bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Boulez's ‘Doubles’ and ‘Figures Doubles Prismes’: A Preliminary Study
Authors: Edwards Allen
Published: November 2009

When in 1957 Igor Markevitch and Georges Auric commissioned the 32-year-old Pierre Boulez, fresh from the success of his Marteau sans maître, to write a work for the Société des concerts Lamoureux, the result was an eightminute symphonic torso, Doubles, whose gripping intensity, heroic utterance, and vivid orchestral imagery marked it as potentially one of the composer's most important creative efforts. Announced at its Paris première on 16 March 1958 as the beginning of an ambitious work-inprogress, it was not heard again until January 1964, when the first ten minutes of a revision entitled Figures Doubles Prismes were presented by the Südwestfunk Orchestra in Basle. Instead of adding the expansive second stage of Doubles – which had been mapped out and in part actually composed in particell – the revision opened up the existing first stage by interpolating new episodes of contrasting character. Though the plan of the revision called for a total duration of about 30 minutes (toward which an additional five minutes of music were composed and introduced at the Hague by Het Residentieorkest in 1968), a shift of career focus by the composer in 1971 to conducting and electronic research brought progress on this and several other major projects to an indefinite halt. As a consequence, the intended but still unrealized overall shape of Figures Doubles Prismes, as well as of its forerunner, Doubles, can be appreciated, at least for the time being, only from manuscripts on deposit at Switzerland's Paul Sacher Foundation.
‘Malven’: Richard Strauss's ‘letzte Rose!’
Authors: Kissler John M.
Published: November 2009

Thirty-six years after the completion of September from the Vier Letzte Leider, presumed to be the last work penned by Richard Strauss, an autograph manuscript reappeared containing a lied composed for solo voice and piano, and it is this which is now considered to be the last completed work of Strauss. It is entided Malven (Mallows), set to the poem by Swiss poet and novelist, Betty Wehrli-Knobel (b. 13 July 1904). The lied was completed in Montreux on 23 November 1948, a full two months after Strauss had finished September, and bears the dedication to Maria Jeritza: Der geliebten Maria dieser letzte Rose!
Steve Reich Talking About ‘The Cave’
Authors: Smith Geoff
Published: November 2009

Well, I've been collaborating with my wiie, the video artist Beryl Korot. Her work involves multi-channel video where the timings between the channels are very highly worked out – four channels where the first and third and the second and fourth would be interlocked – very musicaltype structures. So it was a natural collaboration, but the question was, what's it all about? In a few minutes we decided it would be the Cave of Machpela. Beryl and I had both become interested in our own Judaic backgrounds and had both begun studying the Torah. We discovered that there's a town in a very politically sensitive area of the world, Hebron, thirty miles south of Jerusalem in the West Bank, where Abraham is accepted to be buried by Jews, Muslims and Christians. Whether he's there or not is really immaterial. I think part of the decision to choose the Cave of Machpela was that, on a political level and as a human being living in the world today, I don't think you can understand what's going on in the Middle East unless you understand the Biblical and the Koranic level of the conflict – otherwise you miss the base on which it all stands.
British Music at Darmstadt 1982–92
Authors: Fox Christopher
Published: November 2009

The new music summer school in Darmstadt is perhaps the most important gathering of and performers of contemporary music in Europe. Launched in 1946 in the then American Zone of occupied Germany, as part of the postwar process of internationalization (and, therefore, de-Nazification) of German culture, the Darmstadt Ferienkurse quickly gained a reputation as a forum for the promulgation of a radically abstract musical aesthetic, based on reductive analyses of the serial works of Webern in particular. While some composers saw this new aesthetic as a ‘mechanistic heresy’, the music of what came to be known as the Darmstadt School – Boulez, Maderna, Nono, Stockhausen – soon attracted official support since, like Abstract Expressionist painting, ‘a seemingly abstract art could readily be elevated as an emblem of “terrible freedom”’. This ‘terrible freedom’, the freedom to be unpopular, was a potent symbol of Western individualism in the symbolic battle that characterized the European theatre of the Cold War during the 1950s.
Dieter Schnebel and his ‘Sinfonie X’
Authors: Warnaby John
Published: November 2009

The German composer Dieter Schnebel was born in March 1930, in Lahr, Baden. He began serious piano studies at the age of 10, and made his first attempts at composition around the end of the war, in his mid-teens. His principal music studies took place at the Musik Hochschule, Freiburg from 1949 to 1952; having encountered the music of Hindemith in 1949, he became aware of Bartók, Stravinsky and the Second Viennese School during the early 1950s, and studied at the Darmstadt Ferienkurse für Neue Musik, where he came into contact with Krenek, Varèse, Adorno, Henze, Nono and Boulez.
In Search of ‘Grohg’
Authors: Knussen Oliver
Published: November 2009

I first encountered the name of Grohg some 25 years ago on the sleeve of Morton Gould's marvellous Chicago Symphony recording of Aaron Copland's Dance Symphony of 1929. Copland had hastily extracted this score from an unperformed ballet (written in Paris in 1922–5) in order to enter a major competition organized by RCA Victor records, when he realized that he would be unable to complete the planned Symphonic Ode in time for the deadline. I found this music very attractive indeed – amusingly Ballets Russes-ian to be sure but, in the precision and transparency of its sound-world, very characteristic of its author and not at all suggestive of a first attempt at orchestration (Grohg pre-dates the Organ Symphony, which was the first orchestral music of his own that Copland actually heard). I was also intrigued by the idea of a ballet that had been suggested by F. W. Murnau's classic silent horror film Nosferatu (1922).
Birds in concert: North American birdsong in Bartók's Piano Concerto No. 3
Authors: Harley Maria Anna
Published: November 2009

