Music Monday: Gardner: Perseids

As much as I like many aspects of city living — the density, the hustle and bustle, the major cultural institutions, just to name a few — there are other aspects of it I’m less fond of. Like many kids, I was fascinated by space growing up, and loved to go stargazing whenever I could. I don’t really remember if I had many opportunities in Columbia, but Amherst is rural enough that finding a sky free from the worst of the light pollution isn’t terribly difficult, and the UMass stone circle (not quite as imposing as Stonehenge, but constructed along similar principles) was basically walking distance from my house, so I have many memories of summer evenings spent staring heavenwards.

Rather unsurprisingly, Los Angeles is . . . not like that. I’ve definitely seen stars here, but only the brightest of them, and even then not reliably. The fainter tracings of nebulae and the dusty sweep of the Milky Way are all blotted utterly from view. I’ll probably be living in cities for the rest of my life. I may well have seen the majority of all the stars I will ever see in my life. So pieces about stars and stargazing have a special resonance for me, tinged with nostalgia both for the past and for an imagined future.

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Music Monday: Cuong: Moth

Unsurprisingly, my first exposure to Viet Cuong had nothing to do with nocturnal lepidopterans. Instead, it was in the fall of 2010 when the Yale Concert Band played his Ziggurat, complete with a custom animation projected behind us that, for some reason, involved flying bicycles. At the time, Cuong was finishing up a Master’s of Music degree at the Peabody Conservatory (where he also did his undergraduate studies) and preparing to begin an MFA in Composition at Princeton, where he’s currently pursuing his Doctorate. Despite still being in school, he’s accumulated a truly staggering number of awards and performances — on all six permanently inhabited continents, according to his webpage — and I’m honestly kind of surprised I haven’t encountered more of his works. (The YCB played another of his band pieces, Sound and Smoke, in 2012.) I’m sure that will change going forward; he’s an excellent composer and his fame is only going to continue to grow.

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Music Monday: Du: Kraken

Described by the New York Times as “an indie pop diva with an avant-garde edge”, Du Yun makes a point of being hard to categorize. Born in Shanghai in 1977, Du was drilled in the Western solo piano tradition from an early age, but in her own words she was “not your typical Chinese good student at all”. Her inclination towards the subversive was only amplified when she began studying composition at the Shanghai Conservatory of Music. It was rapidly becoming easier to access 20th–Century Western culture, but she describes the music as coming over in a wash — without Western contextual frameworks in place, Penderecki seemed on an equal footing with Pink Floyd, with everything up for grabs. Du embodies this eclecticism herself, being an active performer as well as having written everything from chamber operas to electroacoustic pieces to uncategorizable performance art spectacles. (She also has a dance pop album out called Shark in You which I have not listened to yet but am very eager to.)

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Music Monday: Diemer: Santa Barbara Overture

Despite living less than two hours away from the place, I’ve never actually been up to Santa Barbara, which means, at least according to today’s composer, that I am Missing Out. Emma Lou Diemer describes the joyous theme at the start of her Santa Barbara Overture as reflecting what one might feel after “enduring the clogged freeways and smog of Los Angeles”, to which I can only rejoin “Yeah, no, that sounds about right.”. Diemer was born in November 1927 to a very musical family (she had learned piano by the age of five, and family road trips would often involve sing-alongs accompanied by her sister on flute and one of her brothers on trumpet. I can’t decide if this sounds amazing or horrifying.)

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Music Monday: Rehnqvist: Arktis Arktis!

Rarely do pieces with exclamation marks in the title end well. Usually they’re a sign of desperate over-enthusiasm, and presage a pandering piece of peppy schlock, so determined to be relentlessly upbeat that all concerns for musical quality are cast carelessly aside. There are exceptions, but they’re few and far enough between that I approached Rehnqvist’s Arktis Arktis! with some trepidation. Happily, my misgivings were misguided.

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