I heard yet another talk about audiences last week that used two adjectives interchangeably to describe them: “gray-haired” and “dying.” I get it. The young demographic is a big prize: get listeners hooked in their teens and twenties and you could have them coming back for a half century. That’s just not the case with a 60-year-old listener. But there are still problems with this approach … [Read more...]
Archives for February 2018
Attacca String Quartet and the composer/performer dynamic
We had the Attacca String Quartet in residence here this past week. Started things off with a 2-hour seminar on composer-performer collaborations, featuring performances of three Caroline Shaw quartets: Entr’acte, Valencia and Blueprint. That evening, the quartet recorded three student compositions: Alicia Bachorik: Tango Tyson Davis: String Quartet No. 1 Nicholas Karr: The Flaw in … [Read more...]
Horn ensemble
The French horn presents composers with an interesting challenge. Inextricably tied to the heroic aspirations of the Romantic era, it often struggles to find a range of expression that lies outside of Wagnerian fantasies. I tried taking it in a direction that overlapped with but diverged from that Romantic world in my horn concerto Revenant, a piece David Jolley premiered thirteen years ago. I … [Read more...]