On March 10, 1969, Philip Glass was performing his piano piece “Two Pages” at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam when an audience member rushed onto the stage. “The next thing I knew,” Glass recounts in his memoir, “he was at the keyboard banging on the keys. Without thinking, acting on pure instinct, I belted him […]
Tag: Composers
Posted inInterview
Blood and Milk
In 2019, Janvier Murenzi wrote “Mata y’ amaraso,” a composition to commemorate the 1994 genocide against Tutsis in Rwanda. Murenzi lives in Huye, in the south of the country. The 62-year-old is a lecturer at the University of Rwanda, where he teaches courses in social thought, philosophy, and political thought. He is also a music […]
Posted inReview
Seeking the Truth About Julia Perry
I am always bitter about going to the established-yet-edgy New York venue (Le) Poisson Rouge—their cheapest beer is $10—but their programs make it impossible to stay away. The kickoff event for the Julia Perry Centenary Festival and Celebration on March 13 was no exception. Even more irresistibly, it was one of the first-ever concerts dedicated […]
Posted inInterview
The Accidental Avant-Garde
“Make it New,” Ezra Pound’s modernist call-to-arms, turns 90 this year. Producer and composer Danny L Harle still believes in the crux of the project. Harle’s story is made up of the kind of groupings and vanguards beloved by modernist-inclined histories. He was a key part of PC Music, an influential thing (label/art collective/aesthetic sensibility/lightning […]
Posted inHistory
How Parsis Came to Love Western Classical Music
At any Western classical music performance that I attend in Mumbai, the audience is always a sea of elderly Parsis. (Parsis are a tiny community of Zoroastrians who migrated from Iran to India in the eighth century.) There were the regulars: the elderly gentleman with a scimitar nose, bobbing his head in time to the […]
Posted inInterview
A Struggle for Memory
The Catalan composer Hèctor Parra is the author of a large body of work that builds sonic bridges between arts and society, making connections with the work of writers and artists such as Marie NDiaye, Jaume Plensa and Händl Klaus, or scientists such as the physicist Lisa Randall. His multidisciplinary ear looks for collaborations that […]
Posted inRankings & Roundups
Augusta Holmès’s Most Virile Works, Ranked
Have you ever wondered why they call it the long 19th century? From Beethoven’s hammering martellatos, to Wagner’s massive, veiny works that seem to last forever, to Liszt’s immense hand size (…), the Romantic period was in many ways a musical virility contest with many—many—climaxes. But there was one composer who critics considered the most […]
Posted inPlaylist
A Psappha Playlist
“Psappha is now closed.” On November 6, Psappha, a contemporary music ensemble based in Manchester, posted a short notice that signaled the end of over 30 years of commissioning, performing, and championing music from the 20th and 21st centuries. On the perennially shaky UK new music scene, organizations are routinely thinned, trimmed and pruned, but […]
Posted inProfile
A Lovers’ Discourse
Evan Johnson is a composer; he thinks about sound. But Evan Johnson is also the rare composer who thinks just as much about sight. It’s true that, to the ear, his music is often extremely affecting in its tightrope delicacy, but that aural richness is only a happy consequence of an opulent visual field: his […]
Posted inUncategorized
Show Some Emotion
Currently, Laurence Osborn is moving house, from Notting Hill (West London) to Notting Hill (West London). We meet for coffee on Gloucester Road (West London) in an hour squeezed between cardboard boxes. As someone whose magpie-like tendencies have steadily transitioned from shiny sounds to juicy words, I remember being struck by the title of Osborn’s […]