Born today

[Mirror Image]

Yes, his Poem for Flute and Orchestra is one of my favorite pieces.

Beautiful work certainly, jochanaan.

[Mirror Image]

A Happy Belated B-Day to the great Swiss composer, Frank Martin (born September 15, 1890):



Martin's long, quietly productive career reflected a quest to reconcile creative imperatives with stylistic integrity in an era of unprecedented technical challenges, experiments, and fragmentation. A conventionally trained musician would have been less liable to brook such challenges as an ethical dilemma or to see in them an almost paralyzing array of possibilities, while Martin, the tenth child of a Calvinist pastor, felt both keenly. Martin began composing at 8, was overwhelmed by a performance of Bach's St. Matthew Passion at 10, and by his 16th year knew that music was his destiny. While formally studying mathematics and physics at his parents' behest, he pursued music privately with the distinguished Swiss composer Joseph Lauber, who introduced him to the rudiments of piano, harmony, and composition. Martin became an able interpreter at the piano and harpsichord and, in later life, proved well enough equipped to make a definitive recording of his difficult Preludes for piano. In 1918 Martin moved to Zurich, then on to Rome and Paris, returning to Geneva in 1926 with the experience of jazz hot in the ear. A meeting that year with Émile Jaques-Dalcroze, founder of eurhythmics, went hand-in-hand with exploration of Hindu and Bulgarian rhythms, issuing in the orchestral triptych Rhythmes (1926) an element of rhythmic nervosité as a persistent feature of his music. Modal and serial elements also informed his work without being slavishly adopted. That the fairly prolific Martin achieved his first characteristic work -- the secular oratorio Le vin herbé (1938-1941) -- only as he passed his 50th year owes as much, perhaps, to the German-dominated insularity of Swiss musical life as to the search for an ideal purity of utterance. The impact of Debussy and Ravel, for instance, was brought to bear only during the Great War through the revelations of Swiss conductor Ernest Ansermet, who performed Martin's Les dithyrambes in 1918 and became a champion of his work, making several classic recordings of it. Recognition came in the form of teaching posts, directorship of the Technicum Moderne de Musique, president of the Swiss Musicians' Union 1943-1946, a composition class at the Cologne Hochschule für Musik 1950-1957, and commissions (e.g., by Geneva Radio for the oratorio In terra pax for broadcast on armistice day). In 1943 he married his third wife, Maria Boeke, and in 1946 moved with her to Amsterdam, and later to Naarden. Masterworks flowed from his pen between concert tours that carried his music worldwide.

[San Antone]

Andrzej Panufnik : Born in Warsaw on 24th September 1914



"In all my works, I attempt to achieve a true balance between feeling and intellect, heart and brain, impulse and design."

Andrzej Panufnik is one of the most important and original symphonic composers of the 2nd half of the 20th century. His output includes ten symphonies, with Centenary commissions from Sir Georg Solti for the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and Seiji Ozawa for Boston.



RTRH

[Brian]

September 25 is a real blockbuster: Rameau, Saint-Saens, and Shostakovich!

[San Antone]

Lots of competition today, along with the composers Brian listed, today is also the birthday of Glenn Gould.  But I chose a remarkable composer, whose work is not well known but had he lived longer might have been a second Mozart.

George Frederick Pinto : potentially the English Mozart



As a musician he excited an extraordinary degree of admiration from well-qualified critics. Samuel Wesley said that 'a greater musical Genius has not been known'; Salomon remarked that 'if he had lived and been able to resist the allurements of society, England would have had the honour of producing a second Mozart'; J.B. Cramer, William Ayrton and others joined the chorus of enthusiasm. The chief source of their admiration seems to have been Pinto's compositions. Yet within a few years of his death, his name was almost forgotten by the public.

[San Antone]

Phill Niblock turns 82 today. 



Happy Birthday Phill

Phill Niblock is a New York-based minimalist composer and multi-media musician and director of Experimental Intermedia, a foundation born in the flames of 1968's barricade-hopping. He has been a maverick presence on the fringes of the avant garde ever since. In the history books Niblock is the forgotten Minimalist. That's as maybe: no one ever said the history books were infallible anyway.

Bio, news and audio clips can be found here.

[San Antone]

Alexander von Zemlinsky : combining the divergent tendencies of Brahms and Wagner.



Alexander Zemlinsky (October 14, 1871 – March 15, 1942) was one of the most powerful musical voices of his time.  A remarkably influential musician, he had connections with both the more traditional and the Second Viennese School.  Although his work was nearly forgotten after the war, he has recently been recognized as one of the 20th century's significant compositional voices.

https://www.youtube.com/v/JxjBNCnxcqE

[San Antone]

Lera Auerbach : composer; poet



Lera Auerbach's music has been compared to that of Shostakovich, and with good reason. She remains committed to a fresh use of tonality, without denying herself the full resources of modern technique. The 24 Preludes for cello and piano follow the traditional journey through all the major and minor keys.

[San Antone]

Franz Liszt



For decades Liszt's compositions were disparaged as nothing more than virtuosic concert showpieces and salon bon-bons.  However modern scholarship has accepted that Liszt, the composer, was very daring for his period.  It is now accepted that his innovations and manner of writing for the piano would influence 20th century composers such as Schoenberg, Bartok and Messiaen, among others.

[San Antone]

Anestis Logothetis : experimenting with graphical notation



"Logothetis employs this system to different ways of imprinting the contemporary sound on the score in order to express the sense of space in musical notation and redefine the roles of the composer, the performer and the audience, during the composition and performance of a piece."

[San Antone]

Jacob Obrecht : Netherlands Renaissance composer born #OnThisDay

[San Antone]

Krzysztof Penderecki : Poland's greatest living composer born #OnThisDay

[torut]

Scott Joplin (November 24, 1868 - April 1, 1917)


As a composer Joplin refined ragtime, elevating it above the low and unrefined form [...] This new art form, the classic rag, combined Afro-American folk music's syncopation and 19th-century European romanticism, with its harmonic schemes and its march-like tempos. [...] Joplin intended his compositions to be played exactly as he wrote them – without improvisation. Joplin wrote his rags as "classical" music in miniature form in order to raise ragtime above its "cheap bordello" origins and produced work that opera historian Elise Kirk described as, "... more tuneful, contrapuntal, infectious, and harmonically colorful than any others of his era." - Wikipedia