On 22 April 1944 Béla Bartók wrote to his son, Peter:

Spring has now indisputably arrived. A kind of ‘kutyafa’ (dogwood) is in bloom, like acacias flowering at home. The birds have become completely drunk with the spring and are putting on concerts the like of which I've never heard. They start with puty-puty-puty ./../../. and end up with various new bird sounds (clearly from later arrivals). Thekeeps on creating more and more variants.
The Association for Contemporary Music in Moscow: An interview with Nikolai Korndorf
Authors: Ferenc Anna
Published: November 2009

The Association for Contemporary Music was initially founded in Moscow in 1923. It united Russian modernist composers, promoted the cause of ‘new music’ in print and in performance, and served as the Russian chapter of the International Society for Contemporary Music. Bowing to political pressure, the Association ceased to operate in the early 1930s. In January 1990, the existence of an Association for Contemporary Music was again announced in Moscow. Despite difficult economic circumstances, it remains active. The following is an interview conducted in July 1993 with one of its founding members and vice-presidents, Nikolai Korndorf.
où l'on retrouve les ailes d'Icare: Notes on the rediscovery of the composer Igor Markevitch
Authors: Drew David
Published: November 2009

It was only in the last five years of his life that Markevitch-the-conductor acknowledged and made some amends to his once-celebrated but long forgotten predecessor Markevitch-the composer. Having ignored if not actively suppressed his compositions for some 30 years, he began in 1978 to review them with the mingled delight and anxiety of a prodigal father returning to his offspring after a protracted and neglectful absence. In the intervening years, his cherished friend and onetime teacher Nadia Boulanger had been almost alone among prominent musicians to deplore the disappearance of a major composer, and his supercession by a (mere?) conductor, however brilliant and successful.
The Composer as Seer, but not Prophet
Authors: Polin Claire
Published: November 2009

Have composers developed a new role in our time? Are creative musicians today, by the gifts given to them, foretelling Armageddon, the musical Nostrodamuses of our day? Does Steve Reich's recent opera The Cave, despite its avowed peaceful message, actually foretell the Hebron massacre of last February? Are the sombre works of the Russian composers Alfred Schnittke and Sofia Gubaidulina predicting events of a similar nature, which are just waiting to be interpreted from the musical sounds to meaningful dialogue?
‘Not a cherry tree in sight!’
Authors: McBurney Gerard
Published: November 2009

Would you have been so very angry? But then again I have already offended in this way, or something like it. Hypothetkally Murdered – or Provisionally Dead or whatever you want to call it – I brought back to life as best I could, trying to clothe your sketches and scribbles in the kinds of instrumental colours that I imagined that you might have liked, or at least that you might have recognized. And this was music for a show which, at the time (in 1931), you described as ‘purely disgraceful’.
Filipp Herschkowitz: Mahler and Memories of War
Authors: Badamshina Ghuzal
Published: November 2009

It is impossible to speak of any composer's harmony, syntax and form without exploring their close linkage. However, on the other hand, it is impossible to understand this close linkage without examining harmony, syntax and form separately.
Maxwell Davies's Fifth Symphony
Authors: Beecroft Julian
Published: November 2009

What does it mean to call a piece ‘Symphony’ in 1994? Over the past 100 years the term has been commandeered and exploited in so many different ways, meanings constantly lost and found with each new transliteration, that any attempt to recover a set of authentic meanings might seem like some kind of neo-classical neurosis.
Resurrecting the Antichrist: Maxwell Davies and Parody – Dialectics or Deconstruction?
Authors: Sweeney-Turner Steve
Published: November 2009

Ever since Michael Chanan's 1969 Tempo article connected Peter Maxwell Davies with the philosophical tradition of speculative dialectics, this connexion has been virtually the mainstay of Davies's critical reception. If we accept the popular model of dialectics as the resolution (synthesis) of two opposing terms (thesis-antithesis), then we can easily identify a dialectical critique underpinning, for instance, Paul Griffiths's monograph written 13 years later. In discussing Davies's parody technique, Griffiths begins by highlighting those processes which result in the ‘distortion’ or ‘corruption’ of sources, leading to situations of ‘ambiguity’ or ‘contradiction’. Such an account is no doubt authorized by the composer's own terminology of ‘distortion’, ‘ambiguity’, ‘dissolution’ and ‘fragmentation’, which is found particularly in the sleeve-notes to Vesalii Icones (1969).
The Light and the Dark: contrasts in the Music of Jacob Druckman
Authors: Johnson Bret
Published: November 2009

