I’ve found it’s best to trust a publicist who is an artist as well: It likely means that they love music rather than just viewing it as a product to promote!
Kudos to Sarah Baird Knight (formerly at Boosey and Hawkes and now part of the Dot Dot Dot Music PR firm) for rekindling her passion for songwriting.
Megakudos for sharing her new songs with us via Soundcloud.
Laurie San Martin teaches at UC Davis. She’s one of our featured composers on the fast approaching Sequenza 21/MNMP Concert (October 25 at Joe’s Pub). In the guest post below, she talks about her work Linea Negra, which will be performed on the program.
Linea Negra
The faint, dark, vertical line that appears on a very pregnant woman’s belly in the weeks before she bursts is called the linea negra. So it seemed like a fitting title for the solo marimba piece that I was writing during the final weeks of my first pregnancy in the summer of 2004. Real-life deadlines work in my favor as a composer. That is to say, the countdown leading up to a big life change is an intensely productive time for me. Linea Negra is a piece I always associate with that particular time in my life. When most mothers would have been preparing the baby’s room or redecorating the house, I was making deals with my daughter while she was still in the womb. “How about you wait a few more days to come out and I can finish this piece. Really, it’ll be much better that way.” She arrived a few days late, so I was able to finish the piece on time; I have the greatest daughter one could ask for (and the piece isn’t bad, either).
I compose from left to right. That is to say, I start at the beginning and pretty much write the musical events in the order that they happen. It probably comes as no surprise then that my music is very linear. Linea Negra is just under five minutes in length, with an ABA structure. The outer sections are a fast and repetitive moto perpetuo while the middle section is slow and lyrical. The piece is quite virtuosic–the marimba player is asked to play very fast runs, leaps, and chords; audience members often describe the piece as “acrobatic.”
Linea Negra is written for percussionist Chris Froh, who premiered the piece in October, 2004 at the American Academy in Rome. Chris is an exhilarating performer, and I was very lucky to be able to work with him while writing the piece. Hearing the work in progress influenced the direction of the piece and helped me iron out some of the technical difficulties, and clarify the musical gestures. Working with a musician of Chris’s dedication and commitment is such a privilege for a composer, not to mention, inspiring and rewarding.
Below is a Soundcloud embed of the studio recording of “For Milton,” a duo for flute and piano performed by John McMurtery and Ashlee Mack. It will appear on a CD included in a special double issue of Perspectives of New Music/Open Space, dedicated to Milton Babbitt.
PS You may have noticed that at the bottom of the page, there is a link to my Soundcloud page and a Dropbox link to share your own audio files. Please feel free to listen and to share your sounds.
In other publication news, my review article, “Arnold Whittall and the Perils of Transcontinental Serialism,” is in the current issue of Intégral, a music theory journal published by the Eastman School of Music.
Read chapters 2-3 in R. Murray Schafer’s Tuning of the World
1) A sound walk is not dissimilar from a regular walk, but the participant(s) is more mindful of the sounds around them. For Tuesday, take a couple of short sound walks, taking note of the sounds you hear around you, paying attention to distance, direction, loudness, variety, etc. Be ready to report on what you heard in detail (it’s advisable to jot down some notes afterward).
2) We all create soundscapes all the time. A soundscape is different from a soundwalk in that, rather than walking through an environment and observing the sounds that are made, we are creating a sonic ambience to our taste. Try a soundscape at home. It could be while you are doing a mundane task, such as cooking or cleaning, or during some other activity (reading, eating, etc.). What sounds do you insert into your environment. Why do you like having them accompany you? Are any of them used to mask other sounds? If so, why? If you could have an environment in which only sounds you “liked” were in operation, what would they be?
3) What’s a spectrograph? What’s noise abatement?
4) What are the principal difference Schafer draws between manmade sounds and sounds from the natural world.
5) What do you think Schafer means when he says that a musician is “an orchestrator of sound?” Notice he doesn’t use the word composer. This has to do with soundscaping and soundwalking.
Maya Beiser, everyone’s favorite ex-Can Banging All Star downtown cellist, was an invited presenter at the March 2011 TED conference. The TED site recently released a high quality video of her lecture recital, and it’s already garnered over 80,000 views!
TED’s slogan: “Ideas worth spreading.” We’re glad that Maya’s getting the chance to spread the word about Steve Reich’s Cello Counterpoint and David Lang’sWorld to Come far and wide!
This week, composer David Smooke (faculty, Peabody Conservatory) will be visiting Westminster Choir College on Thursday to talk about his music. In addition to his work as a composer, Smooke is active as an avant improviser, employing a somewhat unlikely instrument: the toy piano.
Here he is in a video excerpt of a recent trio outing with Bonnie Lander and Erik Spangler at the Highwire Gallery in Philadelphia.
Magnus Lindberg’s important early opus Kraft received its long-belated NY premiere this past week. While the requirements for the piece itself – a large orchestra, massive percussion section, antiphonal spatializing, electronics, amplification, and several soloists – are daunting enough to make the piece a logistically challenging one to present, Lindberg goes still further to personalize its requirements. He stipulates that the percussion section use found materials from a local junkyard in their performance of the work, thereby locating each performance and making it a site-specific entity.
Here’s a video of the NYPO’s percussionists going on a scavenger hunt with Lindberg in preparation for the NY performances of Kraft.
This type of piece personalization makes each orchestra’s rendering of the work a unique experience; but it’s also curtailed the number of organizations who have, to date, presented Kraft.
Kraft, and other pieces with daunting requirements, raise certain aesthetic questions for composers. Is it important for each performance of a new piece to have a sense of personalization? Should composers strive to think big, even if it means that they’ll get less performances as a result? Or is a more portable and utilitarian view preferable?
Of course, one can make strong a case for both options and many variations in between. Lindberg himself has composed works which are far more easily programmed than Kraft!
But the piece does throw down a gauntlet. Composers: are you willing to wait years for performances of your music if that’s what making highly personal work requires? Or do you prefer getting your music out into the world right away and thus favor more practical solutions?
Entries (RSS)