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diegobueno

only in the past year has the opening movement's main subject made any etching on the surface of my memory.....it seems almost like a student composer's earnest yet limited attempt at a big bow-wow symphonic subject. Have you heard the original 1872 version of the symphony? Talk about an earnest at...

diegobueno

Coming back to the finale, it takes many listenings to the rather milquetoast second theme that was Tchaikovsky's own creation that the listener remembers it; the tune he so shrewdly used to dominate the work was an old Russian folktune. I've always been drawn to that second theme in the finale. I ...

diegobueno

I guess this is the place to cite the letter Mozart wrote to his father about the performance in Paris of the symphony now known as the Paris Symphony (no. 31, K. 297) in the m i d s t o f t h e f i r s t a l l e g r o came a passage I had known would please. The audience was quite carried away-ther...

diegobueno

Belle, you make the mistake of thinking this is just a disagreement about policy. the fact is, as I said before, that Trump violated the law from the very beginning. Yes, the Kavanaugh fiasco was a disaster. The way that man responded to his accuser, the temper tantrum he threw, the nakedly partisan...

diegobueno

Donald Trump has engaged in corrupt, illegal behavior since... but certainly from the time of his 2016 campaign. That's why Paul Manafort, Michael Cohen, Michael Flynn, Rick Gates, and George Papadapoulos are in jail, and Roger Stone will join them soon. There was ample reason to investigate him for...

diegobueno

I think I should mention also Kevin Puts. I often think his music is a bit too much on the "nice" side. I wish it had more edge to it. But this Concerto for Marimba is an attractive work and it has enough to keep my interest.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qlioHe_fJ-M

diegobueno

And unfortunately, we have Pennywise as president.

diegobueno

If you haven't heard this yet, you really need to. This is a remarkable vocal arrangement of a Christmas song In the Bleak Midwinter made and performed by Jacob Collier, an impossibly gifted youngster with an amazing ear. I post it here in the Corner Pub because it quite clearly comes from the popul...

diegobueno

I don't think it has so much to do with Beethoven as boosting AI. It's a technological quest rather than a musical one. Right. I guess it helps if you start with good material. But there were other options. They could have given the computer the first so-many-measures of any of the Beethoven sympho...

diegobueno

There's already a Beethoven's 10th completion by Barry Cooper. Is that not good enough? If not, why does someone think a computer can do better?

diegobueno

One set of works I've been concentrating on these past few months are the 10 string quartets of Ben Johnston. Written between 1959 and 1995, they embody styles which fall on both sides of the line Belle and Brian would call noise. Nos. 2-10 employ microtones, dividing the octave into many tiny units...

diegobueno

I didn't say it was all noise; I was talking about those who hitched their wagon specifically TO noise!! My position is that none of it is noise. It's all valid as music. Those who've hitched their wagons to it, do so because they enjoy listening to it. You don't have to like it or listen to it you...

diegobueno

By way of contrast, the music of the British composer Gavin Bryars tends to be slow in unfolding, and very lyrical. His Concerto for Double Bass, following the example of Busoni, features a male chorus in addition to the orchestra.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OHAeakWz36A

diegobueno

I can't say I agree with the characterization of 20th century High Modernism as "noise". But I can understand why composers today don't feel like that kind of music is a hill they're willing to die on. A lot of the composers I'm going to introduce here grew out of the minimalist movement. They featu...

diegobueno

I love the oboi d'amore and oboi di caccia (in the Sinfonia). Colorful orchestration isn't the first thing you think of with Bach, but his choice of instruments is so specific, you know he put a lot of thought into it. And it often involves instruments no longer in use for which with modern instrume...

diegobueno

Reich's music is mostly about rhythm. There is always a lot of repetition, and there are rhythmic patterns that interlock in intricate ways. Music for 18 Musicians was written in the 1970s at the high point of the minimalist movement, and the repetition was part of the aesthetic. I find this piece m...

diegobueno

Here's more Torke. One of his more recent works is Sky, a bluegrass concerto for violin. Here's the first movement

