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: New(ish) Music
Posted inReview
A Chance to Mourn
All eyes have been on Detroit in recent years, where Yuval Sharon’s much-profiled tenure at the rebranded Detroit Opera has turned into a case study for new models of opera’s cultural relevance in regional America. News outlets and commentators have been generous in covering his stewardship, highlighting Sharon’s audaciously modern programming and unorthodox concepts—not to […]
Posted inProfile
Urgent Attention
Hear that? It’s the sound of a composer’s music changing. Timothy McCormack’s “you actually are evaporating” for violin and cello begins with a rapid flicker of timbres. Microtonal double stops, coarse strokes deep in the strings, laconic glissandi, the occasional single note, flit past. Ear and brain reach for the pattern. This is beautiful music […]
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 inPlaylist
A “Rhapsody in Blue” Remix Playlist
Over the last few months, I found myself unexpectedly steeped in George Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue” while working on “American Rhapsody,” a documentary about the work’s centennial for BBC Radio 3. Part of me said yes to the project because I thought that it would be a nice diversion from the dumpster fire of real […]
Posted inEssay
The Black Modernism of American Music
How many years should pass, in polite society, before a country is allowed to have its own national style of classical music? In 1939, over 150 years after the Declaration of Independence, Leonard Bernstein began his senior thesis at Harvard with the statement, “I propose a new and vital American nationalism.” In the essay, “The […]
Posted inPlaylist
A Luigi Nono Playlist
Luigi Nono would have turned 100 on January 29. He was born, raised, and died in Venice, whose tradition of separate choirs performing from different places within the church had a profound impact on the composer’s sense of sound, space, and silence. Despite this relationship with the past, few musical oeuvres have quite as palpable […]
Posted inInterview
Assembling an Organism
Lithuanian composer Justė Janulytė watches and listens intently to the mysterious wonders of our reality. Born in Vilnius in 1982, Janulytė’s pieces explore time and space through the large-scale texturing of sound, moving between minimalism, spectralism, and electroacoustic music. Because of this, listeners have often compared listening to her music to being bathed in an overflow […]
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 inProfile
The Things We Form
It is afternoon in Berlin. Sarah Saviet is not meant to be here. She is meant to be hiking, unreachable in the woods in Spain, but, change of plans, she’s here, playing Bach: in her living room, an afternoon in Berlin. And so we meet. We talk, and we do not cover everything. She is […]