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.

Composers were asked to contribute a small section of one or more compositions and were asked to write a statement or description about their work. Several of those commissioned treated the book as a forum and submitted essays on topics such as notation, contemporary music, graphic notation and the creative process. I totally agree with Sauer – “all are completely fascinating and unique.” At 320 pages, 8 1/2 x 11 inches format and color used throughout, this is a gorgeous book, as visually striking as it is provocative.

Comparison with Cage’s book is unavoidable, and here we see some glaring differences in subject approach. The 1968 Notations uses a cross sampling of graphic and indeterminate scores and those in conventional (or nearly so) notation. One noticeable difference is that virtually all examples are in the composer’s hand. Several contributions are of composer sketches. There also seems to be a democracy of musical styles with conservative and radical artists existing in a peaceful kingdom. The accompanying text was typical Cage: one to sixty-four words (often cryptic) chosen with I-Ching chance operations and applied to the two hundred and sixty-nine composers. Notations is for a specialized reader, one who understands mid-20th Century notation and the many styles in existence. There is a wealth of personalities revealed in the examples chosen and in the composers’ manuscript. Creative processes and work methods are often reflected in the writer’s pen. Here is Aaron Copland’s thought on the matter: “Examining a music manuscript, inevitably I sense the man behind the notes. The fascination of a composer’s notation is the fascination of human personality.”

Beyond the examples of contemporary manuscript, Cage provided a few examples of music where score beauty is on an equal par with the distinctive quality of the music (eg. Roman Haubenstock-Ramati’s Mobile for Shakespeare). Graphic or indeterminate notation often could approach the level of conceptual art where the visual beauty of the score was equal to the sound upon realization. It is with this type of score that Notations 21 really hits its mark. From one page to the next we are presented with a bevy of pages suitable for framed display. Is the visual beauty, though, the only criterion for inclusion?

Theresa Sauer takes a cue from composer Earle Brown. After quoting the innovative composer on ‘open’ or ‘available’ form she writes “In other words, the identity of notation comes from its purpose for the creation of music, a phenomenon that can allow for spectacular variations in musical scores (Foreword p. 10).” She writes that she has “examined this phenomenon and the impact it has had on performance as well as our collective consciousness as consumers of art and music.” The result is Notations 21.

From one piece (and composer) to another we see the “spectacular variation” spoken of in the Foreword. There is the occasional work in traditional pitch/rhythmic notation. These all are of an evolved modernist aesthetic. Then, there are a great variety of graphic scores and scores that equally impact the visual and aural. A wonderful feature of Notations 21 is the composer’s note following many of the score pages. These help to explain the notational symbols and the visual component and/or provide a program note of meaning. There are some wonderful essays that examine the concept of notation in today’s world or more directly in the particular writer’s world. Here’s a small sample. After presenting composer Robert Fleisher’s Mandala 3: Trigon for soprano saxophone in score, a concise set of notes explains how to read the music. Following this, Fleisher’s essay ‘Being of Sound (and Visual) Mind’ explores the topic of notation via Cage’s book, Schoenberg’s concept, the visual/aural sense of Klee and Kandinsky, through Crumb and Haubenstock-Ramati. Four very unique graphic works are presented by composer William Hellermann. Following this is an extended letter written to composer Philip Corner to discuss “Score Art.”

Theresa Sauer, the composer who put the whole volume together, is represented by her work Parthenogenesis, written for da’uli da’uli (a kind of xylophone) and an unspecified number of female voices. In the note, she states that “the mother Komodo dragon and her genetic code are the source of all the lines and other designs within the score (p. 207).” A further program note discusses the meaning of ‘parthenogenesis.’ I’d love to see the rest of the score. That holds true for so many examples in Notations 21. Considering that a certain number of these are a type of intermedia (e.g., the visual is a notational trigger for the audio), I am curious how the style and design of notation might dictate the style of the individual composer, and might dictate the style of the realized composition. I have thought for a while about this very thing in my own music and am intrigued to see a volume exploring the same concepts.

