Writing about music, like the art itself, is alive and well in this country.
COMPOSER, PERFORMER, MEDIA HOST, writer and musicological avatar to the immortal P.D.Q. Bach: The marvel of Peter Schickele is not only the variety of his parts but also how well they all fit, the one to another. Composer/performers are a dime a dozen these days, judging from the press handouts and homemade CDs in my [...]
. . . the faithful flee: So goes the rhyme in support of equal temperament. Music, your old prof surely had you believe, draws its strength from its harmonic progressions, and they derive their strength from the set of falsities and compromises worked out in Bach’s time to enable composers to create cadences and chromaticisms [...]
One special image comes to mind when Toru Takemitsu’s music is at hand. It is the final moment in Akira Kurosawa‘s Ran, for which Takemitsu composed the score that is one of film music’s supreme achievements. The film is Kurosawa‘s gloss on Shakespeare’s Lear, and its final shot is of a lone figure, blind and [...]
Within a week in late April the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra played in two local venues, at Glendale‘s Alex Theater and UCLA’s Royce Hall, and three on the East Coast, Portland, Hartford and at Manhattan‘s Carnegie Hall. I heard the first and the last. Thomas Quasthoff was soloist in all five concerts: Bach’s “Kreuzstab” Cantata [...]
Photo by Christine Alicino WHERE MUSIC CAME FROM, WHERE music stands today, where music is going: lovely questions, these, that nobly sustain motor-mouth moderators of pre-concert “symposiums” and writers of program notes. They were more easily answerable in my younger days. I grew up in an age of definition (or so it seemed): sonata form, [...]
Alan's Poppies and Sage, photographed by Paul Cabanis, Spring 2010.