Music Monday: Brouwer: Guitar Sonata

Before you accuse me of repeating a composer, today we‘re featuring Leo Brouwer, not Margaret (to my knowledge there is no relation). Leo Brouwer was born on 1 March, 1939 in Havana, Cuba, into a family of music enthusiasts. His father gave him informal guitar lessons, teaching him to pick out pieces by Heitor Villa-Lobos and the like, largely without the use of sheet music. Brouwer started taking formal lessons at the age of 13, and quickly attained a high level of ability on that instrument, making his professional debut at the age of 17.

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Music Monday: Moroi: Piano Sonata No. 2

Moroi Saburō (諸井三郎 for those who read kanji) was born just to the north of Tōkyō to a wealthy, industrious family in August of 1903. He was very close to his older brother Kanichi, and looked up to him as something of an inspirational figure. Said brother was reasonably educated in the arts, and gave Moroi his first piano lessons. (Kanichi would also take him to see the pianist Sueko Ogura perform the Beethoven piano sonatas — I haven’t been able to tell if this was his first exposure to said sonatas, but given the influence of Beethoven’s style on Moroi’s work, it seems an occasion well worth mentioning.) Moroi continued to pursue his musical studies — both on piano and in composition — both in high school and college, frequently working from books instead of studying with teachers in person.

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Music Monday: Solomon: Rotational Games

So even tho this is technically my “getting back into the swing of things” post, today I’m going to be doing something a bit different. Instead of featuring music that someone else wrote and I like, today I’m going to be talking about a piece that I wrote. Specifically, I’m going to be talking about the work that I premièred on my recital in September: Rotational Games.

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Music Monday: Coulthard: Cello Sonata

Unlike many of her contemporaries, Coulthard steered clear of the cutting edge of the avant-garde, writing in a language that was often criticized for being conservative and out of touch (criticisms that often carried more than a whiff of misogyny in the background), but one that she felt called to all the same. (In her last works, she did experiment with various contemporary techniques, but they were never a core part of her repertoire.) Her cello sonata, written in 1947, very much exemplifies this style.

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Music Monday: Clarke: Viola Sonata

Chances are that, even if you're not a musician, you have a general sense that the viola is the butt of a lot of jokes. There are some historical facts that help get them off the ground, but at a certain point they got enough momentum to become A Thing and simply carry on out of their own inertia. Even if often wrapped in a layer or two of irony, the viola has a reputation (or, at the very least, a reputation for having a reputation) for being a scrappy, unimpressive instrument. This is entirely unfair. The viola is a marvelous instrument with many outstanding qualities, and it's a shame that it gets so little time in the spotlight. Fortunately, there have always been composers and performers out there working to make sure the viola is taken as seriously as it deserves.

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Music Monday: Schickele: Summer Serenade

Peter Schickele (b 1935) is undoubtedly best known for his work with the music of PDQ Bach, the youngest and oddest of JS Bach's twenty odd children, but he's also a talented composer in his own right. His youthful musical environments were perhaps not the richest — he was the only bassoonist in Fargo, and subsequently the only music major in his class at Swarthmore (1957) — but he wound up studying with many of the giants of mid-century musical education, including Roy Harris, Darius Milhaud, and Vincent Persichetti. When he was only 26, he landed a teaching job at Juilliard, but, even more remarkably, he was able to quit four years later to embark on a career as a freelance composer. He's managed to keep this up right thru to the present — he currently lives with his wife in upstate New York and isn't affiliated with any institution (occasional research work on PDQ Bach at the University of Southern North Dakota at Hoople notwithstanding). 

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Rotational Games

So I'm currently in the middle of writing a bassoon sonata. It's the first entirely new concert piece I've written since finishing my musical, the first such piece, in fact, since finishing my clarinet sonata in the fall of 2013. (I've done a couple of concert arrangements of selections from Window for various forces, and while all of them have new material spliced in, those additions are really just connective tissue to make the music work without the words; they lack the depth of compositional intensity that building a new structure from the ground up calls for.) It's going well: I have solid drafts of the first two movements and the third is off to a promising start.

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Music Monday: Tailleferre: Harp Sonata

Today, we step back from the massive forces and raging sorrow of Corigliano to a work that's considerably more tranquil and serene. Germaine Tailleferre was born in a suburb of Paris in 1892, and originally studied piano with her mother before ultimately winding up in the Conservatoire de Paris. Her father refused to support her musical endeavors, and to spite him, she refused to go by the name she was given at birth. (Tailleferre had to deal with a lot of bullshit in her life as a female composer, living and working in a time when Aaron Copland could confidently proclaim that women had an innate block against composing well. It's hard to escape the feeling that one of the reasons she's so little known is pervasive sexism.)

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