My only criticism is that music of a more conservative nature (in sonic design and notational directive) is not included. So many countries and cultures, so many traditions of music are represented that anything possible would seem to be covered. Yet, going from the earlier compendium of Cage’s book with its myriad styles to the 21st Century graphic art of this new volume, one could easily be misled into thinking it reflects the mainstream. What about John Adams, Philip Glass, Arvo Part, film music? Theresa Sauer, in her Foreword, mentions the close deadline facing her after in order to meet the 40th anniversary of Notations . She seems to hope that further editions will come out which can include examples not in this volume. That would be welcome: it truly would allow for the continued Forum on new music, notation, art and music, creative process, etc. already launched.

What we have in Notations 21 is a beautifully rendered volume on notation. Beyond the composers, students and scholars of 20th/21st Century music, one can easily imagine this book in the hands of artists and art historians, and anyone who appreciates a book with stunning visuals. Bravo! II

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.

This version of American music (a love affair between our capitalism and Europe’s various flavors of socialism) was officially sanctioned in Roosevelt’s New Deal which funneled government cash into music projects for a middle class (supposedly) hungry for culture with a capital C. Enter Copland (along with Samuel Barber, Roy Harris and others) who sought to unite what critic Van Wyck Brooks in 1915 termed the false dichotomy between highbrow and lowbrow, academic and pop, intellect and pizzazz. He needed a recognizable American style and found it under the Parisian tutelage of Stravinsky-ite Nadia Boulanger.

I concur with Alex Ross’s statement in The Rest is Silence, page 291, “If you were to take a Stravinsky score such as the Octet or the Symphonies of Wind Instruments, loosen up the tightly controlled structure, and insert a few melodies of the New England hymnal or urban-jazzy type, you would have the beginnings of a Copland work such as Billy the Kid or Appalachian Spring. The entire style is implicit in the ‘Pastorale‘ of Histoire du soldat.”

Now take Samuel Barber, who knew a good thing when he heard it. He blended Copland’s new American sound with Sibelius’ Seventh Symphony and voila! Vanessa and the hundreds of Barber-Menotti modeled art-songs and operas by hundreds of other composers throughout the 20th century. Barber’s long, lush lines, rich orchestral color and elastic bar-lines mirror American diction perfectly (inspired perhaps by late Janacek’s conversational Czech). He was eminently soothing to an audience weaned on Brahms. The Barber songs featured on this compendium, In the Dark Pinewood, Beggar’s Song, Of That So Sweet Imprisonment and Sleep Now, were composed “in short order” and premiered at the Academy (1935) when the composer was in his mid-twenties. Barber himself was a vocalist (his aunt was Met contralto Louise Homer). He studied both voice and composition at Curtis. (The recording to hear Barber sing Barber is Great Performances from the Library of Congress, Samuel Barber, baritone and piano, Bridge 9156). On this CD soprano Susan Narucki and baritone Chris Pedro Trakas sing these early gems with careful diction and what Copland called Barber’s “absolute sincerity.”

Randall Thompson’s Siciliano (1978) is a lovely song – even taking into account the unmistakable echoes of Britten’s Cole Porter inspired Tell Me the Truth About Love. Its “flowing melodic character” (quoting the program notes) hearkens to the songs of the at-that-time-discredited Henry Cowell.

Sessions was the ur-university composer who resisted Copland’s new simplicity. He remained tied to the Schoenberg circle he befriended on his trip to Berlin in the early 30s. The Copland-Sessions concerts bridged this gap in a mutual neo-classic/American expressionist hug. Sessions became the spokesman for composers obeying only their “inner creative urge” with no creative obligation to write in a more populist style. (Query: What about the composer who writes populist music out of his “inner creative urge”?) Sessions’s influence as a teacher and writer would spawn the whole post World War II 12-tone crowd by way of his student Milton Babbitt so much so that Kurt List would write that Sessions’ atonal polyphony [would be] the only valid “expression of modern America.” I saw the American premiere of Roger Sessions’ Montezuma under Sarah Caldwell. The costumes were abominable (who wants to see fat singers in terry-cloth?) but the complaint at the time, that the orchestra buried the singers, I thought was unfounded. Still, Richard Aldag lightens the texture in his arrangement recorded here of Malinche’s Aria (violin, cello, flute, clarinet, piano, percussion) which brings soprano Susan Narucki to the fore. It’s a stunning rendition.

