“Anamorphosi” (1980) When the term anamorphosis appeared in the 17th century, it was used to describe a visual effect that had existed for some time but had not yet been given a technical name: by means of an optical transposition a form, not visible at first blush, becomes a readable image when perceived from a […]
Tag: Composers
Posted inInterview
“Everything He Touched Became Rihm”
The composer Wolfgang Rihm died on the night of July 27 at the age of 72. His friend, the Swiss composer Dieter Ammann, was in close contact with him until close to the very end. The two artists have known each other for nearly 30 years. Rihm once described Ammann’s music as “never idle, always […]
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Places with a Heartbeat
A piece of clay dropping in a ceramic pot is the centerpiece of Leilehua Lanzilotti’s sound installation (single-channel video directed by Lanzilotti, cinematography by Gahlord Dewald) in the “Toshiko Takaezu: Worlds Within” exhibit at The Noguchi Museum in Queens, New York. Lanzilotti, a 2022 Pulitzer Prize finalist in music, released their latest album, “the sky […]
Posted inReview
A Refusal of Habit
Putting 50 pianos in a room creates a sense of occasion. On Saturday, I heard Georg Friedrich Haas’s “11.000 Saiten” (“11,000 Strings”), for 50 uprights tuned in ascending intervals of two cents and the contemporary music ensemble Klangforum Wien, at the Holland Festival in Amsterdam. Although the piece premiered in August 2023 in Bolzano, Italy, […]
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Fantasies, Urgencies
At Wigmore Hall in November, a solo piano recital by Vijay Iyer was like a set of rough clouds in a humid summer, breaking in brief, awesome moments. Hearing “Love in Exile” at the Barbican a few months earlier, the trio (Iyer, Arooj Aftab and Shahzad Ismaily) made a thick haze like a hot-warm drunkenness. […]
Posted inProfile
epistle; possessive
I. At 12:27 on September 30, you wrote me three lines that read “Just caught TV glimpses of dreadful flooding in New York.Hope you are OK.M xx” I replied only much later, half-past, (you, surely asleep) My darling M,(Will I ever stop using that ‘my’?)— And though you didn’t know it—how could I have expected you […]
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Intuitive Refrains
“I want to build a new tradition, an aural tradition, transmitted via the ears,” Karlheinz Stockhausen declared in 1971. Such a tradition, he insisted, would avoid treating “the materials of music as separate from the process of composition” and would be “based on the direct experience of working with sounds rather than writing on paper.” […]
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Threatening the Composer
Once again, I spot the lively gait of Matthew Shlomowitz walking towards me on a busy London road. Over the past year, I’ve come to know him better thanks to several shared projects. Behind the composer, co-director of the Plus-Minus Ensemble, and co-host of the Soundmaking podcast lies a supportive and passionate personality, one that […]
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Create an Aura
In the composer Utku Asuroglu’s pieces, colors joust like a child battling with their plastic toys: passages of extreme, artificial, neon intensity sit alongside moments of sensitive beauty, moving from Starburst-candy orange to oceanic blues and grays. Lo-fi electronic glissandi and kazoos unravel into bare tendrils of melody. Many of his works traverse great textural […]
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“All They Have is Their Culture”
The total population of Estonia is just 1.3 million, but the diversity of its cultural scene belies the country’s small size. Estonian classical music alone boasts the renowned Estonian National Symphony Orchestra, several opera ensembles, an active choral scene, and groups specialized in early and contemporary music. Composers have often taken on roles as public […]