Premiere: You Are There
The choral version of You Are There was premiered June 29, 2008 by the Synaxis Choir at Jersey Baptist Church under the direction of Mark Hutsko with soloist Emily Williams.
Unusual Trends…
This week I have spent countless hours listening to submissions for a new music festival, my first such experience. I was struck by two unusual trends:
- Sounds that used to arouse negative valance (i.e. digital distortion and the like) are now free game for musical exploitation.
- Music that using Western materials that maintains stasis for entire pieces.
Concerning (1), I sense that composers are playing with “forbidden” sounds much like the Diabolus in musica.
Concerning (2), hasn’t this already been exquisitely accomplished by composers such as Messiaen, as in the Quartet for the End of Time.
Classical Music’s Marketing Problem
As I was editing the May/June issue of the SCI Newsletter this week, I was struck by a discussion on the SCI listserv concerning the difference between Art and Entertainment. A number of ideas were offered for a way of differentiating the two, including focus audience or the content of the music. Some even offered better terms that would not be so derogatory, such as craft in place of entertainment.
I’m not sure that any of this discussion even matters. As Anthony Cornicello points out, there is such a big disconnect between composers and audiences that the public generally does not even know what a composer does. Conrad Kehn accurately describes the modern market with an incredible amount of entertainment options, with classical music ranking fairly low on the list for an entertaining evening (he mentions the stale, pretentious atmosphere, which forbids speaking and moving for long periods of time). Kyle Gullings made the most salient point in my mind: contemporary classical composers do a poor job of packaging their product.
Are Electroacoustic Composers Our Friends?
Electroacoustic composers have a long way to go before they can become friends with audiences and performers (and this is coming from a composer with some success in this medium). Last week, I guest-lectured to college sophomore music majors and found out that only two of them knew any electroacoustic music (one was a composer, the other recently heard my Eastern Pinnacle for Clarinet and CD). This is even more surprising considering they had just had a unit in electroacoustic music in their Music History/Literature course.
Clearly, there is a disconnect between audiences when college music students have troubles naming one piece. The Kronos quartet is a needle in the haystack of mainstream ensembles that has bridged the gap with performances of recent works such as Terry Riley’s The Cusp of Magic and Clint Mansell’s music for Requiem for a Dream.
Premiere: The Fall
The premiere performance took place in Weigel Hall at The Ohio State University on May 6, 2008. Praznik plans to record this piece in the summer.