Among established American composers, Jacob Druckman's music remains unique in the breadth of its range, the mastery of its orchestration and the totality of its expressive power. There is little point in spending too much effort in drawing comparisons with some of his closest contemporaries and, in any event, such comparisons are hard to come by. He has had a remarkable career: as an academic, as composer-in-residence to the New York Philharmonic, as a conductor (he has conducted a number of his works with the BBC Philharmonic), as artistic director of many festivals, and as lecturer and administrator. He now devotes as much times as he can to composing, but whatever the future brings, there can be little doubt that he has already made a major contribution to the growth and development of 20th-century music.
Charm and Simplicity: Messiaen's final works
Authors: Dingle Christopher
Published: November 2009

Oliver Messiaen is a classically–minded composer with a strong affinity to Mozart, Rameau and Scarlatti. His often intimate music is full of irrepressible charm and frequently betrays a whimsical sense of humour. Simplicity of expression is Messiaen's overwhelming trait and while he has composed on a large scale, he has a penchant for miniatures …
‘We know for whom we mourn’: Britten, Auden and the politics of 1936
Authors: Docherty Barbara
Published: November 2009

On 25 September 1936 Benjamin Britten's Our Hunting Fathers, his first adult song cycle, first score for full orchestra and self-confessed ‘real op.l’, had its Norwich première. Its public agenda, both political and social, was set by W.H. Auden's 1930 Poems, and its aggressive technical and moral exhortation desired to épater les ancêetres much as Berg's Wozzeck had sought to do. Its private agenda is, however, of far greater interest. In 1930 it had seemed that the detached, self-conscious Künstlerarzt could take the knife to the social gangrene of the prewar generation and its political prescriptions; by 1936 such detachment yielded neither public nor private satisfaction. Political despair now had three names: German, Jew, and Spain; personal despair derived from the realization that ‘love without love's proper object' led only to love's privation and defeat. The texts Auden assembled for Our Hunting Fathers acted (as many of the choruses in the Auden/Isherwood play The Dog Beneath the Skin had done) as an examen de conscience, both confession and homily, with a Prologue and Epilogue in particular addressed to a composer increasingly aware of an imprisoning emotional isolation.
Wolfgang von Schweinitz's impersonations of composer and poet
Authors: Hilger Silke , Hall M.C.
Published: November 2009

Franz & Morton Singing Together in Harmony (With the Lord Himself Enjoying His Bells) is the title of a recent chamber-music work for violin, cello and piano by Wolfgang von Schweinitz. The musically erudite will have no difficulty in identifying the persons referred to by those Christian names. They are, of course, the two composers, Schubert and Feldman – who, with Schweinitz, form a trio which combines more as a community than merely professionally.
Galina Ustvolskaya: ‘Sind Sie mir nicht böse!’
Authors: Derks Thea
Published: November 2009

The last sounds of her Third Symphony have died down; conductor Valery Gergiev turns about, clapping. A wave of surprise and emotion passes through Amsterdam Concertgebouw as Galina Ustvolskaya, shy but determined, climbs the stage. The audience, aware of the historic significance of this moment, continues applauding for some minutes, and she returns to the stage a second time. But this time she turns about half-way up the stairs, and leaves the hall.
Schoenberg as a Performing Artist
Authors: Kolisch Rudolf , Boynton Neil
Published: November 2009

Translator's note. The violinist Rudolf Kolisch was brother-in-law of Arnold Schoenberg. He first played under Schoenberg's direction in the Verein für musikalische Privataufführungen. Through the Kolisch Quartet, founded in 1922 on Schoenberg's instigation, and later in America, through the Pro Arte Quartet, he promoted the music of the Second Viennese School. Kolisch's essay was originally published in German as ‘Schönberg als nachschaffender Künstler’ in the issue of Musikblätter des Anbruch commemorating Schoenberg's fiftieth birthday (6 [August–September 1924], 306–7); this is the first English translation. Kolisch's text presents ideas about the rendering of ideas: it is essentially philosophical, and as such, many would argue, untranslatable. There arc no English equivalents for many of its terms. With this proviso, the translation is offered as a guide to the original. In those instances where recurrences of words in the original are not preserved in the translation and where it was felt that important nuances of the original were lost, the German has been added in parentheses. In this regard the words used by Kolisch to denote ‘performance’ are particularly varied: ‘nachschaffen’ (‘to reproduce’); ‘vortragen’ (lit. ‘to carry forward’, hence ‘to hold forth’, ‘to execute’; Kolisch used ‘declamation’ as a synonym for ‘Vortrag’ when referring to the way in which a specific musical passage is conceived and executed); ‘aufführen’ (‘to perform’); ‘reproduzieren’ (the latinate equivalent for the German ‘nachschaffen’); ‘darstellen’ (‘to represent’); ‘Wiedergabe’ (‘rendition’); ‘spielen’ (‘to play’); and ‘musizieren’ (‘to play’, ‘to make music’). Some of the connotations of the word ‘nachschaffen’ from the original title of Kolisch's article are captured by Erwin Stein in the Introduction to his Form and Performance: ‘Music consists of sounds, and the word “form”, applied to music, means the arrangement of sounds.
‘Tutt' ora vivente’: Petrassi and the concerto principle
Authors: MacDonald Calum
Published: November 2009

