Search Results for: underrated

Musicologist Dragana Stojanovic-Novicic was here from Serbia, researching Cage at the John Cage Trust at Bard. Chair of musicology at Belgrade's University of the Arts, she's just published a book of essays on contemporary music in Serbian, and she's working on two more, in English: a series of interviews with Vinko Globokar, Yugoslavia's leading emissary to the Darmstadt crowd, and a book on Conlon Nancarrow's correspondence. Reading her preliminary chapter for the latter taught me a lot I didn't know about Nancarrow (did anyone know he urged … [Read more...]

[Update below] I've been intending to write more about my European sabbatical, but I'm rather frantically composing on deadline. I have five world premieres coming up in the next several months, and two of the pieces aren't finished. Thanks to my extended leave from teaching, I wrote seven works in 2007, totaling some 85 minutes of music - not much by some people's standards, but a personal record for me. And I have two movements of The Planets to finish before school starts, so that the Relache ensemble can start practicing the entire … [Read more...]

As a music critic, I’ve sat in the middle of hundreds of audiences, and I’ve observed them closely. I’ve seen them all gasp in unison at a right turn in a daring improv; I’ve seen them break into laughter at a clever one-chord quotation in a Rzewski piece; I’ve seen them fooled by an energetic performance into approving mediocre music; I’ve seen them let their minds wander during a performance and then clap loudly because it was something they were supposed to like. In short, I’ve generally seen audience members get swept into a collective … [Read more...]

From recordings, I've known and loved Aaron Copland's opera The Tender Land for over thirty years, but I had never seen a production of it until last night at Bard's Summerscape Festival. It's true the piece is a little more stage-awkward than I'd imagined: some of the lyrics are more pictorial than dramatic, and the first love scene between Laurie and Martin takes place at an otherwise racuous party, which must be imagined silently continuing in the background. (Staging also failed to clarify Top's peculiar second-act story, which scandalizes … [Read more...]

February is the shortest month, mercifully, and I'm going to leave all of John Luther Adams' music up on Postclassic Radio for a few more days at least as compensation. But I hereby proclaim Robert Ashley Composer-of-the-Months for not only March but April as well - on account of, I'm sick and tired of having classical musicians and even composers respond, "Who's Robert Ashley?" "I've never heard his music, what's it like?" And so if you've never heard his music you're going to hear it this month, and if you have, you may revel in it to your … [Read more...]

The next repertoire I'm transferring from vinyl to CD is my collection of Ralph Shapey recordings: I believe I have every vinyl recording he ever produced. Shapey (1921-2002), whom I knew in Chicago, is not the kind of composer I'm supposed to like - his music is atonal, thorny, somewhat complex, relentlessly abstract - and I mystify some of my Downtown friends by championing him. But he was a tremendously misunderstood figure. He became grouped with a lot of the more academic composers, both because he taught at the University of Chicago from … [Read more...]

And speaking of art's ability to sharpen our perceptions (which I was), Beth Anderson's Ocean Motion Mildew Mind has given me a new appreciation for the counterpoint between word sounds and word connotations. If you're not familiar with her - and you should be, for she's been producing fantastic music for a long time, even if not the kind lionized by classical institutions - Anderson writes what is just about the prettiest music of any composer today, with the possible and very different exception of Californian Harold Budd. But she didn''t … [Read more...]

I'm out here in the wilds of Devonshire, lecturing at Dartington College of the Arts, a school that resembles my own home institution in many ways: rural setting, size, priorities, student interests. As with all such liberal institutions, technology is not at the top of its priority list, and it took me a few days to get fitted with my own internet connection, one that would allow me to e-mail and blog comfortably and at leisure. In the process I missed a very important American-musical birthday this week: William Duckworth turned sixty. [Oops … [Read more...]

One of the advantages of this blog is that it allows me to indulge in the news-pegless item. Those of us journalists who have a soft spot for obscure music, or who have even become leading experts in bodies of music few people have ever heard of, get frustrated waiting for the "news peg," the external event that justifies a subject to editors. When, after all, is there going to be an Ivan Wyschnegradsky concert in New York? How long will I wait to give my opinion of Ben Weber (1916-1979), if I am dependent on the prodding of external events? … [Read more...]

For forty-five years, since I was a middle-schooler in Dallas, Ives's Essays before a Sonata has been one of the most important books in my life. Lately it's become tremendously underrated. Some Ives scholars have dismissed it nearly entirely as a jumble of psuedo-intellectual bloviations. The literature about the book has mined it piecemeal, a few sentences at a time, for insights into Ives's biography, or to prove that he was highly influenced by Emerson and considered himself a Transcendentalist - or to prove the opposite. One of the themes … [Read more...]