The CD is rounded off with two early neoclassic songs by Elliott Carter, Warble for Lilac Time and Voyage, composed for piano and voice in the 1940s and later orchestrated (1970s) on Carter’s return to the AAR. In these songs Carter had not yet renounced the Church of Copland. “I was particularly concerned with giving my compositions an American flavor,” he writes. In his Warble for Lilac Time he sought to use “smooth, flowing diatonic lines in the accompaniment and a lyric vocal line that becomes increasingly rhapsodic as the song progresses.” Later, of course, with the prodding of the philosopher-cum-music critic Adorno and the new Babbitt articles heralding the ecstasy of hexachordal-inversional-combinatoriality, Carter strayed from the party line. With this, the American supported European welfare state recipients at Darmstadt, headed by Boulez, embraced the new Carter as a member of their tribe. How they loved that dense, difficult First String Quartet with its juxtaposed voices, each independently getting-faster/getting-slower in its jazzy, Ivesian way!

But that’s the future. Here the neoclassic Carter is recorded beautifully by soprano Tony Arnold and sensitively conducted by Scott Yoo with the Colorado College Festival Orchestra. A new era and the neo-romantics group hugged the old Copland crowd: the “seven captivating works… personal and searingly communicative” (according to Robert Beaser) of disc B of this compendium reflect that. As on disc A, I juggled the tracks to see if I could name the composers. The only composer I got right alas! was Alexander Steinert and that was only because his 19th century late romanticism, by way of Gabriel Faure by way of Nadia Boulanger, stuck out from the peek-a-boo tonality offerings of the late 1990s and early 21st century. Steinert’s 1930 sonata for violin and piano, beautifully played by Donald Berman, piano, and Sunghae Anna Lim, violin, was rescued from out-of-print oblivion by Mr. Berman. Leo Sowerby wrote in 1928, “The sonata is reminiscent of Ravel, though the workmanship is splendid.” It was a pleasure to hear the recording. Once.

The others on disc B are pleasantly generic. True, Paul Moravec toys with the BACH motive, Stephen Hartke explores Renaissance counterpoint, Aaron Jay Kernis gets his shtick from a Mozart string trio and Martin Bresnick has his extended cello technique. Still, to these ears, they were all written with much skill and no particular personality. (P.S. I realize that these are Very-Distinguished-and-Lauded-American-Composers so I’m willing to concede that I may be a third-rate composer myself whose ears cannot discern the maverick in Moravec, the genius in Kernis or the pioneering-edge in Bresnick. On the other hand, the answer to my perception of their collective sameness might lie in their collective eagerness to please.) Disc C features an “assemblage of piano music [which] spans a period of almost seventy years,” says Yehudi Wyner’s program notes. There’s an offering of George Rochberg’s Bagatelles (1952) before he went functionally tonal in his Third String Quartet. It’s expertly executed by Donald Berman, who, by the way, performs all the piano music on disc C.

In Lukas Foss’ Fantasy Rondo (1944) the composer, according to Berman, “openly bows to the swing tradition of its time and is saturated with toe-tapping tunes.” Mr. Berman savors every beautiful moment in the piece but he doesn’t connect all those beautiful moments into a coherent whole. The work should swing but Berman’s tempo is so slow it’s danced with leaden feet. (Listen to Foss Plays Foss, Elysium, ELY 724 2003. The composer-pianist’s dance rhythms move; the attacks are crisp; the pedal light. Foss plays the contrasting sections of his Rondo so clearly that the structure leaps out.)

