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...]
Archives for 2018
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...]