Italian masters seem habitually to survive to a ripe old age. The proverbial example is Verdi, dying at 87, but Gianfrancesco Malipiero had turned 91 by his death in 1973, and his longevity has now been equalled, and seems likely to be surpassed, by Goffredo Petrassi. Long an eminent and respected figure in Italian musical life, and routinely named in the reference books as a significant 20th-century composer, Petrassi has never been well known in this country. His international reputation was at its height in the 1950s and 60s, and probably reached its apogee here with the London premiere, in 1957, of his Sixth Concerto for Orchestra, commissioned by the BBC for the 10th anniversary of the Third Programme. During those decades he travelled, conducted and adjudicated widely; he was closely associated with the ISCM (and was its President in the years 1954–56); as Professor of Composition at the Conservatorio di Santa Cecilia in Rome, he exercised a powerful influence on his country's musical life. He is especially celebrated as a teacher: his Italian pupils have included Aldo Clementi, Riccardo Malipiero, the film composer Enrico Morricone and the conductor Zoltán Pesko, but composers of many nations have studied with him. Among his British pupils, one need only instance Peter Maxwell Davies, Cornelius Cardew, and the late Kenneth Leighton to see that his teaching was never stylistically prescriptive.
Berio's ‘Visage’ and the Theatre of Electroacoustic Music
Authors: Causton Richard
Published: November 2009

As a setting for the enactment of important or dramatic events, theatre may be located anywhere. The construction of special auditoria to accommodate aspects of theatre as an art form of re-presentation and re-enactment in no way invalidates the concept of a theatrical drama which unfolds in the imagination or in the arena of everyday life. Music, like theatre, may be inspired by real-life situations, but whereas in modern Western civilization it has taken on a life of its own, and is played in the rarefied isolation of concert halls, theatre, being a more concrete form of representational art, has retained much closer links with the outside world.
‘A volcano viewed from afar’: the Music of Salvatore Sciarrino
Authors: Hodges Nicolas
Published: November 2009

With the exception of a few small-scale pieces programmed by the more adventurous contemporary music ensembles, the music of Salvatore Sciarrino has not been performed frequently in this country; BBC Radio 3 has given occasional airtime to larger works, but we have yet to hear much of his most important music in any form. This article should act, I hope, as a pointer to readers who might wish to explore his output on disc, which currently is really the only way to do so in this country.
In Interview with Anton Weinberg
Authors: Keller Hans
Published: November 2009

The following text is a transcript of the last interview given by the Austrian-born British musician and writer Hans Keller (1919–1985), the 10th anniversary of whose death fell on 6 November. The interview – which gives a remarkably wellrounded summary of Keller's life and activities – was given in the Summer of 1985 in support of Anton Weinberg's Channel 4 documentary ‘The Keller Instinct’ (first shown 23/2/86, repeated 28/6/88). While the moving sight of a frail and obviously very ill (but still chain-smoking!) Keller will no doubt be remembered by many viewers, the programme in fact used only a small proportion of what was recorded; most of what follows, therefore, is being made available for the first time. In any event, the programme itself seems not to have been preserved, making future re-broadcast unlikely. The interlocutor is Anton Weinberg himself; the tape has been transcribed and edited by Mark Doran.
Fritz Brun: a Swiss Symphonist
Authors: Palmer Peter
Published: November 2009

Ferruccio Busoni, who saw out the First World War from the neutral haven of Switzerland, maintained that the best Swiss symphony was Rossini's William Tell overture. Not that the country was completely lacking in resident composers of symphonic music during the Classical and Romantic eras. There was, for example, Gaspard Fritz (d.1783), whom Dr Bumey met in Geneva. There was Xaver Schnyder von Wartensee (d.1868), whose works include an amiable ‘Military’ Symphony. But the dominant force in the 19th century was the composer, publisher and pedagogue Hans Georg Nägeli, whose primary achievement was to develop a choral tradition. Instrumental music in Switzerland depended largely on imports. Joachim Raff, who came from the Lake Zurich region, did not begin to find his feet as a symphonist until he settled in Germany. The vocal bias persisted into the 20th century: thus Othmar Schoeck could say that writing a violin sonata was something of a ‘crime’ for him.
Harrison Birtwistle's recent music
Authors: Adlington Robert
Published: November 2009

Getting to grips with Harrison Birtwistle's ever expanding oeuvre is becoming an increasingly challenging business. The forthcoming South Bank Centre festival naturally provides occasion for some critical stocktaking. Yet the retrospective schemas within which composers' works are traditionally placed seem less than usually appropriate. The idea of linear development is of as limited use to understanding Birtwistle's creative progress as it is to explaining his musical forms. Contrasting musical surfaces, for instance, testify to the difficulty of useful generalization about the recent works' lineage. Whereas the crisp, pulse-based clarity of many pages in The Cry of Anubis bears comparison with moments in Earth Dances and the contemporaneous Words Overheard, Panic's impenetrable textures and sonorities are more reminiscent of the earlier Verses for Ensembles and An Imaginary Landscape. The treatment of musical form in the recent works similarly resists summary description.
The Maxwell Davies Sketch Material in the British Library
Authors: McGregor Richard E.
Published: November 2009

The British Library recently acquired the sketch material for a good number of works by Peter Maxwell Davies, ranging from some of the earliest pieces up to, at the time of writing, music of the early 1990s. The purpose of this article is to present an overview of the available material and to demonstrate some of the valuable insights it affords into the composer's working methods.
‘Soirées de Barcelone’: towards a performing version
Authors: MacDonald Calum
Published: November 2009

