A couple of my recent blogs – here and here -- have saluted John Luther Adams as “among the most esteemed present-day American composers for orchestra. . . . Encountering Adams’s Become Ocean on a 21st-century symphonic program is so fundamentally enthralling that it risks cliché. It is the proverbial oasis in the desert. The Sahara here is contemporary American … [Read more...] about John Luther Adams on “Why I Moved from the US to Australia”
“Ur Kind of Music?”
I cannot think of a better conversationalist about music, and about the state of things musical today, than the conductor Kenneth Woods. Ken is an American based in the UK, where he conducts the English Symphony Orchestra in Worcester and resides in Wales. He programs bravely and insightfully. He presides over a Mahler festival in Boulder and an Elgar festival in … [Read more...] about “Ur Kind of Music?”
Was Sid Caesar’s Cancellation a Media Parable for Today?
It must mean a lot that I can remember watching Sid Caesar’s “Show of Shows” on TV with my parents as a young child. For one thing, I don’t recall watching anything else as a family. For another, Caesar’s “Show of Shows” went off the air in 1954 and I was born in 1948. So I was all of six years old. The memory stuck. Caesar virtually disappeared from television when … [Read more...] about Was Sid Caesar’s Cancellation a Media Parable for Today?
Who Wrote “Porgy and Bess”?
It must mean something that the highest creative achievement in American classical music is permanently controversial. When Porgy and Bess premiered on Broadway in 1935, a typical critical reaction was: “What is it?” American-born classical musicians (unlike their European-born brethren) marginalized George Gershwin as an interloper, a gifted dilettante. Later, in the 1950s, … [Read more...] about Who Wrote “Porgy and Bess”?
The Music of the Future?
The current issue of The American Scholar includes a long piece of mine suggesting a possible new direction for contemporary classical music – versus the “makeshift music” that deluges our concert halls. I make reference to John Luther Adams, Charles Ives, Jean Sibelius, and Ferruccio Busoni. To read the whole piece, click here. To sample it, read on: The American arts are … [Read more...] about The Music of the Future?