Music Monday: Ginastera: Harp Concerto

Going by the ones I know, at least, harpists aren’t overly thrilled with their repertoire. Admittedly, my harping acquaintances are heavily biased towards the ones who apply to new music–friendly festivals, but still, the point stands: There’s an awful lot of frivolous harp music out there (much of it, unsurprisingly, French), and while one or two pieces like that can be a nice change of pace, at a certain point, you want something with a little more crunch and substance. And that’s where composers come in.

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Music Monday: Montgomery: Source Code

One of the things I find most interesting about other performer-composers is seeing their different approaches to writing for their own instrument. I’ve always been hesitant about writing for solo bassoon (other than a few bits of juvenilia, Rotational Games was the first solo piece I wrote for it), but many performer-composers write primarily or even exclusively for the instrument(s) they play. Jessie Montgomery falls more in the latter camp. Introduced to the violin at the age of four, her first compositions grew out of her improvisations, and most of her works are for string instruments in various combinations. She’s gradually been expanding her comfort zone — she recently earned a Master’s in composition and film scoring from New York University, and her second work for full orchestra will be premièred sometime next month.

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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: Sheng: Clarinet Concertino

So had things gone a little differently, I could have wound up studying with the composer of the piece we’re featuring today. Bright Sheng* has been on the composition faculty of the University of Michigan since 1995, and his presence there was one of the many things that attracted me to that program. Still, getting rejected didn’t change my musical tastes, and I still find Sheng’s music as compelling as ever. Born in Shanghai in 1955, Sheng got his first musical training at the age of four when his mother began teaching him piano. During the Cultural Revolution, he spent seven years serving as a pianist and percussionist in a provincial theatre in Qinghai [Wikipedia], where he also found time to study the region’s folk music. When the Revolution ebbed and the universities re-opened, Sheng enrolled in the Shanghai Conservatory of Music, studying there from 1978–82.

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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: Mehmari: Villa-Lobos Variations

Many composers over the years have written variations on other composers’ themes as an homage to their friends and predecessors, and that tradition is alive and well today. André Mehmari was born in 1971 in Niterói, Brazil, and began studying music with his mother at the age of five. A precocious youth, he taught himself jazz improvisation by ear, and had established himself as a piano and organ teacher by the age of fifteen, with several compositions already under his belt. In 1995, he moved to São Paulo to study at the University of São Paulo*, and from there his career really took off, both as an active pianist (in multiple genres) and as a composer and arranger. He tours internationally, and has written works for major musical institutions both at home and abroad; he also enjoys an active life as a recording artist, with some of his albums being entirely improvised.

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Music Monday: Villa-Lobos: Quintette en Forme de Chôros

Very few standard chamber groups are as heterogeneous as the wind quintet. From the brassy outbursts of the horn to the breathy whispers of the flute at the bottom of its range, the ensemble covers a broad timbral range, and one that is not easily unified — even in the most perfectly balanced performances it’s still immediately obvious which instrument is carrying which line. If the string quartet presents a seamless façade of timbral similarity, the wind quintet is more of a menagerie, bursting with brilliant, uncompromising colors. Some people see this as a defect, others as a delight.

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Music Monday: Orth: Stripped

This week we’re doing something a little different! A few months ago now, Rene Orth, a composer friend I met at the fresh inc festival back in 2013, posted a recording of her new string quartet, Stripped. As soon as I heard it, I knew I wanted to feature it in a Music Monday post, but since she’s a friend, it felt weird to write about her and her work in my usual manner. So instead, I approached her about doing an interview instead, and this is the result!

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Music Monday: Brouwer: Guitar Sonata

Before you accuse me of repeating a composer, today we‘re featuring Leo Brouwer, not Margaret (to my knowledge there is no relation). Leo Brouwer was born on 1 March, 1939 in Havana, Cuba, into a family of music enthusiasts. His father gave him informal guitar lessons, teaching him to pick out pieces by Heitor Villa-Lobos and the like, largely without the use of sheet music. Brouwer started taking formal lessons at the age of 13, and quickly attained a high level of ability on that instrument, making his professional debut at the age of 17.

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Music Monday: Valverde: Cuatro poemas de Octavio Paz

Vocal music hasn’t made much of an appearance so far in these posts, which may be kind of surprising given that I’m interested in making a career out of composing for voice. In part, that’s simply a result of awkward lengths — standalone songs are too short to make a whole post about, while song cycles and operas (the latter being more my stomping ground than the former) clock in at such lengths as to be impractical to adequately cover in a single blog post — but it’s also an issue of familiarity. I’m not a singer, so I don’t deal with this music on a day-to-day basis, and presentations of the repertoire often center on Romantic-era lieder, which are written in a musical language I find phenomenally uncompelling. Still, there are plenty of great songs out there, and every now and again I stumble on some that I really like.

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Music Monday: Still: Seven Traceries

Sometimes called “The Dean of African American Composers”, William Grant Still (1895–1978) is undoubtedly most famous for his first symphony, the Afro-American Symphony from 1930. That’s a great work, and it’s definitely worth getting to know if you’re not familiar with it, but I think relying on it too heavily to give a snapshot of Still’s output runs the risk of pigeonholing him and limiting our conception of his musical breadth. Still himself was adamant about this [College Music Symposium], insisting that he “wrote as [he] chose, using whatever idiom seemed appropriate to the subject at hand” and “did not bow” to the “complete domination” of Jazz any more than he did to the modernist style he encountered when studying with Edgard Varèse.

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Music Monday: Wilson: Expansions III

When asked in a 1991 interview with Bruce Duffie if his music was in some way specifically African-American, Olly Wilson Jr responded that “because [his] experience has been an African-American experience” his music necessarily reflects that, “[b]ut that is a very, very complicated kind of thing” and “there may not be discernible aspects of that music that you say, ‘Aha, that’s clearly from African American tradition.’”. So those seeing his name on a program of African-American composers and hoping for a jazz- or gospel-infused escapade are bound for disappointment.

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Music Monday: Moroi: Piano Sonata No. 2

Moroi Saburō (諸井三郎 for those who read kanji) was born just to the north of Tōkyō to a wealthy, industrious family in August of 1903. He was very close to his older brother Kanichi, and looked up to him as something of an inspirational figure. Said brother was reasonably educated in the arts, and gave Moroi his first piano lessons. (Kanichi would also take him to see the pianist Sueko Ogura perform the Beethoven piano sonatas — I haven’t been able to tell if this was his first exposure to said sonatas, but given the influence of Beethoven’s style on Moroi’s work, it seems an occasion well worth mentioning.) Moroi continued to pursue his musical studies — both on piano and in composition — both in high school and college, frequently working from books instead of studying with teachers in person.

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Music Monday: Coleridge-Taylor: Quintet

On or around his fifth birthday, Coleridge-Taylor began playing the violin, and by the age of 15, he had enrolled in the Royal Conservatory to continue his studies. Two years into a projected three-year program, he switched from violin to composition, working under Charles Villiers Stanford. The older composer was quickly impressed with Coleridge-Taylor’s abilities, declaring him one of his two most brilliant students — no mean praise considering he also taught Frank Bridge, Herbert Howells, Gustav Holst, and Ralph Vaughan Williams!

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