These observations form a long-delayed epilogue to my article ‘Soirées de Barcelone: a Preliminary Report’ in Tempo 139 (December 1981), where I outlined the history of Roberto Gerhard's Catalan ballet, a major score which was then (and remains now) virtually unknown save for the performance of some excerpts. For the work's conception, and its commission from Colonel de Basil's Ballets Russes de Monte Carlo, readers should consult that article, and the article by Julian White in the present issue. This was the work-in-progress – apparently still at that stage bearing its original title Les Feux de la Saint Jean – which Gerhard took with him when the climax of the Spanish Civil War and the fall of the Republic forced him into exile in France in January 1939. He continued to work on it during the following five months he spent in Paris and Meudon.
Gerhard, electronic music and King Lear
Authors: Cholij Irena
Published: November 2009

Between 1947 and 1962 Roberto Gerhard contributed incidental music to eight Shakespeare plays for the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre (later Royal Shakespeare Company). Of these, easily the most controversial was George Devine's production King Lear for the Stratford Touring Company in 1955. A far cry from his very traditional The Taming of the Shrew (1953) and still relatively ‘safe’ A Midsummer Night's Dream (1954) – for both of which Gerhard also composed music – this was a thoroughly modern production. The sets and costumes were designed by the American sculptor Isamu Noguchi (of mixed American and Japanese parentage), and were his first theatre designs. The rationale behind the production was set out in the programme:

Our object in this production has been to find a setting and costumes which would be free of historical or decorative associations so that the timeless, universal and mythical quality of the story may be clear. We have tried to present the places and the characters in a very simple and basic manner, for the play to come to life through the words and the acting.
Christopher Rouse: An Overview
Authors: Shulman Laurie
Published: November 2009

One of the brightest stars in contemporary music, the American Christopher Rouse remains comparatively little known in the UK. A Baltimore native who teaches at the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, New York, he had already served as composer-in-residence for two orchestras and his music was widely performed when his Trombone Concerto earned America's Pulitzer Prize for Music in 1993. Rouse has been particularly successful with orchestral works. He promises to be one of the next century's great composers in traditional forms, specifically symphony and concerto.
The Panorama of Michael Finnissy (II)
Authors: Pace Ian
Published: November 2009

A large body of Michael Finnissy's work refers to music, texts and other aspects of culture outside the mainstream European tradition. As a child he met Polish and Hungarian friends of the family, and was further attracted to aspects of Eastern European music when asked to transcribe Yugoslav music from a record, for a ballet teacher. Study of anthropological and other literature led him to a conviction that folk music lay at the roots of most other music, and related quite directly to the defining nature of man's interaction with his environment. Finnissy went on to explore the widest range of folk music and culture, from Sardinia, Yugoslavia, Rumania, Bulgaria, the Kurdish people, Azerbaijan, the Vendan Africans, China, Japan, Java, Australia both Aboriginal and colonial, Native America and more recently Norway, Sweden, Denmark, India, Korea, Canada, Mexico and Chile.
VW9 and the ‘St. Matthew Passion’
Authors: Doran Mark
Published: November 2009

On the face of it, Bach's St. Matthew Passion and Vaughan Williams's Ninth Symphony are two works which could hardly have less in common. Even the one feature they might be said to share at the outset – some form of E minor tonality – has come to divide them by the end: the Baroqueperiod work concludes not in the starting key but in a ‘progressive’ C minor, and it is, curiously, the 20th-century symphony which not only returns to its original tonic but also makes use of the Baroque feature of the ‘picardy third’.
Bill Hopkins's orchestration of Debussy's ‘Lindaraja’
Authors: Hodges Nicolas
Published: November 2009

In spring 1975 the British composer and writer Bill Hopkins completed an orchestration of Debussy's Lindaraja. Paul Griffiths has reported that Hopkins believed this to be ‘the only one of Debussy's piano works which was intended as a sketch of an orchestral composition’. As an expert on both French music and orchestration, Hopkins was admirably qualified for the job. But as we have no written record of his ideas on the subject we need to analyze the musical evidence as it stands, to see what might justify his view of the piece.
Cross-Currents and Convergencies: Britten, Maxwell Davies and the Sense of Place
Authors: Whittall Arnold
Published: November 2009

Anyone bold enough to claim that the British compositional scene is dominated at present by a mainstream whose principal godfathers are Tippett and Birtwistle might just as well extend the reductive flourish by observing that an alternative duo – Britten and Maxwell Davies – not only have less in common with each other but are also less influential, less ‘significant’. Despite obvious differences of style, Tippett and Birtwistle share a basic predisposition to internationalism and modernism. By contrast, Britten's resistance to modernism and Davies's aspiration to classicism combine with a more direct response from both composers to local, if not exactly ‘national’ features, and, by the criteria for mainstream membership given above, this means that they belong on the margins of contemporary musical life in Britain, not at the centre.
Confidence in the Power of the Poetic: The Composer Matthias Pintscher
Authors: Töpel Michael
Published: November 2009

