Our regular listen to and look at living, breathing musicians that you may not know yet, but I know you should… And can, right here and now, since they’re nice enough to offer so much good listening online:

Julie Harting (b. 1957 — US, NYC)

The talk is always “Oh that Schoenberg, making this artificial system that nobody really gets or feels!”… Except there are a few people like Julie:

When I was 7 or 8, I found a miniature violin in my father’s closet, because he played violin when he was a kid. I also found a book called A Tune a Day, and I taught myself from the book to play a little violin, so it was clear that I was musical. But I ended up playing the tuba, but it was never really my instrument. It was really weird, loving music and being accomplished at it, but not playing an instrument that was mine. I ended up very depressed and confused, and when I was 18, after a year of college, I hitchhiked to Montreal with a friend. I was alone a lot, and one time when I was walking alone on a huge hill in the back of McGill University, I had this thought that at the time felt like it was coming from outside of me, that said I should compose. I took that and I said, “OK, that’s it.” It was my lifeline. After that, I went to Berklee College of Music in Boston, and then I finally got to Manhattan School of Music. […] But musically, Schoenberg is my big influence – his music and also his writings. Schoenberg’s also a person who’s very much concerned with integrity. It’s an inner journey when you compose, so you write the music that you feel is right, which means there’s kind of this morality to it, in a sense. You search for yourself, for what’s honest, and what’s truthful, and that’s what you write in music. Schoenberg’s such a key person for that, as well as Beethoven. Mahler’s great, too.

Maybe Julie’s music is “old school”; but if it is, I can happily go back there to study a little. It’s never a question of style so much as the voice, and Julie’s is a wonderfully distinct voice. At her site linked above, you can hear a number of her pieces; I’d particularly recommend the Trio for flute, cello and piano, and hoc est corpus meum for solo violin.

Samuel Vriezen (b. 1973 — Netherlands)

Samuel posts around these parts, though infrequently enough that I feel OK about plugging him here. We’ve been bumping into each other for years on the USENET classical newsgroups, a happy breeze of true contemporary thinking amid all the John Williams wannabees and folk who haven’t gotten past Holst or even Yanni. From the rather complicated and involved pieces of his time in University, he’s been progressively paring back both his scores and materials; still finding the complicated and involved, but arising out of seemingly simple and clear actions and reactions. He’s also great Euro-advocate of our own expat composer, Tom Johnson, who pioneered many of these same concerns. Samuel also performs, and has helped produce a number of great exploratory concerts in Amsterdam over the years. His site linked above has plenty of listening, both to his own work and others equally interesting (Johnson included). If you’re ever headed to Amsterdam, he’s your hook-up, go-to guy.

Our regular listen to and look at living, breathing musicians that you may not know yet, but I know you should… And can, right here and now, since they’re nice enough to offer so much good listening online:

Strange and intimate places via Myspace

Rather than go in-depth on one or two musicians, we’re going to play epicurean. The back-stories and other works of each of these musicians may (or sometimes, may not) be found easily enough with a few clicks around; I’ll leave that up to you. Right now, it doesn’t matter; I only want to lead you to a specific track on their individual Myspace pages, tracks that keep echoing around in my mind long after the first encounter.

None of these are truly “classical”; yet none are quite pop, jazz, etc. etc… they all inhabit the cracks in between, with no apologies or justifications other than that they exist. They’re also each one “intimate”. By that I mean we feel a kind of “beside-ness” with the artist, drawn into their space rather than simply presented to. Simple or complex, across all cultures, that drawing-in is one of the greatest achievments of any art. So simply find the suggested title on the flash player on each page, click and listen, and see where each leads you.

10-D PJ  (UK)  “My tears are for you” — Exquisite mix, match & mash of completely different Asian-and-otherwise recordings, creating some entirely new place in the world.

Charles Reix  (Montréal) “Contemplation” — Brilliantly dark, serpentine duo for shakuhachi and ‘cello.

Thomas Leer  (Scotland)  “Blood of a Poet” — The voice of Charles Bukowski, placed just so into the perfect “frame”.

Sylvain Chauveau and Felicia Atkinson (France)  “How the Light” — The simplest of songs: a few chords and figures, no sung melody. Yet a completely absorbing emotional “space”.

Olivia De Prato  (Wien-Venezia-NYC)  “Ageha Tokyo” — Over and over, a nervously unstable play of string and electronics suddenly refracts into hopefully radiant textures.

[Update: Due to the flaky options Myspace offers for putting anything other than pop songs on the site, I passed over the tiny bit that tells me that “Ageha Tokyo” is actually a piece by the composer Samson Young (Hong Kong, but currently finishing his study at Princeton). A wonderful piece nonetheless, and Olivia’s is a fine performance. Samson’s own website, with much more information and listening is at http://www.samsonyoung.com/.]

Maxim Moston (Moscow-NYC)  “Myrtle Blue” — A solo guitar, with just a few chords, out-Harold-Budds even Harold Budd.