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...]

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...]

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...]

Vijay Iyer’s music occupies a fascinating terrain.  It’s a world that emanates from a lifetime of improvisation and a multilayered approach to the passage of time.  It’s also music that reflects its creator’s quiet defiance of unexamined assumptions of the Western Classical tradition. Every fall, our Composition Department chooses a single living composer to focus on, studying several scores, … [Read more...]

For as long as there have been machines, I suppose, the question has been asked: Can Machines Make Art?  With the exponential growth of artificial intelligence this century, the topic is discussed with increasing frequency.  It’s an interesting question, but there is a supplementary question that I find even more interesting:  How Much Do We Care About Machine-Made Art?  To me, there are at least … [Read more...]

I’ve had this happen to me before. My head is always whirling with music.  For a long time, I assumed that was true for everyone, but it’s really one of those phenomena we can describe to one another without ever being sure we are experiencing the same thing. What I constantly hear is sounds combining and recombining, heading off in simultaneous different directions, merging together again … [Read more...]

I write music for three reasons that I can name, though there may be others that elude me.  These three reasons jockey with one another for primacy from one work to the next, and sometimes within one work. The first, though not necessarily the most important (just, I think, the most obvious), is to communicate with others.  When I say it’s not necessarily the most important, I have to qualify … [Read more...]

When I was an undergrad, I was taught the concept of masculine and feminine cadences.  It went like this: masculine cadences resolve on the strong beat; feminine cadences resolve on the weak beat. I have no idea if this nomenclature is used by anyone anymore.  It probably is, because so many things survive longer than one would think necessary or possible. The underlying implication of … [Read more...]

Opera lovers can be forgiven for imagining the works they love were born in a flash of inspiration.  Sometimes the journey is a bit more arduous. The UNCSA Composition Department met with Jennifer Higdon via Skype on September 20th to talk about her opera Cold Mountain.  We got the two things we had hoped for: a rich and detailed rundown of the eleven-year process from conception to premiere, … [Read more...]

We’ve got a packed fall season in the Composition Department of the UNC School of the Arts.  For those who aren’t familiar with it, this is a campus of about 1200 students, all artists, from high school through graduate school.  Our composers have a ridiculous number of opportunities to write absolute music, music for film, for dance, for theater, installations – whatever they want to dive into, … [Read more...]