Music Monday: Gardner: Perseids

As much as I like many aspects of city living — the density, the hustle and bustle, the major cultural institutions, just to name a few — there are other aspects of it I’m less fond of. Like many kids, I was fascinated by space growing up, and loved to go stargazing whenever I could. I don’t really remember if I had many opportunities in Columbia, but Amherst is rural enough that finding a sky free from the worst of the light pollution isn’t terribly difficult, and the UMass stone circle (not quite as imposing as Stonehenge, but constructed along similar principles) was basically walking distance from my house, so I have many memories of summer evenings spent staring heavenwards.

Rather unsurprisingly, Los Angeles is . . . not like that. I’ve definitely seen stars here, but only the brightest of them, and even then not reliably. The fainter tracings of nebulae and the dusty sweep of the Milky Way are all blotted utterly from view. I’ll probably be living in cities for the rest of my life. I may well have seen the majority of all the stars I will ever see in my life. So pieces about stars and stargazing have a special resonance for me, tinged with nostalgia both for the past and for an imagined future.

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Music Monday: Cuong: Moth

Unsurprisingly, my first exposure to Viet Cuong had nothing to do with nocturnal lepidopterans. Instead, it was in the fall of 2010 when the Yale Concert Band played his Ziggurat, complete with a custom animation projected behind us that, for some reason, involved flying bicycles. At the time, Cuong was finishing up a Master’s of Music degree at the Peabody Conservatory (where he also did his undergraduate studies) and preparing to begin an MFA in Composition at Princeton, where he’s currently pursuing his Doctorate. Despite still being in school, he’s accumulated a truly staggering number of awards and performances — on all six permanently inhabited continents, according to his webpage — and I’m honestly kind of surprised I haven’t encountered more of his works. (The YCB played another of his band pieces, Sound and Smoke, in 2012.) I’m sure that will change going forward; he’s an excellent composer and his fame is only going to continue to grow.

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Music Monday: Nelson: Passacaglia

Names can be pretty exciting things for composers. If you've got the right combination of letters in your name, you can encode it into music, leaving a kind of musical signature in your works to mark them as your own. The most famous of these is undoubtedly that of Johann Sebastian Bach, whose last name, using the German system of note nomenclature, translates directly into the notes B-flat, A, C, B-natural. Bach himself used that motif in numerous pieces (iconically, it's the last subject in the last, unfinished, fugue in The Art of Fugue, and, Bach enjoying the status that he does in the musical landscape, numerous other composers have deployed it in their works as a kind of homage, some more subtly than others.

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Music Monday: Archer: Piano Concerto

As Kimberly Archer (b 1973) notes in her program note for today's piece, composing a piano concerto is “one of those nearly obligatory ‘composer benchmarks’” that almost all of us wind up tackling at some point or other in our careers. To be sure, there are times where this kind of expectation can feel stifling — most of us want to be individuals, not cookie-cutouts — but by the same token, seeing how a new person works in a familiar genre can be a quick and powerful way to get a handle on what they're about. The sheer number of pre-existing piano concerti gives a rich field for comparison without having to dive into the treacherous waters of comparing radically different kinds of works. Here's a form with a long and storied tradition; let's see what you make from it!

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