Our friend Marvin Rosen will be airing the entire 6 hour seven minute version of Morton Feldman’s String Quartet No. 2, by the Flux Quartet, beginning at 11 am, EST on Friday, December 29, as part of a special 9 hour Classical Discoveries program devoted to American contemporary music. Two members of Flux–Tom Chiu and Dave Eggar–will join Marvin to discuss the work after the performance. I believe it is safe to say that Marvin is the only broadcaster in America who both can and would undertake such a mission. Classical Discoveries is broadcast via WPRB 103.3 FM in Princeton, NJ. and over
Read moreAnthony Tommasini here. Manuela Hoelterhoff here. An Unamplified Voice here. Maury D’annato here. Jonathan at Wellsung. AP here.
Read moreThe Russian composer Galina Ustvoskaya died yesterday. Alex Ross has the details and the (appropriately) terse, German notice from her publisher, Sikorski. I don’t have time now to write much about Ustvolskaya’s music, but my encounter with it was one of the determining events of my own musical evolution, and I still can’t quite believe that I performed all six of her piano sonatas spaced out during an all-night new music marathon concert as an undergraduate. (By the time I got to the last of them, round about 4 AM, I was pretty spaced out myself.) If you don’t have
Read moreWell, you’re too late for the $550 Center Parterre Premium seats or the $350 Orchestra Premium seats for tonight’s premiere of Tan Dun’s The First Emperor at the Met but if you hurry it looks like you can still grab one of the bargain $250 orchestra seats. (I have a couple of mere $80 seats in the alpine section later.) In the meantime, us poor people can read about the Mr. Tan’s opera foo young in the Met blog or perhaps lurk at the stage door for a glimpse of Placido Domingo or Elizabeth Futral or maybe even the great film director Zhang Yimou (To Live,
Read more‘Twas the night before Christmas, when all through the city The critics were trying their best to be witty; They printed their lists of the past year’s best fare, In hopes that their trendy young readers would care; But the readers were nestled all snug in their beds, While vacuous pop idols danced in their heads; And the Maestro in PJs, and I in my drawers, Had just settled in to examine some scores, When out on the lawn, such cacaphonous sound, I sprang from my desk thinking Zorn was in town.
Read moreA while back, Stephen Colbert made fun of John Zorn on the Colbert Report, and I’m pleased to report that tonight he referred, if not by name, to La Monte Young. At the beginning of a segment on Art, he talked about feeding hay to a piano, which as you know clearly refers to Young’s 1960 piece “Piano Piece for David Tudor #1.” The piece is one of several text instruction pieces from 1960 and its instructions read: “Bring a bale of hay and a bucket of water onto the stage for the piano to eat and drink. The performer may
Read moreHere’s an obituary written by Carson Cooman. American composer Daniel Pinkham passed away on the morning of December 18, 2006 in Natick, Massachusetts, USA after a brief illness. Pinkham, one of America’s most active and well-known composers of music for the church, was born in Lynn, Massachusetts, USA on June 5, 1923. He studied at Harvard University and Tanglewood with Walter Piston, Aaron Copland, Samuel Barber, Arthur Honneger, and Nadia Boulanger. As an organist and harpsichord he studied with Wanda Landowska and E. Power Biggs. For over forty years, Pinkham was music director at Boston’s historic King’s Chapel, where he
Read moreTom Jackson over at Modernclassical writes: Donald Rosenberg, the classical music critic and correspondent for the Cleveland Plain Dealer, gets the cover of the arts section Sunday with a primer on classical music, an article about the “beloved staples” which form the foundation of classical music. The headline graphic lists the usual suspects — Tchaikovsky, Beethoven, Mozart, Bach. The big shock is when you turn the page and see a huge graphic accompanying the article listing Rosenberg’s picks for a representative sampling of the repertoire. Rosenberg lists just three works from the Baroque period and only four from the Classical
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