Attic music speaks quietly - and with wide-open possibilities. A secret garden, perhaps? Stacks of printed music found in closets and attics - having survived the decades by accident or design - often lose their purpose along with the last person who sang or heard the music. And re-discovering that purpose can confound the smartest historians with pages stored out of order … [Read more...] about Music from the attic: The Revelers return with a mellifluous secret garden
The creative arc of Kile Smith: Do opportunities make the piece? Or does the piece create the opportunity?
The surprisingly large number of thriving Philadelphia composers is only partly about the city's relatively low cost of living and great conservatories. It's also about great opportunities that don't depend on the Philadelphia Orchestra. Certainly, composers such as Jennifer Higdon have had that lucky break with the Fab Philadelphians. But no realistic composer can put their … [Read more...] about The creative arc of Kile Smith: Do opportunities make the piece? Or does the piece create the opportunity?
The Crossing’s Month of Moderns : A masterwork is born
The great but tragic American poet Hart Crane (1899-1932) can’t help but exert a magnetic attraction to composers with his fusion of lyricism, modernism and mad, extravagant fantasy. Of course, no two composers are going to approach this material the same way - until, for a quick, curious moment, they do. Crane’s six-part love poem Voyages became a pair of polar opposite … [Read more...] about The Crossing’s Month of Moderns : A masterwork is born
Simon Rattle’s high-def 3-D Mahler festival with the London Symphony was a landmark in the New York season
So often when star musicians such as Simon Rattle hit a golden spot in their late 30s and early 40s, you stand back and ask, "Where can they possibly go from there?" Everybody's darling conductor in the 1990s, Rattle certainly invited that kind of speculation, though his Berlin Philharmonic years (2002 to the end of this summer) left only provisional answers: You never knew … [Read more...] about Simon Rattle’s high-def 3-D Mahler festival with the London Symphony was a landmark in the New York season
Fear and loathing in the Renaissance church: Stile Antico sings Victoria’s Holy Week music
Sacred music began tumbling from heaven to earth in the late 16th century, when the words it was sung to became something more than liturgical reference points. It took on more qualities of human speech and a greater intensity of meaning. The turn of that century was the essential tipping point from the rules-based music of the Renaissance to the more emotion-based music of the … [Read more...] about Fear and loathing in the Renaissance church: Stile Antico sings Victoria’s Holy Week music