Slouching Toward Lachenmann: Who Cares If I Listen?

 Schoenberg is dead.
-Pierre Boulez

Boulez is alive.
-Judd Greenstein

Milton Babbitt, 1916-2011.  In Memoriam.

I’ve been affected, in writing this post, by the Ecstatic Music Festival going on in New York City (through March 28, 2011).  I was able to attend only a small part of the opening day’s Marathon, but the part I attended was sublime.  The Chiara String Quartet played Jefferson Friedman’s String Quartet No. 3, and the NOW Ensemble played Judd Greenstein’s City Boy.  Both pieces were superb, the musicians excellent, and the composers were in attendance.  I was, yes, ecstatic, to be able to attend two more concerts that week.

"Only Connect!"

Only connect!  That was the whole of her sermon.  

Only connect the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted . . .

-E. M. Forster, Howard’s End

Music is my optimal language, and I want it to express my world.

-Dylan Mattingly, Composer

In 2006, a group of teenage musicians in California called Formerly Known As Classical presented a program of classical music that had been written “Since We’ve Been Born.”  That meant 1989, and the program they came up with was this:

Hallelujah Junction (1996) by John Adams
Nickelcurve (2005) by Preben Antonsen
Sonata for Lou Harrison (2004) by Matthew Cmiel
Of A Summer Evening (1988) by David Conte
Last Round (1996) by Osvaldo Golijov
Cantos Desiertos (1993) by Terry Riley

I knew the names of only two of the composers:  John Adams, who by that year was almost in his dotage, having reached the ripe old age of 59, and Terry Riley, who, at 71, was even older.  The others were unknown to me:  though Conte and Golijov were younger, they were well into middle age.  Antonsen and Cmiel are both quite young.