Music Monday: LeBaron: After a Dammit to Hell

Let’s be real, this was pretty much inevitable. Music Mondays very deliberately don’t have a theme or central organizing principle (beyond being music I like), but still, there are patterns. Twentieth–Century works, works a little off the beaten path, bassoon features — these are all things I’ve come back to again and again. So how better to wrap up the last Music Monday with an off–the–beaten–path work for solo bassoon from late in the most recent century?

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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: 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: Diemer: Santa Barbara Overture

Despite living less than two hours away from the place, I’ve never actually been up to Santa Barbara, which means, at least according to today’s composer, that I am Missing Out. Emma Lou Diemer describes the joyous theme at the start of her Santa Barbara Overture as reflecting what one might feel after “enduring the clogged freeways and smog of Los Angeles”, to which I can only rejoin “Yeah, no, that sounds about right.”. Diemer was born in November 1927 to a very musical family (she had learned piano by the age of five, and family road trips would often involve sing-alongs accompanied by her sister on flute and one of her brothers on trumpet. I can’t decide if this sounds amazing or horrifying.)

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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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