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1KCvCcBDr6A

diegobueno

This is my own personal prejudice: I don't pay big bucks to go to a concert and hear music I've heard a million times already, and which I could enjoy at home on CD, as performed by master musicians of far greater status than the one presently on stage. But something like Robert Paterson's Enlighten...

diegobueno

Christopher Rouse's sumptuous Symphony no. 4 is dazzling and richly scored. The opening movement is some of the most upbeat music you'll hear from this composer. But he prefers dark moods and the symphony ends with a slow movement marked "Doloroso". MKp9NaKlCU8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MKp9Na...

diegobueno

Thanks, Mark, for your POV. We actually agree, but I would appreciate your posting some recordings you would recommend of current music on CD that would interest us. Brian Michael Torke -- Fiji Here's my first sample. I really adore this piece. It may be my favorite piece of 21st century music. It ...

diegobueno

This is exciting news. Reich is writing his best music now, in his old age, most of it for ensembles highlighting mallet percussion and pianos. I figured he had recognized his limitations and would know better than to write for orchestra, but I see he's found a way to make it work. I can't wait to h...

diegobueno

I've said it before, but anyone who says all 20th century and contemporary music is noise, is quite simply wrong. Completely and utterly wrong. There's a wealth of wonderful, substantial and thoroughly listenable music out there by composers such as Christopher Rouse, Michael Torke, Esa-Pekka Salone...

diegobueno

The actual definition of a gentleman is someone who plays the saxophone and refrains from playing transcriptions of early music on it.

There's plenty of wonderful modern music for, and with, the instrument.

diegobueno

I had no idea that he abhorred the saxophone - a somewhat 'sexy' instrument which my nephew (a medical doctor) also plays. He, along with the also recently departed jbuck, felt the saxophone was not a suitable instrument for classical music. I couldn't convince him otherwise. I don't know what he t...

diegobueno

Whoa! I'm seeing posts from him here dated, Nov. 29, 2019. The loss of John F is certainly quite a blow to this forum, since it seems like at least 40-50% of all posts were from him. He was very knowledgeable and very opinionated. I disagreed with him often enough that I got the feeling that he rega...

diegobueno

I haven't noticed that Franck's D minor Symphony has dropped out of the repertory. It seems to come up on programs often enough, at least for my taste. I have performed the piece twice, most recently with the Prince George's Philharmonic (in Maryland) in October. If the major league orchestras are g...

diegobueno

The obvious comparison is with Steve Reich's Come Out , which also manipulates a looped vocal sample where the loops are out of synch and create complex rhythmic patterns. In this case, the course of the piece is more complex than increasing complexity (as in the Reich), but the underlying vocal sam...

diegobueno

Just musing aloud, really, but doesn't music require some sort of organising principle? It doesn't have to be rhythm, melody or harmony but it's pretty hard without at least one of them for me to enjoy it. You might see that simply as a personal failure by me, and you might be right. Some people ju...

diegobueno

The Glimmerglass Opera in Cooperstown, New York has been steadily producing Handel operas. I've seen three of them, Agrippina, Orlando and Acis and Galatea . I was pleasantly surprised at how well they work in the theater, even with all of the da capo arias and other baroque conventions. Orlando fea...

diegobueno

They'll probably ignore you, but it's a fight worth fighting. They should play Tehillim no matter what time of year it is.

diegobueno

Sounds like movie material. They could call it The Harpsichordist.

diegobueno

Suggested listening: Piano music of Guy Sacre ( 1948 - ),pianist Billy Eidi, my Timpani cd released 1995: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0r0XmFxf2OE&list=OLAK5uy_nbcJnpdY24l1vU7-UKTIaWjZbx7PDNtXI Sacre , what a name for a modern composer to have, especially one that writes in a style reminiscent o...

diegobueno

Agreed. In music as in language, newness is created by combining the familiar basic elements (pitch, words) in original ways. After composing 100 symphonies, Haydn could and did still create original works in the form, as Shakespeare could after writing 100 sonnets. Right. And at the same time new ...

