Rolling Classical 2017

I mean, partly I just really enjoy Carlos's sound and playing. Piece is contemporary return-to-tonality stuff but it's pretty.

I'm gonna loudly ring the tuomas frederick b and djp alarm here for Andre Caplet's Le Miroir de Jesus, a new acquisition for me. Almost an hour of ravishing spellbinding choir-with-instrumental-ensemble ritualizing.

A recording of Alberto Posadas's Sombras (Shadows) will be released tomorrow (or today if you're across the pond). I was bowled over by his Liturgia fractal for string quartet so I'm curious to hear how he negotiates the addition of a soprano and a clarinet. Here's an excerpt featuring the incredible Sarah Maria Sun:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J1SADwo8IEU

As a side note, I'm glad to see Romanian is gaining traction as a language worth setting to 'serious' music. La tentación de las sombras is based on Emil Cioran's Cartea amăgirilor (The Book of Delusions) and a few years back György Kurtág's Colindă-Baladă, for tenor, choir and orchestra, took its verbal and musical cues from Romanian folk songs.

Has that kurtag piece been recorded?

Yep, ECM released it this summer as part of Kurtág's Complete Works for Ensemble and Choir, which is a bit of a misnomer – quite a few of the compositions therein are for solo vocalist and ensemble. It's a great set, though occasionally a little too languid when compared to the old Hungaroton recordings:

https://www.ecmrecords.com/catalogue/1484665725/gyorgy-kurtag-complete-works-for-ensemble-and-choir-asko-schonberg-netherlands-radio-choir-reinbert-de-leeuw

oh my god, cioran no longer just for black metal then, eh?

I've never heard of Posadas before but that piece is really good! I will definitely investigate further.

I bought Unbound by the Jasper String Quartet recently and have been listening a fair bit. Pieces by big-name mostly NYC/NJ-based composers. The Gosfield piece is by far the best but the Lang and Shaw are really enjoyable too.

Was listening to various recordings of Saariaho's NoaNoa today while prepping tomorrow's lecture. It's really a remarkable sensuous piece. Based on recordings, I think I might even like the Macbook versions more than the old IRCAM version.

Ha, Emma Resmini is 17.

Yeah, NoaNoa is absolutely amazing, though nowadays it brings to mind, by way of contrast, the tedium of most of Saariaho's postmillenial output.

A piece on Claude Vivier in the NYT today!

http://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/29/arts/music/review-claude-vivier-canada.html?emc=edit_th_20171030&nl=todaysheadlines&nlid=5939657

Wow, will read. On the topic of Canadian music, this new release by the Victoria Guitar Trio, consisting entirely of works by contemporary BC composers, is really enjoyable. I'm planning to buy it. The Nobles pieces make good use of the microtonality that is afforded by the use of harmonics. Some nice interplay between percussive techniques and rhythmic pitched material in the Godin. Sharman also uses a lot of harmonics to bring out pleasant melodic material in "Suspended Waltz". "The Nagual's Dream" is a cool thing for guitar trio + a recorded part made from processed guitar samples.

Thanks for the NYT piece, JNJ, I look forward to reading it!

I'll be sure to check out that album, sund4r. I'm awfully, hopelessly Eurocentric when it comes to so-called 'classical' music and hence consistently struggle with North American composers, barring a few names (Claude Vivier, Aaron Cassidy, Joshua Fineberg, for instance, all of whom have/had close ties to European institutions). Canadian music (and, frankly, culture) remains a blind spot for me despite having spent the better part of my life in this country.

Ha, I have a lot of inchoate thoughts about those matters that I should probably sort through before posting them on the Internet. I'll just note that I'm almost the opposite wrt contemporary music. (Obv, everyone is Eurocentric about pre-WW2 art music.)

Inchoate though they may be, I'd be curious to read them.

Anyhow, one necessarily reductive way of looking at the divide is that I find contemporary North American art music to be more easy-going, perhaps because it is less awed by past models. I do not share this relative lack of anxiety, alas, and thus prefer the strenuous sublimity of contemporary European art music.

Having written this just now, I can think of innumerably many objections, but I'll let it stand for what it is.

