The Complete WZ
Renewable Music
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3y ago
Composer Walter Zimmermann has greatly expanded his website, under his own Beginner Press label, with loads of scores and recordings, here.  High recommended.  ..read more
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Judy Dunaway Interviewed
Renewable Music
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3y ago
Here's a lively interview with composer Judy Dunaway. Dunaway is perhaps best-known for her music for her own instrument of virtuosity, the balloon, but her music is about much more than those air-filled elastic vessels ..read more
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Program Notes: Stage Patter
Renewable Music
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3y ago
What a composer says about her or his music is often misdirection (intentional or not.) In this aspect, composing can be thought of as a form of stage magic with a similar arsenal of tricks (production, vanishing, transformation, restoration, transposition, transportation, escape, levitation, penetration, prediction ..read more
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A Note on Accompaniment
Renewable Music
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3y ago
Why is it assumed that an accompaniment runs simultaneously with the thing it's accompanying? When an adult accompanies a child to an event or the zoo, say, or someone walks with a another person — or maybe a pet — on a walk through a park or shopping mall, the accompaniment can be side by side or one ahead of the other. (Indeed, in crowded spaces, single file may be the rule rather than side-by-side.) So why not more pieces in which the thing and its accompaniment are not simultaneous, but just proximate, in the same neighborhood, keeping an ear or eye out for the other? I could imagine a sol ..read more
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Lloyd Rodgers (1942-2016)
Renewable Music
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3y ago
The composer Lloyd Rodgers has left us.  Born in Long Beach, California (June 2, 1942 - December 28, 2016, in San Diego), living away from Southern California only for two years in his first college teaching gig in Michigan.  He studied, bachelor's-master's-doctorate, at UCLA, where, as a grad student, he was a close informant of Roy Harris (Harris would have Rodgers listen to the latest LPs that came his way and report back on them so that Harris wouldn't have to listen himself), a co-conspirator with Douglas Leedy, then low-man and house radical on the composition faculty totem ..read more
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Pauline Oliveros
Renewable Music
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3y ago
Pauline Oliveros had a rare presence and that presence will continue; it had a spiritual, even mystical, character, capable in her music of heights, yet was reliably down-to-earth, mostly tender, sometimes fierce, but often profoundly funny.  She was a pioneer in musical theatre pieces (Double Basses at Twenty Paces, Big Mother is Watching You, Crow II, Rose Moon, Njinga the Queen King, Io and Him and the Trouble with Her,  The Island of Maps), in the use of electronics in music (I of IV, Bye-bye Butterfly, and all of her work founding or co-founding electronic music studios and with ..read more
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Karl Kohn is 90
Renewable Music
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3y ago
Congratulations (as it happens, from Bali, but that's another post) to composer Karl Kohn on his 90th birthday! Although Karl and his duo-pianistic partner Margaret Kohn have given up their concertizing (they were perhaps the finest duo piano team in the US, with fantastic performances of everything from En Blanc et Noir to Visions de l'Amen, the Bartok Sonata, Structures, Piano Phase, the Ligeti...), he continues to compose in his distinctive athematic style, poised between total chromaticism and the local suggestion of the tonal. Viennese-born, a student of Piston and Fine at Harvard, but lo ..read more
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Chris Brown in his Primes
Renewable Music
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3y ago
I don't have much to do with recordings, but I can recommend this new one, by Chris Brown, of his Six Primes for solo piano in a 13-limit just intonation, with each piece or movement in the set using a intervallically distinct subset of the tuning.  (This is mining resources in a very rich tonal vein; Douglas Leedy's masterful Pastorale for chorus and retuned piano four-hands uses a tuning differing from Brown's by only two notes (for intonation enthusiasts: the 13s in Six Primes take the place of syntonic comma-lowered tones in Pastorale.) Although Brown and I shared teachers a ..read more
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A Tempo
Renewable Music
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3y ago
Just to note that I've been particularly enjoying reading the journal Tempo of late.  From the late Bob Gilmore's  editorship to that of his estimable successor, Christopher Fox with a lively reviews section under Juliet Fraser, Tempo has been on a lively streak.  In high school, I used to pour through back issues in the stacks of a local college, fascinated, as the topics in Tempo were reliably a little exotic to me. Though less parochial than the Musical Times with its strengths in music from the UK (with an apparent balance between mainstream, modernist, and experim ..read more
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