An enormous architect-style desk with a heavylooking cherrywood top stands on slender curved metal legs, which give it a light-weight appearance. This is the centre of the composer's work room, just outside the city of Kassel in the middleot Germany. Here are created edifices of sound, pencilled in tiny calligraphy on gigantic manuscript pages. These are the compositions which are being accepted and performed in numerous music capitals of the world. The writer is Matthias Pintscher, who must be counted as one of the most outstanding personalities among the new generation of composers. His phenomenal talent has been compared to that of Wolfgang Rihm, who is 20 years older.
Fleischmann, Shostakovich, and Chekhov's ‘Rothschild's Fiddle’
Authors: Weitzman Ronald
Published: November 2009

Shostakovich harboured a special esteem for Chekhov's literary genius, and knew by heart many of the short stories. At the same time, the composer felt an extraordinary tangible identification with the Jewish spirit, as well as a recognition of the role and importance of the Jewish contribution in history. (When it comes to the references in the disputed biography, Testimony, to Shostakovich's fierce personal stance whenever he came across the slightest expression of anti-semitism, there is sufficient independent evidence to indicate that Solomon Volkov's reporting cannot seriously be challenged.)
‘The Eucharist in my fantasy’: Interview with Sofia Gubaidulina
Authors: Lukomsky Vera
Published: November 2009

In the process of my research on the topic ‘The Soviet Avant-Garde from the 1970s to the present’, I learned that one of the heroes (actually, the heroine) of my studies, Sofia Gubaidulina, had been invited by San Jose State University School of Music for a festival of her music. The annual festivals in the SJSU, called ‘The Annual Guest Composers Series’, are each dedicated to the music of a specific contemporary composer. The guests of previous ‘Series’ were Morton Subotnik (1993) and Mario Davidowsky (1994); the festival in 1995 was devoted to Gubaidulina; George Crumb was selected for the following festival in 1996.
The Symphonies of Joonas Kokkonen
Authors: Jurkowski Edward
Published: November 2009

With the death of Joonas Kokkonen in October of 1996, Finland lost one of its most important post-World War II composers. Almost certainly, Kokkonen is most widely known outside Finland for his 1975 opera Viimeiset kiusaukset (Tlie Last Temptations). Yet his orchestral compositions such as the Cello Concerto (1969), the song cycle Lintuijen Tuonela (The Hades of the Birds, 1958–59), the Requiem (1981), the chamberorchestra work …Durch einen Spiegel… 1977), or such chamber works as the Piano Quintet (1953) or the String Quartets Nos.l (1959) and 3 (1976) demonstrate that masterpieces may be found in virtually every genre of Kokkonen's output. (Oddly, piano music represents a small and minor position in Kokkonen's oeuvre – a surprising fact given his accomplishments as a pianist.)
Leif Solberg, Master Craftsman
Authors: Anderson Martin
Published: November 2009

Don't blame yourself if you don't recognize the name of the Norwegian composer Leif Solberg – when he turned up at the Christmas party of the Norwegian Composers' Union a couple of years ago, they didn't know who he was either. Solberg has been at best a marginal figure in Norwegian musical life, cut off from the Oslo committees which decide who gets heard. His isolation has been both stylistic – his traditionalist craft sitting ill with the modernism that ruled Nordic roosts until recently – and literal, since he has been content with the low-profile rewards of galvanising musical activity in Lillehammer, two hours' train ride north of Oslo.
Richard Strauss: ready for the Millennium?
Authors: Bingham Judith , Ferneyhough Brian , Holloway Robin , Maw Nicholas , Rouse Christopher , Schiff David , Schwertsik Kurt
Published: November 2009

Fifty years after his death, Richard Strauss remains a towering presence in the international concert and operatic repertoire — a firmly established master who remains ever controversial for the role he played as man and artist in the development of German music: as likely to be admired for the radicalism of his early works as to be dismissed for the supposed conservatism of his later ones. But what does this inescapable figure represent to today's composers? Inspiration, irrelevance or awful warning? Are there still fresh lessons to be learned from Strauss? Can he be seen, in any sense, anew? Here seven composers give an idea of what Strauss means to them, either in general or in terms of a single work. Brian Femeyhough's view of Salome was originally written for BBC Music magazine, and is reprinted from there by their permission, while David Schiffs contribution, also reproduced by kind permission of its original publishers, was originally part of a larger article in the New York Times revaluing 20th-century masters and entitled ‘Measuring the Heroes in Music's Valhal’
A happy mythologizer: Strauss's creative role in his Greek operas
Authors: Nice David
Published: November 2009

According to David Fielding's eagerly-awaited, tender-hearted Garsington production of Die Liebe der Danae, Semele, Europa, Alkmene and Leda are ballroom queens. In the beginning, three of their four amours with that master of disguise Zeus/Jupiter bore fruit significant for the ongoing sagas of Greek and Roman mythology: Herakles from the three-night stint of Alkmene and the man she believed to be her husband, Helen of Troy and Clytemnestra out of a single egg laid by swan-seduced Leda, and Dionysus out of the ashes of over-reaching Semele, shrivelled by the sight of her god in all his majesty. The biological imperative was discarded by Hugo von Hofmannsthal – perhaps oddly for one so interested in the child-bearing outcome of his own Frau ohne Schatten myth – as he proposed a new operatic legend for Strauss in 1920. His queens (first three, later four) would be ‘bird-like, vain, forgetful, gossiping about everything’, flitting around in a Zerbinetta-like intermezzo to the main business of Jupiter's quest for Danae's love; the featherlight delicacy of the proposal was beautifully mirrored by Fielding's inspired idea. Taking up his long-deceased poet's suggestion just under two decades later, Strauss, as he neared the end of his operatic career, added a further twist. His god had grown old like himself; and on Jupiter's ever more emotional journey towards the renunciation of the woman Strauss decided would be his last love, Danae, the four close-harmony queens would move from Ariadne-style banter to tender acknowledgement of the ageing process, their apogee a canon of bitter-sweet sentimentality.
Composer in Interview: Helmut Lachenmann
Authors: Ryan David
Published: November 2009

