I. It opens mid-motion, as if caught unraveling. A noise, brisk and grained, emerges from the second violin, bow hairs pressed against string. Col legno: The cello draws the wooden back of the bow upward and then down—a rustle makes itself heard and is gone. Now the second violin traces light, oblique arcs, upward, then […]
Tag: Composers
Posted inProfile
The Sensations of Disconnection
It was a rainy afternoon in an autumnal London as conductor-composer Jack Sheen tuned the quietude of Gerard Grisey’s “Quatre Chants pour franchir le seuil.” The performers, the London Sinfonietta and soprano Nina Guo, were receptive as he worked with them to uncover hidden acoustic relationships, finding sounds that were at once full and soft, […]
Posted inEssay
“Something that has to do with … leaving … ”
Between the winter of 1950–51, when he began mapping out a series of “Projections” in squares on graph paper, and the attenuating final breath of “Piano, Violin, Viola, Cello” in 1987, there were fewer than 37 years. Between then and the centenary that falls on January 12 this year, there have been 39. We have […]
Posted inEssay
Music From the Inside of the Sun
Last winter, Georg Friedrich Haas mentioned to me that the composer Arash Yazdani, a former student of his and a friend of mine, had given him a word he’d been looking for his entire career. That term is “plasmatic music.” I’ll let the two artists define the term in the correspondence below, which covers that […]
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Eccentric Physics
Set and Setting It was Wednesday, early October. I had borrowed a friend’s kitchen to make 100 servings of strudel for my six-year-old son’s school event, and I was listening to John Cage’s “Music of Changes,” which takes form through chance operations and the wisdom of the I Ching. Earlier in the morning, I’d made […]
Posted inEssay
The Last Romantic
“Guero” for piano Soft, almost imperceptible sounds for minutes. In concert, the work has a paradoxical effect: What we see is the traditional virtuoso performance situation. What we hear is a microcosm of perforated percussion sounds in quadruple pianissimo. And then, at the very end: Two different strings in the high register are softly plucked. […]
Posted inInterview
The Generator
I first met the composer Huang Ruo in 2017 at a crosstown bus stop in New York after a performance of Pierre Boulez’s “Repons” at the Park Avenue Armory. We talked about the effect of the chamber group situated in the middle of the audience, surrounded by the soloists and amplification, with waves of sound […]
Posted inOpinion
Is Beatrice Venezi’s Appointment Really Based on Merit?
Everywhere you look, politics are seeping into opera. In New York, Metropolitan Opera General Manager Peter Gelb, accompanied onstage by Democratic senator Chuck Schumer, gave a rousing opening-night speech defending freedom of artistic expression. The Met’s audience, not usually known for its progressiveness, booed Schumer for failing to endorse mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani. Three weeks […]
Posted inInterview
The Question Mark in the System
I’ve known Georg Friedrich Haas for many years, first as a teacher and later as a friend and mentor, and his music has been a constant source of inspiration. Ahead of the North American premiere of his monumental “11,000 Strings” for 50 microtonally attuned pianos and chamber orchestra performed by Klangforum Wien at the Park […]
Posted inBarTálk
The Clear White Light
In a staging of John Tavener’s “The Protecting Veil” at Clapton’s Round Chapel at Spitalfields Music Festival on Sunday, director Anna Morrissey led musicians and dancers from Trinity Laban Conservatoire of Music and Dance in an expressive set of stage pictures, loosely following the scheme of Tavener’s work. “The Protecting Veil” collects a set of […]