For sixteen years now the BBC, as one of its many activities connected with the Proms, has run a program which it calls Inspire, comprising of a competition and several workshops for composers between the ages of 12 and 18. On this last Sunday, composer Fraser Trainer, who chaired the committee of judges for the competition, led a workshop for about two dozen young composers whose activities were related to the works on that night’s Prom, which was presented by the National Youth Orchestra of Great Britain. Trainer was joined by six artist instrumentalists, violinist Anna Smith, saxophone player Simon
Read moreA reminder of the muscular, haunting style of Peter Schulthorpe, who passed away a couple of days ago.
Read moreI’m happy to be returning to posting here at Sequenza21. It has been a while. Recently, a quote from David Byrne was brought to my attention by Joe Benzola in a Facebook post. (The original Byrne post may be found here.) Although the quote is from 2008, it’s new to me; besides, Byrne was responding to “modern music” written in 1957 as if it was new, so I feel okay with my discussion here. Essentially, Byrne’s comments amount to “why don’t these composers act normal?” I’ve heard comments like this from my undergraduates, usually non-music majors in my electronic music class.
Read moreVijay Iyer and the Brentano Quartet in a live performance of sections from Mutations at Greene Space Over the past two decades, Vijay Iyer has recorded some 18 albums of bold, genre-defying, and original music that navigates the fine line between composition and improvisation, between jazz and New Music. Although his restless musical imagination roams easily through both Carter and Monk territory, unearthing insights that evolve and morph over time, the gestures have largely been identifiable as jazz. His new and first ECM recording—Mutations—unveils more of the composer side of the 42-year-old New Yorker’s prolific bag. Meanwhile, as players explore
Read moreOn Monday, July 21st at 8 PM, the last concert of Tanglewood’s 2014 Festival of Contemporary Music is a well-stocked program of orchestral works. The centerpiece is Roger Sessions’s Concerto for Orchestra, a work commissioned by the BSO thirty years ago. Steven Mackey’s violin concerto Beautiful Passing will feature as soloist Sarah Silver, one of Tanglewood’s New Fromm Players. Music by John Adams has not in recent memory frequently been featured on FCM programs, but this year his Slonimsky’s Earbox makes an appearance. The sole work by a younger composer, The Sound of Stillness by Charlotte Bray, piqued my interest
Read more
Brooklyn, Chamber Music, Composers, Concert review, Contemporary Classical, Los Angeles, Ojai, Opera, Premieres
The 2014 Ojai Music Festival opened on Thursday June 12 to begin 4 days packed with informative talks, movie screenings, parties and concerts. The Festival’s Music Director this year is Jeremy Denk and the resident musical groups included The Knights orchestral collective and the Brooklyn Rider string quartet. Friday night’s concert was built around an examination of the Classical period and featured a Haydn string quartet as well as the world premiere of a new opera – “The Classical Style” – by Jeremy Denk and Steven Stucky that was commissioned by the festival for the occasion. The concert began with
Read moreThe annual Dogstar Orchestra concert series of experimental music has been going in various locations in and around Los Angeles since May 30. The venue on June 10 was the Wulf, a converted industrial loft space on Santa Fe street downtown, and a good-sized crowd settled in for an evening of spoken and electronic works. The concert was curated by Sara Roberts and Clay Chaplin. The concert opened with Black & White Oratorio by Robert Lax. A chorus of 15 voices and three soloists performed this piece which consists of groups of words for color that are spoken in various
Read moreLike everybody else, I was stunned to hear that Lee Hyla had died. I first met Lee in the spring of 1973; I was a senior at New England Conservatory and he was a freshman, I think. That year he was studying with my teacher, Malcolm Peyton, but the previous year he had been a special student and studied with John Heiss. During that earlier year he was taking piano lessons with Irma Wolpe, who I also studied with. My recollections of her are that she was the second most unpleasant person I ever met in my life, but Lee
Read moreOn Sunday, May 25, 2014 the Los Angeles Composers Collective presented New Strings a concert that featured new works by nine different composers and performed by the Fiato Quartet. The venue was Human Resources, a converted movie theater in historic Chinatown and although the performance space is a work in progress, the audience was seated comfortably. The acoustics in this new space were adequate – a dryer environment might have been better to bring out the finer details – but this did not affect the performance. The concert began with String Quartet 1 by Jon Brenner and this commenced with
Read moreIrving Fine was a Boston boy through and through. Born on December 3, 1914, in East Boston to Latvian Jewish immigrants, he grew up in Winthrop and went to Harvard. The Boston in which Fine grew up was, through the influence of the Boston Symphony and its conductors Pierre Monteux and Serge Koussevitzy and the Harvard Music Department and its composition professors Edward Burlingame Hill and Walter Piston, among other factors, a world center of new music (or at least francophile new music) activity, and the work of Harvard’s choral conductor Archibald T. Davison at Harvard also made it the
Read more