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, with so much good listening online:

2005 Snapshot: Music at Northwestern University

Northwestern University

Obviously a picture from a warmer season… Northwestern has a killer location, right on Lake Michigan, just a bit north of downtown Chicago. I’ll be heading that way for a week in late January (tagging along for my wife’s special management class), and in honor of the visit I thought I’d share the site linked above, full of streaming audio and video of music from Northwestern.

Though it doesn’t give dates, I can deduce that the series was created in 2005, when somebody probably had some pocket change to spend on a promotional series: Jason Eckardt was on the faculty, not yet replaced by our S21-visitor Aaron Cassidy (himself since moved on to Huddersfield, UK); John Adams had the Nemmers Prize residency, since awarded to Oliver Knussen. The range of listening is great, with works by Berlioz, Mahler, Prokofiev, Hovhaness, Tallis, Handel, Bach, Brahms, Monteverdi, Mozart, Beethoven, Dello Joio, Debussy, Adamo, Bernstein, Hindemith, Zappa, Carter, Tower, Milhaud, Shostakovich, etc, etc…

Of special interest to our crowd though, is the Faculty Composers show, with pieces by Jay Alan Yim (a personal favorite), Augusta Read Thomas, Amy Williams, Stephen Syverud, and Jason Eckardt. And, since he was there then, we have an entire show on John Adams, with an interview, complete performance of Gnarly Buttons, and good chunk of Grand Pianola Music. The music files are .MOV files, which play fine on Macs and any PC with Quicktime installed.