“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 […]
Tag: Composers
Posted inHistory
How Parsis Came to Love Western Classical Music
At any Western classical music performance that I attend in Mumbai, the audience is always a sea of elderly Parsis. (Parsis are a tiny community of Zoroastrians who migrated from Iran to India in the eighth century.) There were the regulars: the elderly gentleman with a scimitar nose, bobbing his head in time to the […]
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 inRankings & Roundups
Augusta Holmès’s Most Virile Works, Ranked
Have you ever wondered why they call it the long 19th century? From Beethoven’s hammering martellatos, to Wagner’s massive, veiny works that seem to last forever, to Liszt’s immense hand size (…), the Romantic period was in many ways a musical virility contest with many—many—climaxes. But there was one composer who critics considered the most […]
Posted inPlaylist
A Psappha Playlist
“Psappha is now closed.” On November 6, Psappha, a contemporary music ensemble based in Manchester, posted a short notice that signaled the end of over 30 years of commissioning, performing, and championing music from the 20th and 21st centuries. On the perennially shaky UK new music scene, organizations are routinely thinned, trimmed and pruned, but […]
Posted inProfile
A Lovers’ Discourse
Evan Johnson is a composer; he thinks about sound. But Evan Johnson is also the rare composer who thinks just as much about sight. It’s true that, to the ear, his music is often extremely affecting in its tightrope delicacy, but that aural richness is only a happy consequence of an opulent visual field: his […]
Posted inUncategorized
Show Some Emotion
Currently, Laurence Osborn is moving house, from Notting Hill (West London) to Notting Hill (West London). We meet for coffee on Gloucester Road (West London) in an hour squeezed between cardboard boxes. As someone whose magpie-like tendencies have steadily transitioned from shiny sounds to juicy words, I remember being struck by the title of Osborn’s […]
Posted inInterview
The Manifestation of Forces
I was captivated by Grawemeyer Award winner Lei Liang’s “A Thousand Mountains, A Million Streams” when Gil Rose of the Boston Modern Orchestra Project performed it at Carnegie Hall. Again in Ojai, California, Lei Liang caught my attention with “Vis-a-Vis,” a lively dialogue between Wu Man on pipa and Steven Schick on a variety of […]
Posted inInterview
Spit On Me
Steven Takasugi’s Piano Concerto will be premiered by Roger Admiral, Ingo Metzmacher, and the SWR Symphonieorchester in collaboration with the SWR Experimentalstudio on October 22. It will be the final work of the 2023 Donaueschingen Music Days, a festival for contemporary music in southwestern Germany. The following texts were extracted from an interview held at […]
Posted inPages Turned
Through the Rubble
There’s a decent case for Felix Mendelssohn being the most important figure in the history of Western classical music, though primarily for the music he programmed, rather than for the music he wrote. Answering the impassioned cry of Bach’s biographer Johann Nikolaus Forkel for an increased visibility of masterpieces if music wished to be taken […]