Contemporary Classical

Cello, Classical Music, Contemporary Classical

Chilly Scenes of Winter

The Boston Symphony premiered Elliot Carter’s Horn Concerto over the weekend and will debut a piano concerto (already completed) next year.  And, there’s a five-day festival planned for Tanglewood this summer.  At 98, Carter is proving that the key to a glorious career is to live a very long time, hold onto to your chops, and be friends with James Levine.

Which is not to imply that Carter is not very good; he’s just very good in a way that I find a bit too abstract and cold to love.

My favorite old dude these days is Ned Rorem, who is often overshadowed by more famous contemporaries and dismissed as a writer of charming art songs.  Naxos has been churning out a stream of wonderful Rorem recordings over the past couple of years that have convinced me, at least, that he is terribly underrated. Listen to the recordings of Symphonies 1-3; the violin and flute concertos, and the just released Piano Concerto No. 2 and Cello Concerto and tell me he isn’t a major talent.

UPDATE:  Forgot to mention that Miller Theater is doing the New York premiere of What Next?, Carter’s only opera, on December 7, 8, 9 and 11–which happens to be Carter’s 99th birthday.

by Jerry Bowles
CDs, Classical Music, Contemporary Classical

BMOP a Lula

The Boston Modern Orchestra Project (BMOP) has just become the latest classical music organization to launch its own CD label. BMOP Sound will debut in January 2008 and will be devoted exclusively to new music recordings, many of them pieces commissioned by BMOP.

BMOP Sound is scheduled to release five world premiere CDs at the start of 2008: John Harbison’s Ulysses; Michael Gandolfi’s Y2K Compliant; Gunther Schuller’s Journey Into Jazz featuring Gunther Schuller (narrator); Lee Hyla’s Lives of the Saints, featuring Mary Nessinger (mezzo-soprano); and Charles Fussell’s Wilde, featuring Sanford Sylvan (baritone). With 28 more recording projects in the works, the company plans to issue four to six CDs each year. Albany Music Distributors will handle the real world distribution and BMOP is planning an interactive website with digital download capabilities for later in 2008. BMOP has an existing catalog of 13 commercially released CDs (from Albany, Arsis, Cantaloupe, Chandos, Naxos, New World, and Oxingale labels).

I’m one of those people who believe that the DIY model is the salvation of new music recording and distribution, a boon to both the people who composer and perform music and those of us who listen, and the ultimate final nail in the coffee of traditional record labels that fail to adapt. Good riddance.

by Jerry Bowles
Contemporary Classical, Strange

Nono no-no

I’d read about the dastardly act a while back, but Ethelbert Nevin over at La Folia has some amusing speculation in his “Top 12 Reasons Why Somebody Broke into a Warehouse and Stole Hundreds of Luigi Nono CDs“. You’ll have to go there to read them all, but I do like “Featured orchestral musicians afraid col legno will adopt Radiohead’s business model”, “col legno’s sets of Rihm string quartets were too heavy”, and “Joyce Hatto discovered playing trautonium on Isola 3“.

by Steve Layton
Classical Music, Contemporary Classical, New York

The Sun’s Not Yellow, It’s Chicken

If you’ve been wondering who is responsible for dumbing down American musical culture, it’s people like Ronen Givony and me.  Givony, as many of you know, is the mini-Sol Hurok who is responsible for New York’s priceless Wordless Music series.  Like me, Givony is not a composer or musician or even someone who reads music.  But, also like me, he loves new music and wants to help nurture and promote the talented people who do.  The web has given us both platforms to indulge our desire to do so.  

According to Andrew Keen, that makes us the worst kind of well-meaning but dangerous and misinformed schmos.  We are”amateurs,” in the most perjorative sense.  Keen’s new book The Cult of the Amateur: How Today’s Internet is Killing our Culture blames the equalitarian nature of web publishing and self-promotion for everything from Britney to global warming.

I dunno.  Seems to me that influential “amateurs” have always been with us.  Weren’t a lot of the explorers and scientists of the late 19th and early 20th centuries people who simply pursued their discoveries, quite often using their own resources?  

