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The Violin Channel has a clip of the New York Phillies rehearsing a new Philip Glass piece, the "King Lear Overture."
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Jessica Duchen is celebrating Clara Schumann's 200th birthday this week and has a clip of the second movement of her cello concerto, Romance, played as an encore at a festival in Bucharest.
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While over at Musicology Now, there is a new piece up on Harnessing the power of sound and music to inspire positive ecological action. The piece is by Geoffrey Cox.
This essay looks at one such product, Tree People, a 45-minute documentary film I made that portrays the efforts of a local community-based group to plant trees in the valley they live in and, as much as image, uses music and creative sound design to not only convey its message, but to give life to the audience’s imagination. The film is part of my on-going research as a composer of acoustic and electronic music, filmmaker and writer, investigating the use of sound and music in documentary film. This has resulted in several solo and joint film productions (with Keith Marley) since 2000. The work focuses on how sound, especially creatively treated, can be a powerfully emotive signifier in documentary, perhaps even more so than image, and thus emphasises the potential of the form’s aesthetic aspect.
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Slipped Disc alerts us to a piece lamenting the disappearance of the music critic: IN MEMORY OF THE CRITIC’S TRADE.
there are likely no more than 20 Americans who still make most of their living writing in newspapers about classical music. In the mid-1980s, The New York Times published more than 1,000 concert reviews a year and there was a column every Sunday devoted specifically to debut recitals. The Daily News had a full-time critic, as did the New York Post; Newsday, after 1987, had two. Reviewing was a good way for young writers to make a poor living: In addition to the newspapers, there were classical music reviews in New York Magazine and the Village Voice as well as in those publications specifically devoted to the field – Ovation, Keynote, Classical, Musical America and others. Coverage at The New Yorker was so copious that critic Andrew Porter was able to assemble a large volume of his published criticism every three years or so.
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Anne Midgette celebrates regional orchestras in the Washington Post. Here is one of the five mentioned:
The New Orchestra of Washington
NOW — this young ensemble’s preferred acronym — aims to present an alternative to the model of the mainstream orchestra. Take the annual “Dia de los Muertos” concert, in which the group performs Brahms’s German Requiem (with the Choral Arts Society) in the characteristic, ornate white-skull makeup traditional to the Mexican Day of the Dead, playing before an ofrenda at the Mexican Cultural Institute.Founded by the husband-and-wife team of conductor Alejandro Hernandez-Valdez and pianist Grace Cho, the orchestra sees every concert as a chance “to interact with the community in unique, transformative ways,” Hernandez-Valdez says. NOW is a chamber orchestra, therefore smaller — and more flexible — than the other groups on this list, and it takes advantage of that by performing in a range of venues and doing repertoire ranging from song cycles to a program of composers labeled “minimalist,” from John Adams to Henryk Gorecki.Founded: 2012.Venues: seven different spaces around D.C. and Maryland.Number of players: 12-24.Concert season: five classical programs and two family concerts a year, most performed twice.Tickets: Single-ticket prices have yet to be announced.Next performance: Nov. 9-10 (“Dia de los Muertos”). (The season opener was Sept. 14, with music by Shostakovich, the 20th-century Polish composer Grazyna Bacewicz, and Bernard Herrmann).
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As someone who spent a few years writing program notes, this item struck particularly hard: WANT TO MOVE YOUR AUDIENCES? START WITH PROGRAM NOTES.
Truth be told, I enjoy reading just as much as I enjoy listening to music. And, as a lover of words, I’d once held the opinion that “Notes on the Program” are bound to be mind-numbingly, soul-crushingly boring – or one of the more effective embalming tools for classical music.The piece continues with some good suggestions about how to write program notes for concerts of new music.
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The Guardian takes a stab at The best classical music works of the 21st century. It is really hard to excerpt this long piece, which talks about twenty-five individual pieces. Yes, of course, one of them is John Luther Adams' Become Ocean.
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Have we posted anything by Brahms lately? No, so here is his German Requiem with the Köln Philharmonic conducted by Jukka Pekka Saraste.