For what it's worth, I very much enjoyed Concentric Rings (the James Nobles piece). It favourably reminded me of Per Nørgård's output for guitar, especially his late 1960s/early to mid 1970s 'infinity series' period (echoes of Takemitsu, too, which is always a plus). Temporal Waves strikes me as marginally less successful, perhaps because I'm wary of its NYC arpeggios. Godin's On Poetics is insufferable – the worst kind of faux-theatrical genre-hopping, drenched in superfluous irony. Suspended Waltz is genuinely pretty and September's reminiscences of a detuned harpsichord made me want to acquaint myself further with Sharman's music (I later remembered that two of his piano transcriptions were featured on a CD recital by Ortwin Stürmer, who notably recorded Horațiu Rădulescu's 'Lao Tsu' sonatas). I found The Nagual's Dream to be conceptually promising but ultimately tedious in its execution and Roark's work irritated me only slightly less than Godin's. Still, I'm glad I listened to the whole thing and would love to hear more stuff by Sharman.

I agree with you that "Concentric Rings" and the Sharman pieces are the best but I also have a higher tolerance for NYC arpeggios and flighty genre-hopping.

Outside of guitar repertoire, the first contemporary composers I really loved as a youth before knowing much of anything were Cage, Branca, and the minimalists (+ Zappa if he counts). I ended up going to the States for my PhD and, ironically, it seemed like most people in that programme revered European composers and European festivals and institutes. (4aron C4ssidy graduated a year or two before I started. I never knew him.) That world just somehow felt/feels a bit distant and impenetrable and idk if it's somewhere I could ever find a place (UK possibly excepted), but tbh, I really don't know much about it and haven't kept up. It's probably just a matter of being (very ambivalenty) a minor part of one (problematic in its own way) scene and not even really having a read on how things work in continental Europe. Occasionally, I'll check out what a former colleague has been doing since moving to France or Germany.

Tbh, I'm thinking now that maybe a lot of what I was exposed to was American composers or players who had moved to Europe or Europeans who had moved to the US more than Europeans from Europe.

It's also a matter of background. In my case, I never studied music formally so I haven't been in touch with local institutions that would have otherwise shaped my tastes. I also come from a European country so the desire to explore 'my' history was perhaps greater, if founded on an illusion. Anyhow, one thing that I simultaneously like and dislike about the North American approach is that there appears to be less of a dichotomy between so-called serious art and pop culture (in the broadest sense of the term). I listen to a lot of classical, but it's no substitute for metal, jazz, electronic, folk, pop, ambient, etc., and I feel like this is viewed as an incontrovertible fact on this side of the Atlantic. That being said, I generally find 'crossover' attempts, more prevalent in North America as a result of this ethos, to be rather uninteresting – they merely make me yearn to hear each individual component in isolation. This is hardly an absolute rule, though. It just shows how difficult it is to synthesize wildly divergent strands. For instance, I think of Fausto Romitelli as someone who successfully bridged the gap between Grisey and psych rock but very few names ultimately come to mind.

I find contemporary North American art music to be more easy-going, perhaps because it is less awed by past models

there appears to be less of a dichotomy between so-called serious art and pop culture (in the broadest sense of the term). I listen to a lot of classical, but it's no substitute for metal, jazz, electronic, folk, pop, ambient, etc., and I feel like this is viewed as an incontrovertible fact on this side of the Atlantic.

Yes, these are my main impressions of the key differences as well. Are there Euro equivalents of e.g. Eric Whitacre or even John Luther Adams or, say, Caroline Shaw? Would someone like Hauschka or Fennesz ever play a 'new music' festival in Germany or Austria? Maybe they would?

I saw the concert listed here today, which included a few premieres. I wasn't familiar with any of the composers beforehand but enjoyed much of it. The Gary Nash piece is listed incorrectly: Sui Generis Bastion is the title; this piece was my favourite. Made me think of Bartok at times; just really good varied solo viola writing with a nice balance of techniques and memorable motifs to hang on to. The Holland pieces were also good, especially Synchrony, which combined recorded speech with instrumental writing (including some inside-the-piano stuff).

I've been listening to Sonata for Harp by young-ish Yale composer Hannah Lash a lot after buying it a couple of days ago. I find I get more out of it the more I listen. It's satisfying to hear a contemporary (and musically modern) piece that makes effective use of a classical form like this, without being neo-Romantic schlock. I think of Debussy at some moments and, oddly, even a bit of Chopin during the second movement. (If only neo-Romanticism actually sounded like that more often.) Kind of gets me on the edge of my seat sometimes.

Not bad. Still too neo-Romantic for me – some melodic turns of phrase even brought Joseph Kosma to mind – but its unpretentiousness is welcome.

I don't know Kosma that well tbh. (Obv, "Autumn Leaves" is a classic.) Ime, though, in an American context, 'neo-Romanticism' usually refers to a sort of bombastic syrupy orchestral music that has little to do with what I love in Schubert or Chopin. (I don't even necessarily have something against bombast and syrup per se but this style of orchestral writing just doesn't speak to me.)