I’m sure this august group can think of many examples of amateurs who have had some influence on the advancement of new music.  Share some of them with us, please.

p.s.  By the way, I am no longer an amateur web site builder and manager.  My first paid-for site called MyVenturepad opened for business yesterday.  Nice article today on the front page about the changing of the guard at Nashville’s Bluebird Cafe.

by Jerry Bowles
Click Picks, Composers, Contemporary Classical

Steve’s click picks #40

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)

Julie HartingThe 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 VriezenSamuel 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.

by Steve Layton
Classical Music, Contemporary Classical, Critics

You Can Leave Your Hat On

If you haven’t read Galen’s rather lengthy piece called Imprecations and Exhortations: A Rather Lengthy Defense of Richard Taruskin over in the Composers Forum, you should do so immediately.  I’ve been taking a short nap for the past couple of days and just go around to it and it’s very thoughtful and very good.  (I say that because on my first day of journalism school as Horace Greeley and I were checking in, our first prof said “Never say ‘very.’ If you must, write ‘damn’ instead.”)  Damned fine work, Galen.

by Jerry Bowles
Classical Music, Composers, Contemporary Classical

Did You Ever Go Clear?

Translating pop music into more ambitious musical forms is a risky business that sometimes produces surprising results.  Who would have guessed, for example, that Twyla Tharp’s recycling of Billy Joel’s songs to tell the central story of the Sixties generation would be such a compelling and moving theatrical experience–an effect greatly heightened by having those songs reproduced note by note on stage by the world’s best tribute band.  Once you’ve seen it, you’re forced to admit that Joel (who you might have previously taken lightly, as I did) writes really intelligent songs that display a wide and deep musical versatility.  It’s one of those ‘aha’ moments like seeing Fleetwood Mac and realizing that without the undersung Lindsay Buckingham’s fabulous guitar work and arrangements, they’re pretty much another lounge act.

On the other hand, who would have thought that a stage musical built around the music of Bob Dylan would reveal him to be a writer of archly pretentious lyrics of little musical grace, played with three majors and a minor?

But, I digress.  What we’re talking about here is Philip Glass’s Book of Longing – A Song Cycle Based on the poetry and Images of Leonard Cohen, which was performed this summer at the Lincoln Center Festival and has just now been released in a 2-CD package by Orange Mountain Music, Glass’s own music label.  I’m a person who knows the difference between W.H. Auden and literate pop songwriters like Cohen and Joni Mitchell and Paul Simon, but the combination of Cohen’s wry, spare words and Glass’s wry, spare settings creates something that approaches a higher art form.  Not quite Auden/Britten but something not embarassed to be seen in that neighborhood.  I’ve played it a dozen times and keep discovering witty surprises and  hidden delights.  All the piece needs is a video by Yasujirō Ozu (or, his still-living contemporary disciple Jim Jarmusch) to be the complete multimedia package. 

I also realized, for the first time, that A Thousand Kisses Deep is probably the best song ever written inspired by oral sex.

by Jerry Bowles
Contemporary Classical, NPR

Sure It’s a Commie Front, But NPR Rules

The big news today is that NPR and 12 NPR Member stations are launching NPR Music, a free, comprehensive multimedia music discovery Web site, that features on-air and online content aggregated from NPR and the participating stations as well as original-to-NPR Music materials such as interviews, reviews, blogs and live performances.   The press release goes on to note that specific sections of the site are dedicated to rock/pop/folk, classical, jazz/blues, world and urban music.   In each genre, program and subject area, users can explore NPR’s and the stations’ renowned music journalism; intimate interviews and studio sessions with artists and bands; NPR’s and stations’ popular national and regional web concerts; reviews and news; original blogs from critics, experts and artists; and podcasts.  The site culls from NPR’s and the stations’ extensive music archives to present thousands of features; at launch, the site’s Artist Index alone, an A to Z artist directory, offers content about more than 2000 performers.  More than 200 new features will be added from NPR and the stations monthly, joining thousands of hours of archived concert, story, review and interview pieces.

Sounds pretty neat to me.

by Jerry Bowles