21st century classical music

[San Antone]

Julian Anderson ~ Eden

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M1Iv224AGF0

An Echo from Heaven: Orchestral Works of Julian Anderson on LPO

[San Antone]

Salvatore Sciarrino - Libro Notturno delle Voci (2009)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2ee45U2Q64o

Mario Caroli, flute

Donaueschinger Musiktage 2009, Vol. 1
NEOS records, 2011

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Tristan Murail - Légendes Urbaines (2006)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iNnjWc_f0XE

Note from the composer:
Légendes urbaines arose from a specific commission by the Ensemble intercontemporain for a "theme" concert integrated into a thematic season. The themes were: the city, travel, and more precisely for this concert, New York - New York is obviously not a travel destination for me, but rather a frequent "commute" from my semi-rural residence. Literary or visual themes in music have caused much ink to flow and left more than one baffled. Can music express or tell? Is it possible to bring the symphonic poem back to life, to continue writing operas? If so, is this legitimate, or is doing so not definitively obsolete? Since I believe in an experimental approach, I decided to rise to the occasion and make an attempt at the proposed subject, though not without keeping a certain ironical distance from the exercise. It was also a chance to research several models, not depriving myself of more or less transparent references to several of my predecessors to the new continent. The formal structure is that of Pictures at an Exhibition, with suites of musical illustrations intertwined with promenades - musical references that can be fun to guess - the visual allusions, starting points or destinations of the musical reverie, will not be the Empire State Building, the Statue of Liberty and other postcards formatted for tourists, but rather the images and sensations provoked by frequenting a city both familiar and completely foreign.

[San Antone]

Pretty good article by Frank Oteri on New Music Box.  Here is an excerpt of a much longer article ~

The most exciting music being created today is not the product of a single compositional aesthetic or the work of just one segment of the population. (Pick your prejudice and throw it away.) It cannot be contained geographically or be hermetically sealed up in impenetrable genre boxes. What writers like Vanhoenacker get so wrong when they look at statistics is how arbitrarily creative work is carved up to fit into niches that are no longer relevant. (It's important to point out that in the percentages he shared as proof that classical music and jazz are at the bottom of "the business of American music," no genre has a majority. That's a far more significant piece of information which speaks to what music in the 21st century is all about thus far.)

During the question and answer period following a fascinating panel discussion at the CMA conference moderated by Joel Harrison, which also included Missy Mazzoli, Clarice Assad, and Billy Childs, Kevin James said something that I believe is emblematic for our time:

Composers now prefer to be beyond genre. There is no sound that I would not consider. Composers today want that flexibility.

That last quote really speaks to me.  I would love to think we are finally entering a post-genre era.

[San Antone]

Hilda Paredes ~ Señales, Hommage to Jonathan Harvey (2012)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BTLQDPwY9Qs

[San Antone]

Hannes Lingens

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qkY6vZWmxg8

Much of what Lingens has done has involved improvisation of electronic music,often with collaborators.  But he recently completed four pieces for quintet utilizing graphic notation. 

Review here.

Berlin composer Hannes Lingens' Four Pieces for Quintet contains realizations of four of Lingens' graphic scores as performed by Koen Nutters and Derek Shirley on double basses, Johnny Chang on viola, Michael Thieke on clarinet, and Lingens on accordion. The scores, which happily are included with the release, are elegantly simple designs consisting of rectangles and squares of four different colors plus white, arranged in five rows. For this performance each color was associated with a tone, to be held for a length of time presumably varying with the length of the square or rectangle in which the color occurs. The duration of each of the four realizations was set at five minutes.

[San Antone]

RYUICHI SAKAMOTO + TAYLOR DEUPREE
DISAPPEARANCE



Description and clip here.

[San Antone]

Marco Stroppa ~ Aye theres the rub

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

for solo cello

[San Antone]

Hugues Dufourt ... L'origine du monde (2004)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mujQmKqIcJ8

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Edith Canat de Chizy ~ Les Rayons du jour (2005)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4VS4081tr2M

She studied first under Ivo Malec and then, in 1983, came the decisive meeting with Maurice Ohana.  At the same time she worked on electroacoustics both at the Paris Conservatoire Supérieur and with the Groupe de Recherches Musicales.

Edith Canat de Chizy's training as a violonist means she is very familiar with string writing. She has an obvious sense of timbre and sound matter which is particularly in evidence in her orchestral works. Her independent language and freedom of style have enabled her to create a singular sound world where her imagination holds sway.

Her viola concerto Les Rayons du jour, commissioned by the Orchestre de Paris, premiered in February 2005 by Ana Bela Chaves under the direction of Christoph Eschenbach.

