by Kenneth Woods | Mar 11, 2008 | A view from the podium, Nuts and bolts
After 100 years with pretty much only one option, conductors now have many choices of what edition of the Beethoven symphonies to use. So what parts have my colleageus been looking at, and what scores have I been? Why? The Edition- In Lancashire they actually used the...
by Kenneth Woods | Mar 11, 2008 | A view from the podium, Nuts and bolts
I can’t help but smile at the fact that less than 24 hours after finishing my concert with the Contemporary Music Ensemble of Wales, I was rehearsing Beethoven 5 and the Sibelius Violin Concerto with the Surrey Mozart Players. Preparing the ultimate “warhorse” piece...
by Kenneth Woods | Mar 7, 2008 | A view from the podium
In Part Four, Gordon and I turned to a rather well-worn topic, the thorny question of why visual modernism has generally been so much more popular than musical modernism. I have my own ideas about why this is the case, but I was curious to get Gordon’s. You may find...
by Kenneth Woods | Mar 6, 2008 | A view from the podium
In part three, we stepped back from a discussion of Downie’s music and I asked Gordon directly whether monderist music is getting a little old-fashioned after 60 years… KW: We’ve spoken before about your music’s connection to the ideas and...
by Kenneth Woods | Mar 6, 2008 | A view from the podium, Explore the Score, Nuts and bolts
I’ve been putting a lot of work in on Paul Mefano’s Intererences in the run up to this weekends sessions. Because of the open form techniques Gordon described in Part II of our interview, the notation is about as thorny as it gets. The challenge for the conductor is...
by Kenneth Woods | Mar 6, 2008 | A view from the podium
In part two, we turn our attention to the other works on this week’s program, and Downie’s attitude to programming. KW: Xenakis was a very prolific composer and Akrata is not one of his best known works. What is the specific interest of this piece for...
by Kenneth Woods | Mar 5, 2008 | A view from the podium
Composer Gordon Downie is the founder and Artistic Director of the Contemporary Music Ensemble of Wales. I sat down with Gordon this week and asked him to talk a bit about his music and this week’s CMEW program. Typically, our discussion went far beyond the scope of a...
by Kenneth Woods | Mar 5, 2008 | A view from the podium
Chill the champagne Martha! This my 500th blog post on Vftp. Just think how much I could have actually gotten done while writing the last 100 posts….....
by Kenneth Woods | Mar 4, 2008 | A view from the podium, Music and Media
My interview with young LA music students that ran on the Classics Alive webstite has been re-run on Violinist.com here. If you missed it the first time, have a look. The kids asked some great questions....
by Kenneth Woods | Mar 4, 2008 | A view from the podium, News and Reviews, Study with Ken
2008 Rose City International Conductor’s Workshop (www.rosecityworkshop.org). As we prepare for our fourth summer of great music and good company in one of the most beautiful and dynamic cities in America, we’re very excited about this season’s repertoire and our...
by Kenneth Woods | Mar 3, 2008 | A view from the podium
Some instrumentalists still look at any and all “extended techniques” as an annoyance that originates in avante garde music of the 20th c., even though many of them have been in use at least since the music of Biber, hundreds of years back. I don’t expect any...
by Kenneth Woods | Mar 2, 2008 | A view from the podium
Is this the face of a man who wrote the St Matthew Passion, father 25 kids and could bend hardened steel with only his mental powers? And I just said science hadn’t done so much the last 30 years…. Read about the reconstruction of Bach’s face...
by Kenneth Woods | Mar 2, 2008 | A view from the podium
I’m going to attempt to tread carefully in today’s post, so as to minimize the hate mail. A collection of words can have devastating, world changing power when we allow them to be perceived as “truth.” The fundamental level of social discourse in our time is that “it...
by Kenneth Woods | Mar 1, 2008 | A view from the podium
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?...
by Kenneth Woods | Mar 1, 2008 | A view from the podium
The writer is Iannis Xenakis The year is 1955 “[…] the serial system is thrown into question on its own two bases, which embody the seed of their own destruction and inadequacy : the series; their polyphonic structure. A series (of any sort)...
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