Disc D features music for winds and piano and, as one would expect of American instrumentalists, the performances are uniformly technically excellent. With the creation in the 60s of the National Endowment for the Arts and The Ford Foundation cash flowed from government and big corporate sponsors into the hands of the composer – provided the composer was willing to write in the received style of the time. (Sorry, no money for minimalists – this is the age of international dodecaphony. Philip Glass and Steve Reich would have to go into the furniture moving business. But Charles Wuorinen, George Perle, Harvey Solberger and company as well as all their students – take our money, please!). Yehudi Wyner and Andrew Imbrie both embrace this systematically intellectual nontonal writing that seems made to be analyzed in a university course on American late twentieth century contrapuntal technique. But who cares if you listen? – though Imbrie’s Dandelion Wine (played with technical proficiency by the Collage Music Ensemble) is, as a matter of fact, a beautifully written, artfully executed species of this style and Yehudi Wyner’s Commedia (also expertly played by the composer at the piano and Richard Stoltzman on the clarinet) is interesting of its type.

David Lang is the lone post-minimalist. He, along with fellow students of the Yale School of Music in the 80s, Julia Wolfe and Michael Gordon, wrote Bang on a Can’s Manifesto, “We had the simplicity, energy and drive of pop music in our ears… but we also had the idea…that composing was exalted.” Lang’s Vent heard here features the usual steady pulsing but also a peculiarly hypnotic second section though the performers, Donald Berman (piano) and Patti Monson (flute), don’t quite get the downtown style. (Benefit of the doubt: I don’t have the score but the execution sounds a little too careful, not pop enough, to my ears – but it could be the piece itself.) The disc ends with Harold Shapero’s Six for Five Wind Quintet (1995) – a musical dessert. Berman writes that “this CD project was designed to capture [a] community of composers, reclaim their music and put it in historical context.” “The time was ripe for reassessing the canons of twentieth century American music,” he continues. Mr. Berman, searching the steel drawers of the Academy’s three thousand plus scores, unearthed “among the more obscure personalities” some interesting music.

But has the AAR really played “a unique role in nurturing American composers,” as Adele Chatfield-Taylor, its president, asserts? Yes, if you happen to be a composer known to Isaac Stern, who exclaimed that, “every important American composer in the twentieth century was associated with the Academy.” But one look at Mr. Stern’s discography would convince you that, though a great virtuoso, he was hardly an authority on contemporary music. So in the end I can’t help but think what Elliott Carter’s pen-pal put forth in his Essays Before a Sonata. Charles Ives, premiere American musical visionary, wrote, “Possibly the more our composer accepts from his patron ‘et al’ the less he will accept from himself. It may be possible that a day in a Kansas wheat field will do more for him than three years in Rome.” And here’s to you Chuck! II

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.

The excellent conductor Anne Manson led the orchestra expertly through the complex score. In it, fast-moving packed passages full of glissandos, shimmering strings, echoing chimes and roaring climaxes change to attenuated, stretched-out passages punctuated with eerie but exhilarating sounds before snapping back again into fast, tumbling full orchestral lines.

Some of the unusual sound effects were achieved by the piano that had been “prepared,” in the manner of David Tudor, here with the addition of magnetic tape. For one effect, Peter Basquin, the pianist, held the free end of a long piece of ordinary magnetic tape of the kind found in cassette players. Before the performance, he tied one end of the two-to-three-foot piece of tape to the lowest C string on the piano. When the sound was called for, he pushed down the pedal on the piano and rubbed a finger along the magnetized side of the tape, creating an unusual bowing effect that separated and stretched out tones. Zare was inspired by photography in creating Time Lapse, but he wisely doesn’t dim the lights and add an attention-grabbing video of corn growing or plants budding. Instead, it was just the music that filled the mind and ear.

That was not the choice of Sebastian Currier, whose work Next Atlantis (an ACO/Goelet commission) followed Zare’s on the program. Currier, interested in using stringed instruments to evoke the sounds of water, created two versions of Next Atlantis, one with string quartet and pre-recorded sound, another for string orchestra, pre-recorded sound, and an accompanying video created by Pawel Wojtasik.

It was the video version that premiered at the Zankel concert, shown from the beginning to the end of the piece in a continuous series of vivid and dramatic images that gradually drew away much of the impact of the elegiac music. In Next Atlantis, the strings imitate the sounds of water, and the sounds of water are heard, too, in the electronic gurgles and drips, and that come from the speakers ringing the hall. But the video shots of New Orleans and the surrounding bayou that accompany these sounds, especially the close-ups of the serious faces of people standing amidst the ruins created by the hurricane Katrina, steadily leech attention from the music.

