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PostClassic

Kyle Gann on music after the fact

Smyth: Early, Late, and Best

Smyth-coverI’ve found what I think is the best available music by Ethel Smyth: this recording of her Serenade in D (1890) and Double Concerto for Violin and Horn (1927). (Pardon the generic suffragette image on the CD cover, kind of a cheap shot.) Curiously, the Serenade marked her debut in the London music world, and the Double Concerto was one of her last works as she succumbed to deafness. Her Mass is magnificent, but liturgical works don’t leave as much room for personality. The Serenade is melodious and varied enough that I’d rather hear it than Brahms’s two works in that genre. The Double Concerto is remarkably delicate and memorable, and rather Holstian – though she was Holst’s senior by 16 years – and a stronger and better thought-out work than Holst’s Double Violin Concerto, to name an obvious comparison piece. Although I like that too. Holst and Walton have long been my favorite English composers, and Smyth now officially joins them. She deserves far more attention than she gets.

 

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So classical music is dead, they say. Well, well. This blog will set out to consider that dubious factoid with equanimity, if not downright enthusiasm [More]

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Sites to See

American Mavericks - the Minnesota Public radio program about American music (scripted by Kyle Gann with Tom Voegeli)

Kalvos & Damian's New Music Bazaar - a cornucopia of music, interviews, information by, with, and on hundreds of intriguing composers who are not the Usual Suspects

Iridian Radio - an intelligently mellow new-music station

New Music Box - the premiere site for keeping up with what American composers are doing and thinking

The Rest Is Noise - The fine blog of critic Alex Ross

William Duckworth's Cathedral - the first interactive web composition and home page of a great postminimalist composer

Mikel Rouse's Home Page - the greatest opera composer of my generation

Eve Beglarian's Home Page- great Downtown composer

David Doty's Just Intonation site

Erling Wold's Web Site - a fine San Francisco composer of deceptively simple-seeming music, and a model web site

The Dane Rudhyar Archive - the complete site for the music, poetry, painting, and ideas of a greatly underrated composer who became America's greatest astrologer

Utopian Turtletop, John Shaw's thoughtful blog about new music and other issues

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