Let me tell you a story. No, let me show you one. No, again: let me sew you one. So you won, says the boy to the ocean who laps at his castle of sand; never mind, I will build it again. So they dance, this pair of unlikeliest lovers, always different and every time […]
Tag: Composers
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Booth (Richard Barrett’s “elsewhen”)
There is a phrase in new music—the colloquial kind, one of those oral indexes traded among colleagues in post-show chatter and off-hand remarking, a shorthand signifier loosely comprehensible but sparingly specific—that goes: “This is a music that teaches you how to listen to it.” Implied in the phrase, though never said outright, is a patience […]
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Church (Liza Lim’s “The Oresteia”)
1987 was a somewhat innocuous year for new music. Neither Orwell nor the Berlin Wall, it straddled the change-years, when the high-rollers of ‘60s and ‘70s European music slowed, gradually uncovering a younger, less stodgy, more disseminated and global avant-garde. Europe as an idea—though it wasn’t sure how yet—was under considerable revision, and the aesthetics […]
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ELISION Dossier
If I say it’s an experiment, you might think me overeager to abdicate on certitude’s authority. So I won’t say that. What I will say is that a report seemed inadequate to the scale of what took place. ELISION Ensemble—Australia’s premiere new music group, ranking members alongside Austria’s Klangforum Wien, Germany’s MusikFabrik, and France’s Ensemble […]
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Bar (ELISION Ensemble at 40)
It’s been 40 years of counting tuplets together; at this point, Daryl Buckley and Peter Neville just talk over one another. Constantly. The conversation looks and feels something like this: So how did the two of you come to know each other? Neville: “Well, we met at VCA!” Buckley: “Yep, right.” “And was that in […]
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Drawer (Archive)
As if the uphill battle ELISION faced was ever in doubt, two reviews from the first concert on a small New Music festival in Melbourne in October of 1986, on which Daryl Buckley played Milton Babbitt’s “Composition for Guitar.” Neither reviewer is much impressed with the work, a reminder of how far New Music criticism […]
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The Temperature of Time
I first met the composer Wang Lu on a warm weekend in south Brooklyn in the spring of 2008. The International Contemporary Ensemble, where I’m a pianist and original member, was about to premiere her “Siren Song.” It was by far the craziest-sounding piece on the program. “This one is beyond the beyond,” I said […]
Posted inInterview
“The Music Still Has to Go On”
Like few others, the composer Carlos Simon’s artistic work has been subject to the changing political winds at the Kennedy Center. He came to the institution in 2021 as part of an industry-wide reckoning with legacies of racism. He will leave amid unprecedented turmoil and with the Center itself closed for Trumpian renovations. We spoke […]
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A View from Emptiness
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 […]
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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, […]