I love the Romantic era and any contemporary music that successfully captures its spirit is a wonder to behold. You're right, though, too much of it is, to quote Boulez's diss against Shostakovich (which I vehemently disagree with, by the way) a 'second, or even third, pressing of Mahler'.

A thread dedicated to exploring awesome neo-Romantic music would be nice, though we'd have to determine what 'neo-Romanticism' stands for in the first place.

We could probably do that here. I've given my one nomination (idk awesome but satisfying).

On the more traditional end of things, I'm rather fond of Pēteris Vasks's concerto for violin and string orchestra, Distant Light. For a less literal take on the neo-Romantic aesthetic, I'd nominate Jörg Widmann's Messe.

Still need to check those out. A couple of nights ago, I saw this concert by NYC's Tak Ensemble (soprano/flute/clarinet/percussion). It was lovely: I was surprised that they opened with Soper's Only the Words Themselves Mean What They Say: Charlotte Mundy's take on the vocal part was a bit softer and less intense than the versions I've seen before but really brought out a neurotic, humorous quality to the piece. Other highlights were Matthew Ricketts' Ms Speaker and Jen McLachlen's new piece. David Bird's Series Imposture was cool, too.

A thread dedicated to exploring awesome neo-Romantic music would be nice, though we'd have to determine what 'neo-Romanticism' stands for in the first place.

― pomenitul

one of the most frustrating things about contemporary classical music to me is this hyper-factionalization, this separation of anything left of the "western classical" tradition into mutually exclusive enclaves in a way that, honestly, reflects everyday life in 2017 but is _not_ reflective from the way i experience all other forms of music. this feeds a little bit into the _most_ frustrating thing about contemporary classical music, which is the apparent impossibility of keeping up with what's happening in it, hearing new compositions other than by happenstance.

i also am frequently stymied by my ignorance of so much of the classical music of the past; i have a hard time (in any field of music) confining myself to talking about what's going on now when most of what i listen to is new-to-me older stuff.

one of the most frustrating things about contemporary classical music to me is this hyper-factionalization, this separation of anything left of the "western classical" tradition into mutually exclusive enclaves in a way that, honestly, reflects everyday life in 2017 but is _not_ reflective from the way i experience all other forms of music.

I'm somewhat conflicted about this. On the one hand, I'm not sure I agree that this is more true of contemporary classical music in 2017 than of any other style, tbh, unless I'm not understanding you. (Maybe it was true in 1967?) Those Chamberfest concerts I was posting about from the summer were fairly diverse, e.g. the Penderecki String Quartet concert of Mozart, Schumann, Penderecki's 3rd, and Kelly Marie Murphy. I don't think a single concert by most metal or IDM (let alone mainstream pop/rock) groups would be anywhere near that broad. I know a composer/performer who e.g. writes spectral music as well as neo-Romantic Americana and play drums in a jazz fusion group. At the same time, I sometimes DO feel like I don't fit in anywhere as a composer or performer but this might be a function of the diversity and lack of aesthetic direction in today's new music world idk?

The last few albums I posted about here were honestly all things I just found by looking under "contemporary classical" on Bandcamp.

I'm listening to Distant Light now btw. P good so far. I like the folky theme around the 13m mark in the Ondine recording.

So admittedly, this is largely in the vein of the type of neo-Romantic music that I usually avoid but I can see the appeal and will listen some more.

well... i don't think the hyper-factionalization is something that occurs among the musicians themselves. i think it's more a factor of the listening community.

let's take metal for an example. if i want to know what the great metal records of 2017 are, lots of people are going to have opinions on what those are. i may not agree, but at least i know where to start listening!

what are the great compositions of 2017? i can ask you. i can ask pomenitul. i can browse bandcamp, which is a great site but positively stuffed with crossover on the classical side and when one gets away from crossover, prone to tumbleweeds.

it just seems like there's a state of nearly total structural breakdown when it comes to classical music as a form of _communication_.

Oh, yeah, totally. I feel like the problem there has to do with something other than factionalization but it frustrates me too. Maybe it's just a function of how small the audience has become?

Well that + WAM was never a tradition that was built around the release and promotion of recordings. Composers write scores, performers study them, concerts are organized, eventually someone might make a recording, but it is normal for a piece to be written years before a given listener might hear it, usually in the context of a concert where it is played next to pieces from other composers and eras. Then it might take a long time before they ever hear it again.