No such visual competition happened in the second half of the program, which showcased a concerto by Paquito D’Rivera, Conversations with Cachao, based on traditional Cuban music. Before the music started, there was a short video of D’Rivera, talking about the man to whom he pays homage in the concerto, his friend and fellow musician Israel ‘Cachao’ Lopez. But the video didn’t share the stage with the music: D’Rivera waited until it was done to lead the concerto. He was the center of the performance, joking with the audience, tapping his feet in their two-tone shoes, and playing both solo clarinet and alto sax, often in duets with the expert bassist Robert Black. The eclectic music, combining mambos with the occasional Hungarian folk rhythms and even echoes of a bar mitzvah, delighted the audience. It was a frigid night in New York, and the winds were whistling down from the shallow lobby into the two stories of escalators at Zankel, creating what is probably New York City’s only concert location with a wind tunnel. But people were whistling D’Rivera’s warm Cuban melodies as they left in the chill. II

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

In this Issue

+++
Contributors, 4
Bravi To, 4
Letters to the Editor, 4
A Note from the Editor, 5

+++
Live Performance Reviews
From the House of the Dead, 6
A Dark and Thorny Night, 8
Orchestral Underground: Conversations, 10
The New York City Opera Returns Home, 11
Love Has A Bitter Core, 13
Flute 311, 14
Celebrating Ursula Mamlok, 15
Soft Tones and Hard Hits, 16
A Passion for the 21st Century, 18

+++
CD Reviews
Monroe Golden: Alabama Places, 20
Other Worldly Sax, 21
Virgil Moorefield: Things You Must Do to Get to Heaven, 22
Americans in Rome, 22
Recent Releases, 25

+++
Book Reviews
Notations 21, 26
American Muse: The Life and Times of William Schuman, 27

Dotted Notes, 30
Advertiser Index, 30
Puzzle, 31

Leon Kirchner was a force of nature, as pianist, conductor, composer, and musical analyst. In 1966, he won the Pulitzer Prize for his Third String Quartet with Electronic Sound, which he had learned about mostly from Morton Subotnick, and never taught any of his students. I sought him out that year for a personal interview, before deciding on whether to attend Harvard College and study composition with him. It took months of phone calls and numerous messages, but I finally did reach him, and set up an appointment, at his home in Cambridge. What I thought would take about an hour ended up lasting over two and a half hours, as he insisted on impressing on me, in detail, the importance of acquiring and studying every note and every word of the Schnabel edition of the Beethoven Piano Sonatas (which of course I then did). At the end of those two and a half hours, he informed me that he had spent that amount of time with me not because of the recommendation I had brought with me from my composition teacher Elie Siegmeister, but because of the regards I had for him from cellist Benar Heifetz (who had played his music at Marlboro), the husband of my piano teacher Olga Heifetz. Indeed, I was to learn, Kirchner generally got along with and had a much higher regard (and use?) for performers than composers.

John Adams, a first-rate clarinetist and conductor who decided to become a composer and studied with Kirchner at Harvard the same years I did, has described him as “devastatingly candid” whose negative assessment “could require weeks for one to recover enough self-esteem to continue.” That was to some extent the effect Kirchner had on me, especially regarding a piece I wrote in his class, inspired by The Living Theatre - and R.D. Laing - called “The Bird of Paradise.” Although it called for a part to be recorded on tape, inspired partly by Kirchner’s Third Quartet, I was not encouraged to find a way to realize that part; Robert Moog told me (in 1970) that there was no way to do it technologically. Today there probably is, perhaps using portions of a recording of a 1970 reading I was allowed to conduct with James Yannatos’s Harvard-Radcliffe Orchestra; but Kirchner’s remarks in class, that he liked the first 12 bars of the piece but after that thought I should start over, made me so depressed that the piece has lain dormant ever since. He was also very ambivalent on the question of whether to join a protest against the Vietnam War which would forbid the broadcast of any of his music by American Forces Network. Not so the other composition teacher at Harvard, Earl Kim, who was the first to move for complete amnesty for the war protesters who had occupied University Hall, and later took off a whole year to work for Musicians for Peace and against nuclear war. After two years of study with Kim and one with Kirchner, I went back to Kim.

