Spring 2010 Issue

On the cover:
Preston Trombly’s “Sonata #2”, mixed-media assemblage made from piano parts in combination with other materials and artist pigments.
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Orchestral Underground: conversations

by Anne Eisenberg

Roger Zare, Time Lapse; Sebastian Currier, Next Atlantis; Paquito D’Rivera, Conversations with Cachao; Anne Manson, conductor; Zankel Hall, January 29, 2010
The young American composer Roger Zare was inspired by photography when he wrote Time Lapse, an inventive and lovely orchestral piece that had its world premiere on January 29 at Zankel Hall in a concert of the American Composers Orchestra.

Zare seeks to create a musical counterpart to time-lapse photography, where weeks-long processes like plants growing and budding are speeded up and shown in seconds. He is also interested in the opposite technique: high-speed photography, when the path of, for instance, a speeding bullet is slowed down and made visible in a series of exposures.

Zare’s piece (an ACO/Underwood commission) is a musical version of these visual expansions and contractions, but it’s heard instead of seen in vibrant, unusual music ingeniously orchestrated for strings, winds, brass and percussion to play with our sense of time.
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Americans in Rome

Music by Fellows of the American Academy in Rome, Donald Berman, Artistic Director, 4 Discs, Bridge Records 9271A/D 2008.

by Andrew Violette

The first thing that struck me was the homogeneous style. These composers are not the pioneering visionaries you’d expect from an American disc. You’ll find no Conlon Nancarrow, La Monte Young, Kenneth Gaburo, Morton Feldman or Philip Glass. Instead you’ll find what Kyle Gann terms “midtown” composers – those still working within a tradition acceptable to mainstream ticket and CD buyers of classical music. The craftsmen on these discs reap the rewards of a musical system which lauds those who put out well-packaged and highly skilled music appealing enough to woo the average concert-goer who wants “something more” than another rendition of Mahler but is still put off by a premiere of Milton Babbitt. Bridge’s Americans in Rome marks the history and success of this institutional sponsorship (Problem: how to create good music without pandering). I juggled the first eighteen tracks on disc A (vocal music), without reading the copious notes beforehand, to see if I could pick out the composers. I couldn’t. They all sounded alike. But this is understandable. Samuel Barber and his partner, Gian Carlo Menotti, had already worked out the lingua franca of this type of American art song music which would appeal to a middle-brow audience and it stuck – all the way to third generation Robert Beaser.
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Theresa Sauer: Notations 21

Published by Mark Batty Publisher, New York 2008

by Frank Retzel

“We live in an incredible time in music history – here is only a small sampling of the evidence.” With these words from the Preface, Theresa Sauer launches her 40-year revisiting of John Cage’s unique book Notations. As Cage sampled the notational evidence at mid-20th Century, Notations 21 is timely with its view of score practice early in the 21st century. Like Cage’s book, numerous composers are represented (here over 100), placed not according to the type of music but alphabetically.
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