I think the fact that the culture isn't based around recordings is what makes it difficult. I could point to several important new recordings from the last few years (Hans Abrahamsen - Let Me Tell You, Andrew Norman - Play, John Luther Adams - Become Ocean, Caroline Shaw - Partita) but it only provides a skewed introduction to what's going on. Still, that's as good as it gets, I think, and it's good enough for me.

If you want to be as cutting edge as the rolling metal thread, you probably need to be a musician and/or composer yourself, and even that will only allow you to keep up with what's happening in your neck of the woods due to the privilege still granted to live concerts over recordings, at least in this particular field.

I'm not a journalist so I don't care about being a couple of years late. Does it even matter when it comes to so-called classical music? Even 'contemporary' is taken to mean something like 'the past thirty-odd years' or 'notated music made by living individuals.'

Anyway, relatively old-fashioned methods are still effective as far as I'm concerned: I check out various blogs, newspapers and magazines, as well as the catalogues of specific record labels (Aeon, Neos, Wergo, Kairos, Harmonia Mundi, ECM, Dacapo, BIS, Ondine, DG, HatHut, Mode, etc.). I tend to use Bandcamp when I want to hear more music by composers I'm already familiar with but who are underrepresented on record.

This approach probably wouldn't suffice if I were a professional, but it's good enough for me, especially since I listen to lots of other kinds of music as well.

Aren't we all overwhelmed, though, regardless of the genres we favour? Opening the 2017 end-of-year lists thread is a vertiginous experience for me despite the fact that it narrows the set by focusing primarily on pop music (in the broad sense).

Honestly, the general failure (dotted with myriad specific counterexamples) of "classical culture" to come to terms with the existence of recorded music is a pretty strong argument against the perpetuation of "classical culture" as distinct from "popular culture". At the same time I genuinely love many forms of classical music and would not like to see the classical idiom become a "dead language", particularly now that it finally has the opportunity to be something other than a male dominated nationalist/colonialist enterprise.

That's why I care about being able to know what's going on now. Because "classical music" is going the way of Latin. Only the most elite even know how to read it anymore. Nobody writes it. I love a lot of the different kinds of music that's out there today, but I think that music would be even better if more people knew how to write fugues.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QZM4yxbE0ZE

Most people don't care about such art forms, especially not in North America. Some things just aren't meant to be popular, and that's okay. It just decreases the likelihood of making a living out of it but that's just a function of late capitalism.

Honestly, the general failure (dotted with myriad specific counterexamples) of "classical culture" to come to terms with the existence of recorded music is a pretty strong argument against the perpetuation of "classical culture" as distinct from "popular culture".

Maybe it's not a failure?

Also, the new music world has definite problems but there's not really a shortage of composers or performers (or even scholars for that matter), unless I'm misunderstanding "only the most elite can read it; no one writes it".

Anyway, I do actually agree that I'd like to have more contemporary classical recordings in my mix, and/or I sometimes wish there was more going on compositionally in a lot of other music, so yeah idk maybe.

Well, this years winner of the Grawemeyer award, Bent Sørensens L’Isola della Città, can be heard on NYT. Second Danish winner in three years btw 8)

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/28/arts/music/grawemeyer-award-bent-sorensen.html

Also, the new music world has definite problems but there's not really a shortage of composers or performers (or even scholars for that matter), unless I'm misunderstanding "only the most elite can read it; no one writes it".

― No purposes. Sounds. (Sund4r)

well it seems like there's this very nearly open hostility from some corners towards the notion that people who aren't musicians trained in the classical tradition might want to listen to composed music. i understand that the (continuing) popular rejection of serialism probably hurt many people deeply, but i'm not sure forming essene communities is the best reaction to this.

Congrats to Sørensen! I haven't heard that particular piece yet, but his music never disappoints.

The Sørensen piece sounded good on first (slightly distracted) listen. The integration of contemporary techniques with more Romantic material was satisfying.

Rushomancy, I have a lot more exposure to people who i) desperately want a broader audience and strain to try to find one or ii) have resignedly given up. I really don't come across the "who cares if you listen?" attitude all that much from North American composers and musicians under 45 in the present day. Maybe with some more examples, I'd see what you're talking about. Are you thinking mainly of New Complexity types?

Come to think of it, Sørensen is an excellent example of a living neo-Romantic who doesn't elicit any skepticism on my part.

Rushomancy, I have a lot more exposure to people who i) desperately want a broader audience and strain to try to find one or ii) have resignedly given up.

I mean, also a bunch of iii) people who are happy with the audience they have, regardless of their educational background.

i'm not talking about the composers themselves! i'm talking about the _scene_. so many really great people but at the same time so much scenester bullshit :(