But Kim’s output as a composer was much more limited than Kirchner’s. Only a handful of Kim’s pieces were available for broadcast on the Harvard radio, whereas Kirchner’s took several hours, in an “orgy” I produced for and on Kirchner’s 50th birthday, Jan. 24, 1969, after which Kirchner took me to lunch.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. My freshman year, before getting involved in the radio, I wrote 9 articles, competing to become an editor of the Harvard Crimson. The last two were finally published, on Mar. 4 & 11, 1968: I’ve posted them on my website at
http://ljlehrman.artists-in-residence.com/articles/harvardcrimson1.html
and
http://ljlehrman.artists-in-residence.com/articles/harvardcrimson2.html

In the first article, I reviewed the Harvard Band. In the final article, I took on the Harvard-Radcliffe Orchestra, in a concert conducted by Kirchner, with his fellow faculty member Luise Vosgerchian (with whom I had also hoped to study) as soloist in his Second Piano Concerto. It was to be a great event, a confluence of the two most dynamic figures on the music department’s faculty.
Unfortunately, Vosgerchian missed some rehearsals due to illness, and when I played through the score Kirchner loaned me, and listened to the recording he had made with Mitropoulos of his First Piano Concerto, I sensed that something was wrong with the performance: He had written a piece inspired by the spirit of Berg and Schoenberg, while she was playing it as if it had been written by Bartók or Stravinsky. It tore me apart, but I felt I had to say it, somehow. When I tried speaking to Vosgerchian about it, she retorted, annoyed: “But I was only playing what the composer wrote and wanted!” Kirchner himself was more reticent. But the following January, he subtly agreed that I had been right. (”Right too soon” was how he once lovingly characterized a Mozart piece he conducted - a recording of which was played at his Miller Theatre memorial - hoping someone would attribute that quality to him too.)

The Kirchner 50th Birthday orgy broadcast an archival recording of a much more sensitive performance of the Second Concerto, by Leon Fleisher, Milton Katims, and the Seattle Symphony. When it looked as though we might not get clearance to broadcast that, I mentioned to Kirchner that we might broadcast the HRO performance. “No,” he said wryly: “You took care of that.” And 30 years later, at his 80th birthday celebration, which I reviewed for Aufbau – please see
http://ljlehrman.artists-in-residence.com/articles/aufbau75.html
– he remembered me, with the words: “You once wrote a very important article about my work….”

I wish I could have loved the music he wrote after I started studying with him as much as the music he had written earlier. I came down to New York to hear the premiere of his 1970 Music for Orchestra and review it for WHRB - having given up on the Crimson as too dangerous in terms of department politics - and hated it. (I understand he revised it in 1988.) It seemed so pretentious and empty. I called the station and said I would not be sending a review after all.

His opera Lily was even worse, notwithstanding a few lovely passages, especially for soprano Susan Belling (née Belink, daughter of Cantor Norman Belink, who had trained me for my bar mitzvah and then organized the first Creative Jewish Music Group on Long Island with me). Jack Beeson recently told me a story, not in his recently-published book, of how he attended rehearsals and the premiere of Lily at N.Y. City Opera, and watched as Kirchner worked himself into exhaustion, refusing to delegate authority to anyone, spent the dress rehearsal in the hospital, and then muttered after conducting the premiere: “I will never again allow a company to wreck my operas [sic]!” - thus blaming everyone else for his own shortcomings and mistakes.

So, it is with mixed feelings that I now share my thoughts with you about one of the most important teachers I ever had, from whom I learned a great deal about music, in terms of both what to do and what not to do.