[San Antone]

Max E. Keller ~ Dialoguefelder (2000) for string bass and percussion

https://www.youtube.com/v/vVjhVOXh2vQ

Max Eugen Keller (born March 19, 1947, Aarau) is a Swiss composer, jazz pianist and improvising musician. He was one of the first free-jazz musicians in Switzerland. Since 2007 he is chairman of the Swiss Society for New Music.

He has composed about 100 works, including electronic music. He produce a chamber opera (commission of the Komische Oper Berlin) and several songs. His compositions have been performed in Europe, Australia, South Africa, North and South America, Russia, Korea, China, Mongolia and Azerbaijan (including the World Music Days in Zurich (1991) and Mexico (1993)). Performers were the Orchester Musikkollegium Winterthur, the Tonhalle Orchester Zürich, the Ensemble Sortisatio and the Hanns Eisler New Music Group.

[San Antone]

Richard Wernick ~ The Name of the Game for Guitar and Eleven Players (2001)


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Cb_2ppi_2k


David Starobin (guitar), International Contemporary Ensemble, Cliff Colnot

[San Antone]

Mauricio Pauly

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tWrhhsAe7N8

"vs. el monopolio de la memoria"

From the composer's website:
(b. Costa Rica / UK resident since 2007) I am a chamber electroacoustic music composer and electric bass player. Recent commitments include performances at Ultima Festival for Contemporary Music in Oslo, MATA Festival in New York and Aldeburgh as well as commissions for Darmstadt 2010 (Staubach Honoraria) and 2012. Upcoming performances in Paris, Geneve, Bordeaux, Melbourne, Berlin, New York, London, TelAviv and at Warsaw Autumn.

In 2011, I was awarded the Costa Rican Composers Association Composition Prize. I'm artistic co-director of Distractfold Ensemble and play electric bass with the Manchester-based trio, A Greater Horror. I am also a founding member of the Altavoz Composers. I teach at the Royal Northern College of Music in Manchester and at the Architectural Association Interprofessional Studio in London.

[San Antone]

Alberto Posadas ~ Oscuro abismo de llanto y de ternura

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IDn1U1pKO2w

From Wikipedia:
Alberto Posadas was born in 1967 in Valladolid where he underwent his first musical education which he then continued in Madrid at the Madrid Royal Conservatory.

In 1988 he met Francisco Guerrero Marín with whom he studied composition and whom he considered his real master. This meeting represented an important turning point in his career. Together with Guerrero he discovered new techniques for musical form creation such as mathematical combinatorics and the fractals. Nonetheless, his determination and constant search for the integration of aesthetics in these procedures led him to employ another "model" of composing such as the translation of architectural spaces into music, the application of topology and painting techniques related to perspective or the exploration of the acoustic features of instruments at a micro level.

He explored the possibilities of electro-acoustic music developing, in a self-taught way, through various projects starting with Liturgia de silencio (1995) and continuing with more recent pieces like Snefru or Versa est in luctum (2002). His interest in investigating the application of movement to the electronic transformation of sound determined him in 2006 to become involved in a multi-disciplinary project promoted by IRCAM Paris whose premiere is scheduled for 2009.

[San Antone]

Billone ~ Mani. Giacometti

https://www.youtube.com/v/3Nf3PlsQvRA

Mani.Giacometti (2000)
for Violin, Viola and Violoncello

Commissioned by the Südwestrundfunk and Ensemble Recherche with support from the Ministry for Culture, Baden-Württemberg.

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Philipp Maintz

https://www.youtube.com/v/SoWi7kinF04

Tourbillon (2008) ~ music for violin, viola und klavier

[San Antone]

Sebastian Currier ~ Time Machines (2007)
concerto for violin and orchestra

https://www.youtube.com/v/DnEsELZUk54

From the description on Boosey & Hawkes website:
World Premiere
6/2/2011
Avery Fisher Hall, New York, NY
Anne-Sophie Mutter, violin / New York Philharmonic / Alan Gilbert

Composer's Notes     
Time Machines is a seven movement concerto for violin and orchestra, written for and dedicated to Anne-Sophie Mutter. Each of the seven movements explores some aspect of the relationship between the perception of music and time. 

