Missy Mazzoli is sitting in one of Ingmar Bergman’s bedrooms when she joins our Zoom meeting earlier this summer. At the time, the 40-year-old composer was finishing a monthlong artist’s residency at the Bergman Estate at Fårö—an island in the Baltic Sea off the coast of Sweden where the director lived and filmed parts of […]
Tag: Composers
Posted inPlaylist
A Palestinian Composers Playlist
“You come out of all this with a clear, sharp feeling that you are a stranger in all of this. Your real homeland is in exile,” composer Wisam Gibran says in Nili Belkind’s new book, Music in Conflict: Palestine, Israel and the Politics of Aesthetic Production. “So you start to search for it—to create it—in […]
Posted inInterview
Meaning in the Parentheticals
Since winning the Pulitzer Prize for “Partita for 8 Voices” in 2013, Caroline Shaw has gone on to collaborate with musicians as wide-ranging as the Attacca Quartet and Kanye West. Her recent projects include “We Need to Talk” with Anne Carson and Opera Philadelphia and “Narrow Sea” with Dawn Upshaw, Gil Kalish, and Sō Percussion. […]
Posted inInterview
An Object Beyond Music
In 2020, composer Sara Glojnarić won Berlin’s “Neue Szenen” competition, awarded the prize by a jury chaired by Chaya Czernowin. In 2018, her work “#popfem,” which artfully dismantles anti-feminist and racist propaganda, received Darmstadt’s Kranichstein Music Prize. “I’d never thought that my identity as a queer woman could have such a strong influence on my work […]
Posted inEssay
I Tried 5 Composers’ (Ridiculous) Daily Routines
My email inbox likes to throw a curveball at me every now and then. Much as I hadn’t expected spring in the UK to announce its arrival with freezing temperatures and pistol whips of arctic hail, the suggestion from VAN’s dear editors that I undertake some of the stranger habits of composers was one I […]
Posted inReport
Built and Abandoned
Georg Friedrich Haas’s new orchestral work opens at the void. A solo contraforte—a sort of improved contrabassoon with a more focused, melodic tone—holds a low F#. A solo violin looks down on it from far above, playing close, dissonant intervals in the high reaches of the harmonic spectrum. Slowly, the violin descends. The orchestra begins […]
Posted inInterview
The Right Questions
A recurring dream that I’ve had for the last several years: My grandmother, a Syrian refugee who spent the last 15 years of her life in the grips of progressive dementia, shows me an attic accessible through a crawlspace in her bedroom closet. It contains a trove of books, journals, letters, and photographs from our […]
Posted inProfile
Sandcastles on the Beach
Sometimes you can figure things out just by thinking them through; sometimes you can figure them out by watching other people. But sometimes you just have to grab onto the electric fence with both hands yourself. For those of us who prefer to learn by doing (including with the occasional low-voltage shock), contemporary classical composition […]
Posted inEssay
Centuries of Silence
Only then can his creative genius begin redounding, as it should, to the glory of Black music history,” writes the musicologist Robert Stevenson in his 1982 article, “The First Black Published Composer.” Stevenson’s subject was Vicente Lusitano (ca. 1520-ca. 1561), an African-Portuguese priest and musician who enjoyed an international career. Stevenson heralds works like the […]
Posted inProfile
The Sound Just After
Cenk Ergün’s two string quartets, “Sonare” and “Celare,” composed from 2014 to 2015, started out as one work, but they are diametrically opposed. “Sonare” is built from tightly intertwined, microtonal and microscopic rhythmic patterns which repeat, the brain glossing them with the illusion of momentum. The texture calls to mind metaphors of active animals: I […]