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, […]
Tag: New(ish) Music
Posted inProfile
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.” […]
Posted inEssay
Opera At the End of the Earth
Can you name a monumental four-opera series that brings together an extended, related cast of characters involved in mysterious and spiritual quests? How about a Great American Novel? Now, how about an artist who created both? The answer is the great American composer Robert Ashley, who died in 2014 just shy of his 84th birthday, […]
Posted inInterview
Reacting in a Continuum
On July 12, the label BMOP/sound of the Boston Modern Orchestra Project will release its 100th recording. BMOP—pronounced “BE-mop”—was founded in 1996 by conductor Gil Rose, and has since filled an essential gap in Boston’s classical music scene, performing new and new-ish music between the Boston Symphony Orchestra’s rarified renditions of canonical repertoire, new-music gigs […]
Posted inInterview
The New Needs Friends
“A revolting, nauseating slog,” “a quarter of an hour’s worth of relentless, faceless, arbitrary blarney,” “stunningly pointless and stupid,” “five minutes of mindless, superficial prolefeed,” “hackneyed, dated, superficial rubbish,” and “empty vessels of cheap, surface-deep, musically moribund sound masquerading as something bold and individual” are just some of the many colorful phrases writer Simon Cummings […]
Posted inInterview
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 […]
Posted inOpinion
Music to Not Listen to Music to
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 […]
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 […]
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Urgent Attention
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 that may remind you of music by others. About six […]
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 […]