diegobueno

I think it goes without saying that music composed recently will sound different than music composed 100 or 200 years ago, simply because people have different experiences, different means of expression and different sounds in their ears than people in earlier times. Any composer left to express the...

diegobueno

His 4th symphony was written in 2013, but before he died he had completed a 6th. His music tends towards dark moods, and the 2nd of this symphony's 2 movements is called "Doloroso". The opening movement is uncharacteristically cheerful.

diegobueno

I related to your comment about your brain having no more room for certain composers!! Can you post any of the modern works you like, if these are available? This is a list of pieces which I have enjoyed and really rock my boat musically speaking. Some of them I've known for a long time, some of th...

diegobueno

Rautavaara Clarinet Concerto I heard Stoltzman play this in 2003 in Carnegie Hall. It wasn't the premiere performance, but close to it. It's a beautiful work, and Stoltzman sounded fabulous. The concerto spends a lot of time in the upper altissimo register, many ledger lines above the staff. I had ...

diegobueno

Sounds interesting.

diegobueno

I think food like that was meant to be consumed with Falstaff (if only they still made it)

diegobueno

One of the great pleasures I take in music is discovering new music (that is, new to me) and taking pleasure in it, absorbing its contents and adding it to my memory banks so to speak, and finding out what makes it work. As I get older I find that certain stylistic categories have been filled up, an...

diegobueno

Half a dozen 'toxic males' saved the lives of Sydney-siders yesterday when a nutcase wielding a knife went on the rampage in the CBD killing 1 woman and badly injuring another. They held him down with cafe chairs and a milk crate over his head until police arrived. So enough of the politically-moti...

diegobueno

It’s a shame it took the recent death of Ben Johnston to goad me into listening to his celebrated series of string quartets, but I must say I’m not the only one. In fact discs of the Kepler Quartet’s Ben Johnston cycle have been a little bit hard to get ahold of. I now have two discs of the three di...

diegobueno

Nice! Thank you. (assuming that was in reference to my piece). I wanted to add that that flute community is extremely proactive in encouraging new music for flute. They go out of their way to encourage composers. I'm sure I will be writing more music for flute. There are two American composers who ...

diegobueno

The group Quaternity gave this performance of my Murmuration for flute quartet at the Florida Flute Festival in 2018, and did an especially good job of it. This piece is inspired by the mass movements of starlings in the evening, creating fluid, undulating shapes as they search out spots to roost fo...

diegobueno

I'm a Tippett fan of long standing, and am always pleased when someone takes on one of his difficult scores -- and they're all mind-bogglingly difficult. Ang seems to have really gotten this well under his fingers, and yeah, the fast movement is really quite exhilerating. Tippett's last piano sonata...

diegobueno

I kept waiting for the reviewer to tell me what the wrong question is that Lepage is trying to answer, and what's the right question?

diegobueno

Thank you, Lance and maestrob for your comments. There's no particular connection between the city of Silver Spring and my piece Silver Spring other than the fact that I was in that city when I needed a title. The piece exists in two other versions, the original version for clarinet quartet (3 clari...

diegobueno

A few weeks ago, on March 23, the Prince George's Philharmonic (Prince George's County, Maryland), under the direction of Jesus Manuel Berard, gave the first complete performance of my orchestral work Silver Spring . Silver Spring is a suburb of Washington DC that sits on its northern border in Mont...

diegobueno

The news has just come out that conductor Michael Gielen just died. The German website I've linked to describes him as a composer, but I remember him mainly as a conductor. Specifically, I remember him as the conductor of a 1973 recording of Schoenberg's Moses und Aron which I found mind-blowing and...

diegobueno

Tonight we saw this Bdway play directed by Bartlett Sher-a very impressive production-wonder if he could talk to Gelb about finding someone to make it into an opera ala Marnie! It could be, given the right librettist and composer. It sounds like something that Jake Heggie ( Dead Man Walking, Moby D...

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