This interview was conducted in November 1998 in connexion with a concert in the ‘dal niente’ series at King's College, London. The questions were faxed to Mr Lachenmann in English and he responded with written answers in German. A German-language version of the interview was published in the May 1999 issue of the Swiss contemporary music magazine Dissonanz, with however an important omission in the text of Lachenmann's first answer which is rectified here. I wish to acknowledge David Alberman's assistance with the translation of this English version.
Composer in Interview: Giya Kancheli
Authors: Ashby Arved , Mazo Margarita
Published: November 2009

Q: Does your music sound differently since you left Georgia?

GIYA KANCHELI: Not only because I left Georgia, but because times changed, the situation changed, the political situation changed. All of this makes itself felt. Right now it is a very difficult time for Georgia, and for almost all of the former Soviet republics, including Russia. All of that means a lot to me, I am not indifferent to what is going on there. I feel as though I've never left Georgia: physically I am in Antwerp, a beautiful city, but at the same time I am ‘there’, in my house, with my friends, and with our and my problems. I have one composition called Abii ne viderem, which I was working on during the civil war in Georgia, in Tbilisi. I gave it such a name because in Latin it means ‘I departed, lest I see’. And even after titling this piece so, I couldn't ‘depart’ for anywhere, I was still there. That is why the music couldn't be the same.… In the 1980s there was one situation, in the 1970s another, but in the 1990s everything has changed, and because of that the music has changed.
Out with the Old and in with the New: Arvo Pärt's ‘Credo’
Authors: Quinn Peter
Published: November 2009

The current standing of the Estonian-born composer Arvo Pärt (b.1935) rests almost exclusively on the works he has composed since 1976, the year the composer unveiled the first fruits of his newly-discovered modal formulae, or what has now become known as the ‘tintinnabuli’ style. There is, however, a large, important and up until now relatively unexplored series of experimental works that predate this seemingly radical change of style. For example, Pärt's first orchestral piece, Nekrolog (1960), was the very first piece of Estonian music to employ the 12-note technique, incurring the wrath of no less a person than Tikhon Khrennikov, the all-powerful general secretary of the Soviet Composers’ Union. Indeed at the Third All– Union Congress of Soviet Composers held in Moscow in March 1962 Khrennikov singled out Pärt for criticism.
Millennium Harvest: The BBC Singers Commissions for 1999
Authors: Burton Anthony
Published: November 2009

One recurring theme in the 75-year history of the BBC Singers (and their various predecessors) has been the tension between their role as a model for amateur choirs and their capabilities as a professional ensemble. Their longest-serving director, Leslie Woodgate, who was in charge from 1934 until his death in 1961, was also an important figure in the amateur choral movement; he clearly believed that part of the BBC choruses' role in broadcasting was to demonstrate how part-songs and oratorios, and indeed hymns and psalms, should be performed. But, given the quality of the forces he had at his disposal, Woodgate was hardly likely to turn down opportunities to conduct the first performances of, for example, Britten's A Boy was born and Hymn to St Cecilia, nor decline to prepare the chorus for the premieres of Bartok's Cantata Profana and Webern's Das Augenlicht and First Cantata.
‘We Should Know Who We Are’: Veljo Tormis in Conversation
Authors: Anderson Martin
Published: November 2009

Veljo Tormis, who will be 70 on 7 August 2000, has become – de facto rather than through any external sign of age – the Grand Old Man of Estonian music' He will celebrate the event in an Estonia enjoying its tenth year of liberty, but for the three preceding decades, through most of the dark night of Russian occupation, Tormis's music, based on regilaul, the primitive runic folksong of the Estonian people, was an important repository of ethnic identity.
Copland in Paris
Authors: Pollack Howard
Published: November 2009

On the trip over he met the painter Marcel Duchamp, who suggested that he forget Fontainebleau and head straight for Paris. The instruction at Fontainebleau proved, in fact, routine. Copland's composition teacher, Paul Vidal, struck him as a French Rubin Goldmark: ‘He is a man with Mr Goldmark's tastes, and was therefore quite satisfied with the stuff I showed him and played for him,’ he wrote to his parents. ‘However, he is not the sort of man I shall want to study with, when I get to Paris in the winter.’ The students, furthermore, were ‘not a very talented bunch, since most of the Jews were scared away.’ But the town of Fontainebleau had its charms and Copland was able to work on his French. Moreover, he made a few friends (including future Cleveland music critic Herbert Elwell), took some conducting lessons, and, most important, met Nadia Boulanger, with whom he would study for three years in Paris.
‘La statue reste sur son piédestal’: Messiaen's La Transfiguration and Vatican II
Authors: Dingle Christopher
Published: November 2009

