“I’m always drawn to defend anything that people shit on aesthetically.” It’s hard to sum up an artist’s work in a single sentence, but for Alex Temple, that’s not a bad place to start. She has a particular interest in “reclaiming socially disapproved-of (‘cheesy’) sounds,” often taking and warping them into something more than a […]
Tag: Composers
Posted inInterview
Sonic Monuments
The music of composer, oboist, and installation artist Sky Macklay explores bold contrasts, theatrical elements, humor, and the physics of sound production and perception. Her works have been performed by ensembles such as ICE, Yarn/Wire, Wet Ink Ensemble, and Spektral Quartet. Two of her pieces, including the string quartet “Many Many Cadences” discussed in this […]
Posted inProfile
Unified Music
The American composer George Crumb lives in an unassuming two-story house, tucked away on an acre plot of land in Media, Pennsylvania, a sleepy suburb of Philadelphia. Recently, he met me at the local train station in his old maroon Toyota, and after a short drive along winding back roads, we arrived at his longtime […]
Posted inInterview
The Texture of Being Alive
A few weeks ago I interviewed Jennifer Walshe via Skype; I was in Berlin, she in her office in London. That week Walshe’s work was to be recognized with an Innovation award from the British Association of Songwriters, Composers and Authors (BASCA), and she was also looking ahead to coming to Berlin in January for […]
Posted inPlaylist
A Pamela Z Playlist
The composer, performer, and media artist Pamela Z works with a wide variety of techniques, including “voice, live electronic processing, sampled sound, and video,” and has produced art both for the concert hall and the museum. From San Francisco, she sent us this playlist. Each track here contains a multiplicity of influences; taken together, the […]
Posted inReport
Temperature and Energy
The Fondamenta Sant’Eufemia, on the Venetian island of Giudecca, is a street that parallels the water. Its presence, rising out of the waves, feels almost arbitrary. Between storefronts numbered 610A and a chipping 655 is a lane where houses in red and gray give way to the same color scheme in smaller scales: the brick […]
Posted inInterview
Amour
On December 1, the Metropolitan Opera in New York City will perform its first opera by a female composer since 1903. Kaija Saariaho’s 2000 opera “L’Amour de Loin” is a haunting tale of love transcending the bounds of distance and death, adapted from a medieval troubadour’s fictionalized life story. There are only three characters: Jaufre […]
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Protect
In the Yong Siew Toh Conservatory of Music in Singapore, a building that could easily be mistaken for the state-of-the-art hospital nearby, a workshop performance of “Bangsokol: Requiem for Cambodia,” by the composer Him Sophy was taking place. The atmosphere there was festive. Friends greeted one another; soloists on traditional Cambodian instruments, a string orchestra […]
Posted inInterview
Xylem
New York-based composer Katherine Balch has an extraordinary number of things going on in her head at any given time. She has recently completed a piece for a multimedia project by Michiko Theurer, inspired by Virginia Woolf’s The Waves, to be performed March 13, 2017, in Boulder, Colorado. Currently, Katie is working on two separate […]
Posted inInterview
Nonfictional Music
Jennie Gottschalk is a composer and scholar currently residing in Boston. Gottschalk holds degrees from The Boston Conservatory and Northwestern University. Her teachers have included Larry Bell, Yakov Gubanov, Jay Alan Yim, Augusta Read Thomas, and Aaron Cassidy. Gottschalk’s new book “Experimental Music Since 1970” was recently published by Bloomsbury. Over the course of a […]