Hilary Hahn doesn’t need much introduction; as one of the leading violinists today, many of you have any number of her recordings or have been lucky enough to catch her in concert.
Usually we put our stars up on some pedestal, always with that remove of the stage between us. But Hilary herself has a different [...]

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Continuing a theme: earlier this week I mentioned a gig by composer Matt McBane’s “not-quite-neo-alt-rock-chamber-folk-etc” ensemble Build. The pattern continues this Sunday at The Stone in NYC (corner of 2nd street and Ave. C, $10), when two more “NQNARCFE” groups show us what they’ve got (is this the true wave of classical music’s future? — [...]

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S21 friend Peter Mueller passed along the good news that:
The Library of Congress has completed digitization of another batch of the compositional sketches of Elliott Carter.  These are now available on our web site.  This current release consists of the following material:
Pocahontas (18*)
Symphony No.1 (224)
Piano Sonata (20*)
Minotaur (108)
Emblems (192)
Woodwind Quintet (141)
Eight Etudes and a Fantasy [...]

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The 2009 Opera Vista Festival and competition just finished up down here in Houston. Line Tørnhøj of Aarhus, Denmark was voted by the audience as the winner with her opera Anorexia Sacra. Second place went to Camilo Santostefano of Buenos Aries, Argentina, and his opera El Fin de Narciso. Tørnhøj received a check for $1,500 [...]

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I’m late getting to this but one of our regulars called my attention to an article in last Sunday’s New York Times about the League of Composers titled Modernists Commission Their Future that struck said regular as misleading. To wit, the article says, in reference to new music organizations that commission new works from [...]

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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3YD6uu7dJ7I

Mauricio Kagel’s 1984 “Der Eid des Hippokrates” (”The Hippocratic Oath”), for piano 3-hands. Kagel wrote:
This aphoristic composition was inspired by the publication in January 1984, in a medical magazine, of an article on my latest work. Whiling away the time in hospital waiting rooms, I began to think about the generous Hippocratic oath. I could [...]

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New New Paths in Music presents
An Hispanic Festival
Elebash Recital Hall
Graduate Center – CUNY
New York

On Friday June 5th, New Paths in Music presented a concert of composers from Mexico, Argentina, and Spain: two of each. While the program centered around national identities, it contained music in disparate styles and for varying forces. DAVID ALAN MILLER, conductor [...]

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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xb50kHf7Tw0

Carles Santos has been a force on the Spanish “downtown” scene (taking musicians like Santos, Llorenç Barber and Maria de Alvear in opposition to the “uptown” likes of Cristobal Halffter, Joan Guinjoan and Tomás Marco) since the early 1970s. This “downtown” movement had a huge impact on Spanish musicians in the 80s, and still carries [...]

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Monday last week I headed over to San Antonio to hear a house concert hosted by composer and San Antonio Symphony bassist Doug Balliett. The program included two new pieces by P. Kellach Waddle, “Louange a l’Eternite de Jesus” from Messiaen’s Quartet for the End of Time, and selections from Balliett’s arrangements and reinventions [...]

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It’s sometimes said that composers are either German or French, and American vanguard one Frederic Rzewski, with his much vaunted admiration for Beethoven, is clearly on the German side.  But how could he not be when some of his composition teachers like Dallapiccola and Babbitt forsook a flowing lyric line for a jagged dramatic one, [...]

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