I had never given a moment’s thought to music written for television until 1997. I was watching The Late Show with the great Peter Takács when he suddenly – in reference to Paul Shafer – said: “This guy’s a genius.” While there’s no reason the art of composing for television cannot be done ingeniously, I cannot at the moment think of a television composer who enjoys the status of “genius.” This is in stark contrast to film composers, a small gaggle of whom regularly get the G-word applied to them (Bernard Hermann, Toru Takemitsu, Ennio Morricone . . . ). But

Last time I wrote about the Argento Ensemble, they were taking their audience on a tour of contemporary French composers. On January 31st at Merkin, they extended their range a century and moved a bit northwest. This new program, entitled “Expressionism in Motion,” traced the legacy of Austro-Germanic Expressionism from Wagner and Schoenberg through Stockhausen to Wolfgang Rihm and Georg Friedrich Haas. Interestingly, Argento chose not to present the works in order of age. Rather, they arranged the pieces in order of increasing instrumental forces. The concert, then, began in the chronological middle with Stockhausen’s “Der Kleine Harlekin” from 1975.

An acquaintance of mine – a fellow student-composer – years ago once had the fortune to have an extended conversation with György Ligeti. Upon learning my friend was an aspiring composer, Ligeti said: “So you want to be a composer? You’d better go to lots of parties!” This anecdote comes to mind now when reflecting on the final concert of Juilliard’s Focus Festival. The Festival, which wrapped up last week, focused this year on Hungarian music after Bartók. Among the works on the final concert were György Kurtág’s Stele and György Ligeti’s Violin Concerto. My friends: the Violin Concerto is

Ecce Cor Meum Paul McCartney Kate Royal, soprano London Voices; Boys of Magdalen College Choir, Oxford; Boys of King’s College Choir, Cambridge Colm Carey, organ Mark Law, piccolo trumpet Academy of St. Martin in the Fields Gavin Greenaway EMI Classics 094637042427 That Paul McCartney was a member of the Beatles should be ignored for the next few minutes as you read the following. Our expectations are immediately met within the first thirty seconds of music: Bland choral writing, sophomoric orchestrations (not by McCartney, I assume), and predictable melodies that are served with cliché “lyrics” in English (interspersed with Latin). To

Courtesy of The Lyric Chamber Music Society of New York, I was able to hear last Wednesday three compositions by the Chinese-American composer Zhou Long (b. 1953). Long’s music had been recommended to me by composer Jeff Nichols, and the Lyric found room for it on an attractive program that opened with Debussy’s Cello Sonata and closed with Mendelssohn’s D minor piano trio. The players were the fearsomely solid Cho-Liang Lin (violin), Hai-Ye Ni (cello), and Helen Huang (piano).Two of Long’s compositions were “early” works from the 1980s: Taiping Drum (for violin and piano) and Wu Kui (for solo piano);

Gian Carlo Menotti died today at a hospital in Monaco. He was 95.  In the days before television became a total waste of time, NBC commissioned him to write the first opera specifically for the new medium.  For many years, Amahl and the Night Visitors was played every year at Christmas and it introduced millions of people, including me, to the idea of opera.  I haven’t heard it for years and thus have no adult opinion of whether it is good or not but it was a very good thing for NBC and Menotti to have done. 

The County Museum of Art didn’t cancel all serious music:  just the Monday Evening Concerts.  Under new management, the music program now offers occasional concerts on any night but Monday.  They try to relate the bookings and programming to the art.  Thanks to one other difference — being willing to do some PR — a good crowd came to LACMA to see eighth blackbird.  The ostensible tie-in to the art was with the smashing special exhibition on Magritte and art he influenced.  (Unfortunately the museum is closed on Wednesdays so that for the attendees the art was limited to a distracting