CONTENTS

LIVE EVENTS“Prepared and Unprepared” Peter Kroll, 6
A Space-Inspired Event BLC, 6
Love and Rockets Michael McDonagh, 7
Getting an Earful (ACA Festival) BLC, 8
Madrigals Made Magical Randy Woolf, 11
A New Era Begins Barry O’Neal, 12

DOTTED NOTES from …
BLC, 13
Leonard Lehrman, 13

The Printed Word Frank Retzel, 14

Critic at Large Leonard Lehrman, 15

RECORDINGS
Picture This! BLC, 17
A Rural Setting Gary A. Edwards, 18
Fearless Harmonic Beauty Nancy Garniez, 19
Wit and Wisdom on Display Nancy Garniez, 19
When Everything Is a Surprise Gary A. Edwards, 21

Recent Releases, 22
Composer Index, 22
The Puzzle Page, 23
Bulletin Board, 23

The award was given to the 63 year old American composer for his recent recording, “Music of Fred Lerdahl, Vol. 2″ (BRIDGE 9269), a disc which includes chamber and orchestral music by Lerdahl composed during the past three decades.

For more information on this award visit here.

This national competition has been one of the most exciting events at the New York Art Ensemble, and this will mark its 11th year.

The winning composer will receive a $1,000 cash award and a New York Art Ensemble performance of the winning piece on our 2010 Tribeca New Music Festival coming up this June in New York City.

In addition to the winning prize the New York Art Ensemble also recognize runners up with Honorable Mentions and Emerging Composer status where appropriate.

Interested individuals should follow the Competition Guidelines found on the New York Art Ensemble website.

If you know of any young composers who may be eligible, please let them know.

The deadline is January 8, 2010.

In a survey just conducted by Classical Archives, the ultimate online destination for classical music, over 20% of the respondents said they love classical music because it relaxes them and acts as a stress reliever in their hectic lives. The survey suggests that classical music, more than rock and pop, is able to calm the nerves in tough times.

Here is the full roster of results to the survey, which asked:

60.2% - It is simply the best music there is
20.3% - Relaxes me when life is stressing me out
9.0% - My parents played classical music at home growing up
7.6% - I’m a freak for culture
2.9% - It is a great aphrodisiac

Nolan Gasser, Artistic Director, Classical Archives, notes, that “Are the results surprising? Hardly. Especially in tough economic times, people are turning to classical music to help them get through the day and to give them the calm and resolve they need to face their daily challenges. People are finding that there’s nothing like the inspiration and soothing nature of classical music to relieve the stresses of a tough economy.”

CONTACT: Jayme Schwartz
HWH PR/ Social Media
212-355-5049, x128
jaymes@hwhpr.com

Firm Provides Acoustical Consulting for New Symphony Hall in Centro de Bellas Artes

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. – October 5, 2009 – Acentech Inc., a nationally recognized multi-disciplinary acoustics, audiovisual systems design, and vibration consulting firm, is proud to announce that it has completed work on the Sala Sinfonica Pablo Casals, a new symphony hall within the Centro de Bellas Artes complex in San Juan , Puerto Rico . The new hall was inaugurated on October 3rd with a symphonic concert by the Puerto Rico Symphony Orchestra. Acentech’s Studio A, specializing in the performing arts, provided architectural acoustics consulting, sound system design, mechanical system noise and vibration control consulting, and acoustical computer modeling for the highly anticipated project.

Designed by architect Rodolfo Fernández and named after the beloved Spanish Catalan cellist and conductor Pablo Casals, Sala Sinfonica Pablo Casals will be the new permanent home of the Orquesta Sinfónica de Puerto Rico (Puerto Rico Symphony Orchestra). The new 1,300-seat Sala Sinfonica Pablo Casals will be dedicated to musical performances, serving a range of symphonic, chamber, and popular music styles. The hall was specifically designed to meet the acoustical profile for classical music: sufficient reverberance or liveness, good clarity, plenty of strength, and a high degree of spaciousness. These sound attributes are supported by interior materials chosen for their appearance, practicality and acoustics, offering an embracing listening experience for the audience and superior sound for the performers. The ceiling and walls are made of multiple layers of drywall and solid wood, respectively, to be both acoustically reflective and beautiful.