Music has a way of slipping through the fingers of politicians. In his memoir Along the Roaring River: My Wild Ride from Mao to the Met, the bass Haojiang Tian writes of the way certain songs of the Cultural Revolution, once force-fed to the Chinese population, became sentimental ear-worms, even for the persecuted. The role […]
Tag: Composers
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The Inner Mountain
I worked in a music library for some years. One of our regular visitors was an elderly Irish nun whose eyes twinkled with purpose. She was working on her book, she told me, about the Russian composer Galina Ustvolskaya. Ustvolskaya’s music was little known in the West when Sister Andre Dullaghan had first heard it, […]
Posted inOpinion
Adams 2.0
Thanks to John Adams, I am no longer a snob. When I was studying composition in graduate school, I was possessed by a young man’s certainty about his own knowledge and taste. Still, I was exposed to enough contradictory opinions and ideas that I began to— fortunately—entertain doubts. What if I didn’t know everything? One […]
Posted inInterview
The Riddle of Silence
Michael Pisaro is an American composer, guitarist, and early member of the Wandelweiser Group. He teaches music composition at CalArts, where he is the founder and director of the Experimental Music Workshop. His 75-minute immersive work “A wave and waves” (2007) for 100 performers will be featured at the Lincoln Center Mostly Mozart Festival on […]
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A Conception of Time
Frank Denyer’s works draw from many sources. In the 1970s, he did ethnomusicological fieldwork with the Pokot tribe in Kenya. Studying at Wesleyan, he encountered musical giants Morton Feldman and John Cage, with Harry Partch providing undoubted additional influence. Hand-made instruments are a standard feature in his compositions. Combined with a Feldman-like approach to time, […]
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Faked Silence
Listening to Salvatore Sciarrino’s “Sei Capricci” for solo violin might best be compared to spending 20 minutes in a butterfly garden. The music rustles, flickers, alights for the briefest moment somewhere, and then flies on. A similar texture lends his classic opera “Luci mie traditrici” (1998) a dreamlike quality. When, in one brief intermezzo of […]
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Challenging Dispositions
Almost directly beneath the composer Patricia Alessandrini’s feet, in a basement performance space, lurks a sheet of steel. We are sitting in the garden of a café next to Goldsmiths College, London, where she lectures in sonic arts, and after our conversation she invites me to have a look. Large enough to bend slightly under […]
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Uncanny Songs
Before she moved to London as a third-year undergraduate student less than a decade ago, Na’ama Zisser had never even been to the opera. This week sees the production of her very own, “Mamzer Bastard,” by London’s Royal Opera House at the Hackney Empire. Taking place within an orthodox Hasidic community and featuring Jewish cantorial […]
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A Memory of Violence
The Berlin-based, American composer Mark Barden writes music that is both technically refined and irresistibly gripping. He has an ear for rhythmic propulsion and microtonal chords that make sense and sound beautiful without falling into Spectral stereotypes. I met him one afternoon at his apartment in Sonnenallee, a wide Berlin avenue full of falafel shops […]
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Studio Metaphors
“I don’t even know what it means,” Morton Subotnick admitted, when I asked if his music could be called psychedelic. We were sitting in his hotel lobby on a Friday afternoon, a few days before his concert at Henie Onstad Kunstsenter. The influential experimental/electronic music composer’s appearance fit right in the spirit of their program. […]