September - 21st Century Music

Chronicle
July 1
American Composers Forum Meeting, with Jennifer Higdon. Yerba
Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco, CA.
July 3
Composer Spotlight: Musical Languages, with Chen Yi and Robert
Sirota. Jack Straw Productions, Seattle, WA.
July 4
Premiere of Higdon's Freedom Dreams. Yerba Buena Center for the
Arts, San Francisco, CA.
July 7
89th birthday of Gian Carlo Menotti.
Weisgall's Six Characters in Search of an Author (after Pirandello).
McCarter Theater Center for the Performing Arts, Princeton, NJ.
"Pirandello's remarkable 1921 play shatters the boundaries between
illusion and reality by boldly manipulating the play-within-a-play
convention. A company of actors is rehearsing Mixing It Up, a new
play that none of them like, by this pretentious modern playwright
named Pirandello. . . . In creating an operatic version of Pirandello's
play, Weisgall and his librettist, Denis Johnston, an Irish playwright,
turned the actors into singers who were rehearsing an overly complex
new opera, The Temptation of St. Anthony, by Hugo Weisgall. . . .
Weisgall's score is brilliant and haunting. Born in Bohemia, the son
of a cantor, he immigrated as a child to the United States, where he
received his musical education. Yet his works are imbued with
Central European Expressionism. Weisgall ably fashioned the
pungent atonal and thickly chromatic elements of his harmonic
language into music of gritty power and affecting lyricism. Though
not conventionally tuneful, the score is richly melodic" [Anthony
Tommasini, The New York Times, 7/11/00].
Summergarden. New Juilliard Ensemble. Sculpture Garden,
Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY.
July 8
Centenary of the birth of George Antheil.
July 9
85th birthday of David Diamond.
July 11
U.S. premiere of Louis Andriessen's Writing to Vermeer (libretto by
Peter Greenaway). New York State Theater, New York, NY.
Through July 15. "[The] music . . . is very beautiful. There is a sense
of song in Mr. Andriessen's writing that for post-tonal composers has
become both anachronism and anathema. The lines are long, sinuous
and gracefully balanced. The composer has also transformed the
sound and the style of early instruments. The songs and dances of
Sweelinck take on the Day-Glo of electronic treatment or become
warped and out of tune through the twist of a dial. History is
accented by synthesized explosions or sharp thrusts" [Bernard
Holland, The New York Times, 7/13/00].
Bang on a Can, with music by Steve Reich, including New York
Counterpoint, Four Organs, and Clapping Music. National Design
Museum, New York, NY.
Messiaen Celebration. Avery Fisher Hall, New York, NY. "[U]nlike
Mahler's [music], [Messiaen's represents withdrawal from this world"
[James R. Oestreich, The New York Times, 7/13/00].
Paul Taub and Jeffrey Gilliam in Schulhoff's Sonata for Flute and
Piano. PONCHO Concert Hall, Cornish College of the Arts, Seattle,
WA.
July 12
Louis Andriessen and Peter Greenaway discuss Writing to Vermeer.
Lincoln Center, New York, NY.
Asko/Schoenberg Ensembles and Vox Vocal Ensemble in Messiaen's
Trois petites liturgies de la Presence Divine, Varèse's Deserts, and
the U.S. premiere of Ford's Salome Fast. Alice Tully Hall, New
York, NY.
Osiris Trio in music of Frank Martin. Frick Collection, New York,
NY.
July 13
49th anniversary of the death of Arnold Schoenberg.
San Francisco Symphony and Chorus in Orff's Carmina Burana.
Davies Symphony Hall, San Francisco, CA. Repeated July 16.
Messiaen's Le Merle Noir, the first all-electronic performance of
Riley's In C, Crumb's Black Angels, and the world premiere of S.
Johnson's Worth Having, with Robert Moog, Donald Buchla, and
Pauline Oliveros. New York Society for Ethical Culture, New York,
NY. "Like people on a bus, some of the musicians [in In C] stood out
because thy were louder or more brightly dressed, in terms of sound,
while others were part of the background, contributing to the often
dense, rich harmonies and the playtime atmosphere" [Paul Griffiths,
The New York Times, 7/15/00].
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