In Mexico City, 7-Eleven carries bottled water in the shape of a dumbbell. One day on vacation, I bought one, drank the contents, took a picture, and sent it to Michael Maierhof, one of the most original composers working today and a master manipulator of the sonic properties of plastics. Would he like me to […]
Tag: Composers
Posted inOpinion
Breaking Binaries
Classical music has a gender problem. The numbers are consistent and dismal: as various orchestras have announced their 2017–18 seasons, numerous outlets have tallied how many male and female composers are represented, and so far none seem to be doing better than the Los Angeles Philharmonic, where male composers still take up 88 percent of […]
Posted inProfile
Matchups
The melody from the hymn Dies Irae breaks the creamy quiet of a restaurant in upmarket Taipei, and the patrons raise their eyes from their waffles and cake and Vienna coffee. The disrupter of the mid-Thursday morning hush is Chung Yiu-kwong, Taiwan’s most noted classical composer, giving an enthusiastic rendition of the Day of Judgement’s […]
Posted inInterview
Lyric Engine
The American composer Ashley Fure writes music of a flickering and gorgeous intensity. Recently, she was in Marseille doing research for an upcoming work. We chatted via Skype about happy sonic accidents, alternative careers, and the state of diversity activism in new music. VAN: What are you up to in Marseille right now? Ashley Fure: […]
Posted inPlaylist
A #HearAllComposers Playlist
On March 21, musicians and music lovers who desired more diverse orchestral programming took to Twitter with the hashtag #HearAllComposers, to encourage symphony orchestras to program music by non-male and non-white composers. The hashtag came largely from the efforts of Emma O’Halloran, Annika Socolofsky, Amanda Feery, and Finola Merivale, all young composers frustrated with the […]
Posted inPlaylist
An Arthur Kampela Playlist
At this year’s MaerzMusik festival in Berlin, Arthur Kampela will present his research on Walter Smetak, an obscure Brazilian composer and inventor of instruments. Smetak is one artist featured in this playlist of radical, searching music by Kampela, himself a Brazilian composer and guitarist currently living in New York. These are intense sounds—our recommendation is […]
Posted inInterview
I’m Not Hiding Anything
Over the last four years, I’ve heard about half a dozen concerts of music by the composer Alvin Lucier in New York City. I have often begun listening to a piece with skepticism and left astonished. On March 25, Alvin Lucier will perform two of his works, “I Am Sitting in a Room” and “Vespers,” […]
Posted inEssay
Honey in the Throat
“Life here is a John Cage score, dissonance made eloquent.” Bill Hayes, Insomniac City “This text is a mosaic of remarks,” begins the Florent Ghys composition “An Open Cage.” When I first hear it, I mistake John Cage’s voice for essayist David Rakoff’s. They share a raspy, disaffected tone, a soft sibilance that exudes ironic […]
Posted inInterview
The Smallest Island of Strangeness
In the first week of February, I talked to composer Chaya Czernowin, my professor in composition at Harvard University, about her upcoming opera “Infinite Now,” which is due to be premiered in Ghent in April 2017, followed by performances in Antwerp, Mannheim, and Paris. Drawing texts from Can Xue’s story “Homecoming” and Luk Perceval’s play […]
Posted inInterview
A Kind Of Truth
In Jorge Luis Borges’s short story “The Aleph,” the narrator walks with a pompous poet down the Calle Bernardo de Irigoyen, in Buenos Aires. Later, he follows the man, whose wife he has fallen in love with, down to his basement, and experiences a single point in which all the mysteries of the “inconceivable universe” […]