Music Monday: Chin: Piano Concerto

Close readers of my tumblr will know that at the end of February, I caught the West Coast (possibly American?) première of Unsuk Chin and David Henry Hwang's Alice in Wonderland and had rather mixed feelings about it. Most of the negative ones were associated with the words, however, so I tracked down some of Chin's non-operatic writing and I am so glad I did, because she is a fantastic composer when not dealing with a deliberately nonsensical libretto. (I am also very late to this party; she has been positively showered with awards, up to and including the Grawemeyer in 2004, and her works are performed regularly by top ensembles around the world.) 

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Music Monday: Moore: Night Fantasy

Music Mondays are back in action! We're still hanging around in the 1970s this week, with an uncompromising clarinet feature by Dorothy Rudd Moore. Moore was born on June 4, 1940 in the town of New Castle, Delaware. Her mother was a singer and encouraged her musical activities from a very young age, including numerous trips to see the Philadelphia Orchestra under Eugene Ormandy. She began making up music for fun before she even knew that the word "composer" existed, a development her parents actively supported. She was accepted to Harvard and the Boston Conservatory, but ultimately elected to study at the historically black Howard University in Washington DC instead.

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