The career of any great artist can be divided into broad creative periods denned by discernible traits. Olivier Messiaen is no exception, despte the fact that, when discussing his music, it is now part of the common currency to remark upon the constancy with which he stuck to his idiosyncratic musical language. It is true that some of the techniques and spirit which he used in the first of his works to be published, the Préludes, can still be heard in his final masterpiece Éclairs sur I'au-delà…. Indeed, Messiaen himself encouraged this perception, so that the received wisdom is of the composer as a steady accumulator of techniques for a continually expanding style. On one level, therefore, this is a reasonably accurate interpretation in retrospect of Messiaen's career. However, within this broad quality of consistency, it is possible to detect places where the composer markedly changes direction.
A Century in Music: Manuel Rosenthal in Conversation
Authors: Anderson Martin
Published: November 2009

Well, no. We are led by destiny, really. When I was very young, I was held to be a literary phenomenon. It was thought I was going to be an important writer. Even when I was very small, the teachers said ‘This child is already writing books’. I had an imagination, 1 knew my spelling and things like that almost from birth. And then when I was 14 years of age – in fact, on 11 November 1918, the day of the armistice of the First World War – my father died. My mother was ill, I had a younger sister – I became the head of the family. What could I do? I didn't have a trade, of course, but like every child I had learned the violin a little. Luckily at that time there were lots of cafés which had musicians who played waltzes. And it was the time of the silent cinema: there were little orchestras in the cinema. So I began to make my living like that, in Paris, and it was going alright. And one day I said to myself, it was fortunate that I had that; you should always do things seriously when you see that they stand up OK. It fed me and my family, so it was worth my while going on with it. So I continued to study the violin and I entered the Conservatoire.
Helmut Oehring in Profile
Authors: Solare Carlos María
Published: November 2009

He has been called a ‘meteor of German New Music’; he himself will say that he doesn't ‘care a fig about New Music’, and deny even to know what the term means. Be that as it may, there's no question that Helmut Oehring's is one of the most original (and successful) voices within the young generation of German composers.
Wolfgang Rihm's Recent Music
Authors: Warnaby John
Published: November 2009

Following Ian Pace's excellent introduction to the music of Helmut Lachenmann, hopes were entertained that similar articles might appear introducing the work of other contemporary German composers, in particular Wolfgang Rihm. The problem is that any article on Rihm is out of date before it is published, even with respect to general trends that have emerged in his recent output. Unlike most composers, Rihm has avoided a mid-life creative crisis, not least by devoting groups of works to particular issues: thus an initial impression may well encourage the belief that his creative personality has several distinct manifestations. This fact alone indicates that Rihm has little in common with Lachenmann. While Lachenmann's music is underpinned by the principles of dialectic, and his rich fantasy tends to be contained within the intellectual framework governing his compositional processes, Rihm's spontaneous approach suggests an uninhibited absorption of influences from every quarter, past and present. We need look no further than some of the items in the recently published two-volume collection of Rihm's lectures, discussions, and introductions to various works, which include reflections on composers as unlikely as Louis Spohr.
Face to face with Stockhausen
Authors: Solare Juan María
Published: November 2009

(The following conversation between Karlheinz Stockhausen and Juan María Solare took place in Kiirten – the small village near Cologne, Germany, where he has lived for many years – on 7 August 1998, during the ‘Stockhausen-Kurscn 1998’. The intention of these courses was, in his own (messianic) words: ‘Forward what I've tried to explain to your own students, wherever you work’. Through a whole week numerous pieces of Stockhausen had been performed in Kiirten, including several of his early works, composed almost half a century ago.)
Vítězslava Kaprálová: a remarkable voice in 20th-century Czech Music
Authors: Gates Eugene , Hartl Karla
Published: November 2009

It was with enormous pride in the achievements of his 23-year-old protégé Vítězslava Kaprálová that Bohuslav Martinů wrote the following in his review of the 1938 International Society for Contemporary Music (ISCM) Festival, held in London:

The very first item on the programme of the Festival was Military Sinfouictta by Vitězslava Kaprálová – an opening with great promise for both the festival and the composer. Her performance was awaited with interest as well as some curiosity – a girl with a baton is quite an unusual phenomenon – and when our ‘little girl conductor’ (as the English newspapers called her) appeared before the orchestra, she was welcomed by a supportive audience. She stood before the orchestra with great courage and both her composition and performance earned her respect and applause from the excellent BBC orchestra, the audience, and the critics. … Kaprálová's international debut is a success, promising and encouraging.
Statements and Connotations: Copland the Symphonist
Authors: MacDonald Calum
Published: November 2009

Two fanfares, one from the Third Symphony and the other from Connotations, the latter not obviously for the Common Man, encapsulate the paradoxes – if not contradictions – of Aaron Copland's symphonism.
Aaron Copland, Emily Dickinson, and the Noise in the Pool at Noon
Authors: Mellers Wilfrid
Published: November 2009

Aaron Copland was an urban American Jew of Russian extraction born – as he memorably remarked –

on November 14 1900 on a street in Brooklyn that can only be described as drab. It had none of the garish colour of the ghetto, none of the charm of an old New England thoroughfare, or even a pioneer street. It fills me with mild wonder every time I realize that a musician was born on that street. Music was the last thing anyone would ever have connected with that street. In fact, no one ever had connected music with my family or that street. The idea was entirely original with me.