Music Monday: Sheng: Clarinet Concertino

So had things gone a little differently, I could have wound up studying with the composer of the piece we’re featuring today. Bright Sheng* has been on the composition faculty of the University of Michigan since 1995, and his presence there was one of the many things that attracted me to that program. Still, getting rejected didn’t change my musical tastes, and I still find Sheng’s music as compelling as ever. Born in Shanghai in 1955, Sheng got his first musical training at the age of four when his mother began teaching him piano. During the Cultural Revolution, he spent seven years serving as a pianist and percussionist in a provincial theatre in Qinghai [Wikipedia], where he also found time to study the region’s folk music. When the Revolution ebbed and the universities re-opened, Sheng enrolled in the Shanghai Conservatory of Music, studying there from 1978–82.

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Music Monday: Mehmari: Villa-Lobos Variations

Many composers over the years have written variations on other composers’ themes as an homage to their friends and predecessors, and that tradition is alive and well today. André Mehmari was born in 1971 in Niterói, Brazil, and began studying music with his mother at the age of five. A precocious youth, he taught himself jazz improvisation by ear, and had established himself as a piano and organ teacher by the age of fifteen, with several compositions already under his belt. In 1995, he moved to São Paulo to study at the University of São Paulo*, and from there his career really took off, both as an active pianist (in multiple genres) and as a composer and arranger. He tours internationally, and has written works for major musical institutions both at home and abroad; he also enjoys an active life as a recording artist, with some of his albums being entirely improvised.

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Music Monday: Galbraith: Bassoon Sonata

Generally, when I discover a work via a recording instead of a live performance, it’s a recording on Spotify. I still like CDs, but my budget is limited, and if I bought a physical copy of every album I listened to online, I would literally be unable to afford rent or food. (I’d probably be able to build a pretty sizable room from all the jewel cases, tho.) Today’s piece is an exception: I first encountered it on a CD I bought on a whim at the final concert of the 2016 Meg Quigley Vivaldi Competition at the Colburn School, and on my very first listen, I fell in love. When I decided to write about it for Music Monday, I assumed that I’d be able to find it to link to on Spotify. The good news is that there is indeed a recording I can link to, but the bad news is that it’s a different recording, and one that I’m not very fond of. I’m still sharing it, because I think the piece holds up, but if you’re on the fence about it and have $10 to spare, the Nicolasa Kuster recording is superior in every way, and comes with a bunch of other interesting bassoon repertoire to boot.

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Music Monday: Rimkus: MacLeod Road

Right, so. This is another one of those times when I don’t have a lot to say about either the composer or the genesis of the work I’m featuring. This time, tho, it’s not because the details weren’t recorded and slipped away into the maw of time, it’s because she’s just starting out, and the work in question received it’s première this past November. Sarah Rimkus was born in 1990 in Washington DC, and moved to Bainbridge Island, Washington state in 1998. Somewhere along the way she got interested in music, and earned a Bachelor’s in music composition from the University of Southern California in 2013. From there, she went on to study vocal music at the University of Aberdeen in Scotland, where she is currently pursuing a PhD

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Music Monday: Coleridge-Taylor: Quintet

On or around his fifth birthday, Coleridge-Taylor began playing the violin, and by the age of 15, he had enrolled in the Royal Conservatory to continue his studies. Two years into a projected three-year program, he switched from violin to composition, working under Charles Villiers Stanford. The older composer was quickly impressed with Coleridge-Taylor’s abilities, declaring him one of his two most brilliant students — no mean praise considering he also taught Frank Bridge, Herbert Howells, Gustav Holst, and Ralph Vaughan Williams!

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Music Monday: Schoenfield: Café Music

Chances are, if you see a lot of live music, that you’ve been to one or two concerts that you described as “literally unforgettable” as you walked out the auditorium doors. Chances are, also, that you’ve forgotten more than a few that you said that about. Certainly that was the case for me with this week’s piece. I first heard it back in the summer of 2009 at the Kinhaven summer music festival, and was totally blown away by it. I then proceeded to not think about it at all until about a month ago, when I was researching the composition faculty at various grad schools I’m looking into applying to. I was on the second or third Spotify album of Paul Schoenfield’s music when I scrolled down the track listing and saw Café Music as the last offering on the disk.

“Huh,” I thought, “That title seems awfully familiar.” At first I thought I might be confusing it with something by Astor Piazzolla (an Argentinian composer famous for revolutionizing the tango, among other legacies), but as soon as I heard the opening bars, the memory of that Kinhaven concert came rushing back to me, leaving me utterly boggled as to how I could have forgotten about it so completely over the intervening half-decade.

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Music Monday: Lash: Moth Sketches

Hardly any information about Moth Sketches (2013) is floating around on the internet — even the listing on her publisher's site is a bare-bones rundown of instrumentation and duration — but according to an archived copy of the program from the première performance, the work started out as a score for a short animated film about a moth. Eventually, the music parted ways from the movie and became a stand-alone work, but the origins left their imprint, and she found herself thinking of different materials as quasi-dramatic characters. The form is still abstract, however; she describes it as being like a braided rope, "involving many strands of differing colors" such that the surface is constantly changing as the piece unfolds.

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Music Monday: Dillon: The Infinite Sphere

Despite the historical prominence of the genre, I don't really listen to a lot of string quartets. It's not hard to find reasons why: I'm a wind player, so I can't exactly perform in one (nor can the people I know from sitting next to in most ensembles . . . ), most of my exploratory listening is in times and repertoires rather more recent than the core of the quartet repertoire, and the music theory courses I took tended to be centered more around art songs and piano sonatas. It will come as no surprise, then, that the ones I do know tend to be rather off the beaten path. 

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Music Monday: Dring: Trio

"Daaaaaaaaaaa, ba du ba du ba du ba deedle-dee" — It's not often that the first two bars of a piece grip me so suddenly and surely as the opening of Madeleine Dring's trio for flute, oboe, and piano. Yet the very first time I heard them — streaming background music at the office, on a CD I had clicked on for a completely different piece — I dropped what I was doing and frantically tabbed over to Spotify to figure out what I was listening to. It's good to be reminded that even with all the repertoire I already know, there are still delightful surprises out there in the world of this music I love.

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