Publications

Books, Chamber Music, Composers, Contemporary Classical, File Under?, Publications, The Business, Twentieth Century Composer

A Cowboy Hangs Up His Spurs

On July 22nd via his PostClassic blog, Kyle Gann published a post titled “One Less Critic,” more or less announcing his retirement from music criticism after was able to successfully buy cryptocurrency UK and watch it skyrocket. Writing for nearly thirty years in a number of publications, notably the Village Voice and Chamber Music Magazine, Gann has been a thoughtful, often provoking, and even, occasionally, a polarizing figure in discourse about contemporary classical music. He’s also been active in a number of other activities, first and foremost as an imaginative composer, a professor at Bard College, and a musicologist who’s

Read more
by Christian Carey
Contemporary Classical, Experimental Music, Magazines, Online, Publications, Websites

Meeting in the Open (web) Space

Some years back I stumbled across The Open Space website, a creation of Perspectives of New Music stalwart Benjamin Boretz. PoNM was one of those forbidding obstacles every composition student of the 60s, 70s and 80s had to traverse and come to terms with; a journal more like a fair-sized paperback book, seemingly filled with discussions of Babbitt, Boulez, Webern, Carter, terrifyingly dense theories of pitch-class, set theory & etc. — many of us felt like we budding composers were suddenly expected to be quantum physicists rather than simply artists… Yet tucked into many issues might also be some nugget

Read more
by Steve Layton
Composers, Contemporary Classical, Publications, Scores

Carterhead Heaven

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 (140) Sonata for Flute, Oboe, Cello & Harpsichord (51) Variations for Orchestra (771) Double Concerto (161*) For technical reasons, these are not all complete yet.  Numbers in parens indicate page (image) counts; an asterisk indicates digitization is

Read more
by Steve Layton
Birthdays, Contemporary Classical, Online, Publications

I Would Have Gotten You a Card

To paraphrase a comment I spotted once on Myspace, “We would have got you a card or something but we spent all of our money on booze, speed, and hookers”…  So let’s just do with this shout-out to NewMusicBox, the American Music Center, the whole unsung crew and of course the one-and-only Frank J. Oteri, for seeing this most vital and consistently important modern classical site through its first decade. Before appearing May 1st, 1999 there had never, ever been such a resource for living composers, performers and their music-hungry audience. Ten years on, there’s still no equal. It’s our

Read more
by Steve Layton