You can view the 2008 KW Repertoire report here, which lists every piece of music I’ve performed in the 2008 calendar year.
I thought I would take advantage of the painstaking efforts of my research assistant, former Lehman Brothers Executive VP Flurp Van Doogle and make some comparisons between this year and 2007, as well as some general observations on trends on this year’s list.
It goes without saying that for many of you, this will be the most boring, naval gazing exercise you have ever encountered, but I hate to let Flurp’s efforts go un-used.
Read more…
A view from the podium, Repertoire Reports
concerto, downie, gal, Haydn, Mahler, Repertoire Reports, shostakovich, sibelius, symphony, xenakis
I’ve decided to remove the discussion and comments from the individual segments of my interview with Gordon Downie, and to anthologize them all here in a single post. Regrettably, a few comments did not measure up to our house standards of civil discourse and have been deleted completely, but I think readers will agree that what remains still represents a spirited breadth of opinion.
Read more…
A view from the podium
CMEW, Gordon Downie, Hyper-complexity, Mefano, Modernism, Open Form, serialism, xenakis
For those of you who have already read my Xenakis quote from yesterday, you may be wondering why I chose it. Given that there are plenty of series on this week’s concert, doesn’t the quotation of such a statement seem a bit self-defeating from a marketing standpoint?
Over the last ten years or so, we’ve seen something of a move to dismiss modernist music as a historical aberration. The problems with this movement are too numerous to count in a single blog post, but one of the primary problems is that the very notion that one can describe vast chunks of music of the 20th c. in one word and dismiss all of it in two sentences is patently absurd.
(Xenakis and Messiaen)
Xenakis was a composer as much “in the hood” as anyone of his generation- like Boulez and Stockhausen, he studied with Messiaen and his music figured prominently in the concerts that established the modernist repertoire. This little quote however gives us a gentle reminder that even in its heyday, serialism was never the one true path, that creative artists argued and debated and fought for their own voices. Even in its supposed heydey, good friends argued strenuously over what it meant to be a modernist.
Read more…
A view from the podium
xenakis
Recent Comments