In the first movement, fragmented time, the solo violin holds together diverse short, abrupt, and incongruous fragments drawn from later movements. In this way the movement is also about future time, as it allows for brief glimpses of material heard in the rest of the piece. In delay time, the second movement, with the exception of three held chords, the entire fabric of orchestral textures is nothing but a reverberation, a resonance, of the violin's lyrical line: not a note sounds that wasn't first formulated in the violin before it's "delayed" representation is reflected in the orchestra. The violin seems to propel everything forward at a frenzied, fast pace in the third movement, compressed time, which ends as abruptly as it begins.  In the fourth movement, overlapping time, passages of contrasting character, and rhythmic and metric structure, constantly cross paths, so that as one passage gradually fades into nothingness another is heard gradually coming into the foreground. Entropy, the principle that ordered systems move towards greater disorder, and which defines the forward moving aspect of time, is the basis for the musical rhetoric in the fifth movement, entropic time. This movement begins with a sharply chiseled motive presented in an orchestral unison.  From this point on, this ordered presentation gives way to more chaotic elements, as the theme itself is gradually dissembled. In backwards time, the sixth movement, the flow of time is momentarily reversed. Both the musical rhetoric and aspects of instrumental acoustics run "backwards" while brief flashes of previous movements mysteriously float by. In this way, it forms a relation to the first movement: where at the beginning there a glimpses of future time, here there are now glimpses of time past. In harmonic time, the final movement, the violin presents a long cantabile line amidst a varied harmonic landscape. 

It's only a little bit of an exaggeration to say that music is made of nothing but  time - well, and air too. Clearly the form of a piece is how it unfolds in time. On a smaller scale, melodic or rhythmic gestures are made of a series of events moving forward in time. Even pitch is a product of time: a pitch is created form a periodic oscillation, the less the time of each oscillation, the higher the pitch. This extends to timbre as well, since the tone color of an instrument is dependent on its overtones and overtones are simply vibration patterns that create pitches above the fundamental tone at a variety of time proportions. And the rest is air. A musician bows a string, blows air in a cylinder, strikes a metal object, and a series sound waves take that information to our ears, the intensity of those waves affecting the relative amplitude. It has always fascinating to me that an art form that is so penetrating, that seems to be able to inhabit a place inside one, is made of such ephemeral stuff.

— Sebastian Currier

[San Antone]

Denis Smalley ~ Base Metals (2000)

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

The title refers to the metal sounds that provided the central material for the piece, and it also evokes the creative process of transmuting these raw sources to a higher musical and expressive plane.

Notes from the composer:
All the metal sources derive from sound sculptures created by the artist Derek Shiel from metal objects collected over a period of time. From the wide range of objects I selected those with the internal resonant properties that could provide me with variegated spectral families. Some possessed intervallic and tonal properties, others were inharmonic or noisier, and some sounded more synthetic than truly metallic. Although there are a number of orchestrated impacts and resonances in the piece, I was less interested in the clash of metal than in more sustained morphologies. Thus there is a focus on varied pushes, surges, swirls and sweeps of spectral energy, balanced with calmer drifts, undulations and dips, all of which move in and out of more clearly pulsed moments. These motions are also spatial so there are approaches, emergences, dispersals and distant disappearances, sometimes leaving behind the residues of spectral trails. The metal-based families, which are hardly ever absent, are brought into relations with a few other sound-types, and those who know my other pieces might spot the occasional refugee-sound from the past, recontextualized.

Base Metals was composed in 2000 in the composer's studio and premiered on October 15, 2000 during the 7th International Acousmatic Festival L'Espace du son (Brussels, Belgium). The piece was commissioned by Sveriges Radio Malmö — Swedish radio in Malmö — (Sweden).

Thanks to Derek Shiel for making his sound sculptures available, and to Bosse Bergqvist for initiating the commission.

[San Antone]

Wolff ~ Exercise 28 (2000)

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

for theremin, violin, French horn and double-bass

[San Antone]

Thierry Machuel

(Pardon the Google translation) - French composer and pianist born in Paris, 1962, Thierry Machuel has devoted most of his work in the choral art on contemporary texts in many languages ​​of authors.  He has long been interested in the texts of testimony, writings or resistant communities with unique life experiences, such as those collected from inmates between 2008 and 2011 (box Clairvaux But the walls ... Grand Prize Academy Charles Cros 2010).  He was resident at the Villa Medici and the Casa Velazquez is rated price SACEM / Francis and Mica Salabert vocal music in 2008, a grant from the Fondation Beaumarchais in 2009 and commissioned by the Ministry of Culture in 2010 for the creation of his next opera, as well as the Grand Prize Lycéen Composers 2011.  His choral works are sung in Europe, Asia and the Americas.

He has also written a number of film scores, including in 2010, Film Socialisme by Jean-Luc Godard.

A work for string trio ~

Leçons de Ténèbres, op.59

https://www.youtube.com/v/-YNMJhaIyh4