10 comments:
I've seen a fair amount of requiems for criticism and claims that criticism is vital. As a kind of arts journalism I definitely appreciate it but the Norman Lebrecht notion of criticism I admit to being a tad skeptical about and the A. O. Scott Better Living Through Criticism form I find to be ... daft.
The Bacewicz string quartets are really fun if you haven't heard them.
Also ... Ricardo Gallen has recorded all of the Leo Brouwer guitar sonatas. Now that's an album I plan on grabbing and giving a serious listen to when I can. I only found out about this particular recording in the last few weeks.
We're not even a quarter of the way into this century and someone at The Guardian has a best of list already ... THAT kind of thing is why I'm not sure we should feel so bad about reported declines in arts criticism if The Guardian is running clickbait lists. The William Osborne rejoinder about the top two dozen odd works from 1900 to 1920 at Slipped Disc was ... instructive. :)
https://slippedisc.com/2019/09/best-works-of-the-21st-century/
https://slippedisc.com/2019/09/best-works-of-the-21st-century/#comments/555586
Norman Lebrecht doesn't do criticism. He does who got hired, who got fired, who died and who molested whom.
Thanks for those tips! The Brouwer sounds really tempting.
And thanks for those links. Lebrecht's list is, uh, interesting. But the two composers I would want to see on this type of list, Salonen and Gubaidulina, were both missing.
Your second link is meant to go to the William Osbourne comment, his list of important works from the beginning of the 20th century? Oh yes, certainly puts our century to shame! The thing is that, at that time, classical music composition still attracted some of the most brilliant and talented people. Whereas now, I suspect that they tend to go to places where they are more sure of getting appreciated, or at least, well paid. Hedge fund managers. University presidents. Stand up comedy. TV scriptwriting. Or pop music. Commissions, even for "successful" composers, look like rounding errors compared to what you can make in those fields.
and album reviews, let's not forget album reviews. :)
He seems to view himself as a critic and has written ... at length ... about whether criticism has a future.
https://www.newstatesman.com/music/2010/02/young-music-critics-arts
Now whether we think of him as a critic might be another matter. Lebrecht is a critic but whether or not he's a critic whose perspective I take seriously ... not so much ... but his other work is a useful reminder that arts criticism generally has to be a subset of a more generally journalistic (if not necessarily scholastic) career. I admit I'm saying that as a journalism student who never managed to land work in journalism in general, let alone arts journalism.
Right, I had completely forgotten Lebrecht does album reviews. Probably because I rarely read them...
Hm, well, ok, I briefly browsed the New Statesman piece. That is the kind of thing I categorize as a "thumb-sucker." It goes on and on trying to find a point or perspective and doesn't quite succeed. My view is probably eccentric, but I think that criticism needs to have a scholarly frame. I think Richard Taruskin, when he takes the trouble, is an excellent critic because he has complete command of the details. I had a friend, long ago, who was a pretty good critic for a local weekly. On one occasion he described a performance of an overture by a Baroque ensemble as "demonstrating simultaneously all three of the current theories of over-dotting." I wish I had said that. You can be a journalist or a critic, but I wonder if you can be both. Arthur Kaptainis at the Montreal Gazette is a pretty good critic who poses as a journalist.
The Guardian has been running top 100 lists for all the major (mainstream) artistic mediums due to the impending conclusion of the decade. The top 100 film list is decent, and the albums one is awful. I think "rock music" burned very brightly for a few decades but has now lapsed into a kind of cultural soporific. The more I think of it, I think classical music will actually be in a good place in 2050 as opposed to whatever will be considered a popular piece of music by then. Music labels probably won't exist and the emphasis will come back to the performance.
I do so hope you are right! And you may well be. There is certainly something soporific about Ed Sheeran.
Anne Midgette has left the Washington Post, alas; the one good thing about this is that I can stop subscribing altogether now.
And she was one of the very, very few music critics in the US often worth reading! Is she going somewhere else?
Slippped Disc this morning. 'More time with family"; who knows.
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