Ours is the age of themes. Drowning in the deluge of streaming content whose rush, flow, and surge defines what Anna Kornbluh last year termed our too-late capitalism, any and all aspirant media—entertainment, art, or otherwise—is increasingly compliant with that dictatorial imperative handed down from marketing departments on high: brand or bust. Streamlined themes get […]
Tag: New(ish) Music
Posted inProfile
Trying To Crystallize Something
The first time that Siwan Rhys played Galina Ustvolskaya’s music in public, something strange happened. She’d been asked to play Ustvolskaya’s arresting Sixth Sonata at the launch of Kate Molleson’s book Sound Within Sound at Cafe OTO in Dalston. This wasn’t the first time that Rhys had encountered Ustvolskaya’s musical worldview—she’d first heard it live […]
Posted inReview
A Refusal of Habit
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, […]
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 […]