the Montreal Symphony beginning next year, clearly hasn�t forgotten his old mentor who died in 1992. Beginning with the 2006-2007 season, the Montreal Symphony will sponsor every two years an International Composition Prize for orchestral works, open to composers of all nationalities, aged 40 years and under. The winning composer will receive the Olivier Messiaen International Prize which includes $25,000 in Canadian cash and lots of performance and recording goodies. The second place work will get the Promise Prize and there is a third award called the Claude Vivier National Prize for the best Canadian work.
South of the border, the Dallas Symphony is demonstrating that everything is relative tonight when it premieres composer Cindy McTee's Einstein's Dream, a DSO commission for string orchestra, percussion and recorded computer music. This is DSO's second world premiere of a work by Dr. McTee, the regents professor of music composition at the University of North Texas.
"Most music performed in the classical western tradition is meant to be seen," McTee writes in the program notes. "Music played through loudspeakers, however, is meant to be unseen, causing a confusion of identities and a new kind of listening experience (to borrow an idea from Paul A. Griffiths) at the threshold between visible and invisible sound. In Einstein�s Dream, these two kinds of music collide, and a new sense of space-time emerges as we hear the seen (the familiar) fold into the unseen (the unfamiliar)."
Sounds way cool, as the kids say.
In the S21 blogs, Lawrence Dillon is still seeking an answer to a question posed to him a couple of weeks ago when he was in Russia: What pieces from the 70s, 80s, 90s and 00s have changed the way composers think about composing? Give him your thoughts...Everette Minchew weighs in with the pieces that have inspired him most personally.
posted by Jerry Bowles
3/31/2005
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