MEMETERIA by Thomas May

Music & the Arts

June 27, 2022 • 5:56 am Comments Off on George Walker at 100

George Walker at 100

Today would have been the 100th birthday of George Walker. His legacy remains far too little known. In his honor, I’m reposting my story for The New York Times on this extraordinary American composer.

A Composer’s Final Work Contains ‘Visions’ of an American Master

Last fall, the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery began to display, among its recent acquisitions, a photograph of the composer George Walker. It shows him close up, his right index finger and thumb bearing down on a pencil with the precision of a surgeon, at work on the manuscript score of his Sinfonia No. 5…

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Filed under: American music, anniversary, George Walker

December 16, 2019 • 12:31 am Comments Off on Das Beethoven-Jahr: Es Geht Los

Das Beethoven-Jahr: Es Geht Los

And so it begins. Bonn opens the anniversary year with a collage by Paul Griffiths.

And here’s a slew of Beethoven-related stories from Deutschlandfunk — including such matters as the transformation of the “Ode to Joy” into Europe’s hymn and Liszt’s piano transcriptions of the symphonies.

Filed under: anniversary, Beethoven, music news

May 21, 2019 • 1:50 am Comments Off on Heinz Holliger at 80

Heinz Holliger at 80

“My entire relationship with music is such that I always try to reach its limits.”

The extraordinary Swiss oboist, composer, conductor, teacher, and all-around musical personality Heinz Holliger turns 80 today — his creativity undimmed.

Later in the week, ECM is releasing Zwiegespräche, an intriguing gathering of “dialogues”: works for oboe by Holliger and György Kurtág, who share a strikingly similar aesthetic. Both studied under Sándor Veress and, notes Roman Brotbeck in his liner notes, “both use the entire history of music as a frame of reference, both love miniatures, both speicalize in homage to friends and colleagues and cultivate a living ‘Davidsbund’ with living and departed soulmates.”

Holliger plays oboe, English horn, and piano on the album and is joined by fellow oboist Marie-Lise Schüpbach, bass clarinetist Ernesto Molinari, soprano Sarah Wegener, and Philippe Jaccottet reciting seven of his poems for another remarkable dialogue here: Holliger responds to the poems with various formal strategies in Lecture pour hautbois et cors anglais (2015-16).

Last year at Zurich Opera I was mesmerized by Holliger’s latest stage work, Lunea. In this opera to a libretto by Klaus Händl, Holliger returns to one of the figures who has haunted him throughout his creative life: the Romantic poet and polymath Nikolaus Lenau, who was institutionalized in his final years. Holliger’s exquisitely refined musical sensibility and aesthetic of fragmentation, indirection, and dislocation work to tremendously powerful effect here in depicting the search for love and longing for eternity.

Holliger has been a formative presence for decades at the Lucerne Festival. Here’s an insightful interview (in German) with Christian Wildhagen.

And here a radio interview with Dorothea Bossert for SWR.

Filed under: anniversary, Heinz Holliger, new music

November 11, 2018 • 10:27 am Comments Off on Eleventh Hour

Eleventh Hour

In honor of Armistice Day, on the 100th anniversary.
Gustav Holst: Ode to Death, H. 144, Op. 38 (1919), which sets a passage from When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d by Walt Whitman.

Come lovely and soothing death,
Undulate round the world, serenely arriving, arriving,
In the day, in the night, to all, to each,
Sooner or later delicate death.

Prais’d be the fathomless universe,
For life and joy, and for objects and knowledge curious,
And for love, sweet love—but praise! praise! praise!
For the sure-enwinding arms of cool-enfolding death.

Dark mother always gliding near with soft feet,
Have none chanted for thee a chant of fullest welcome?
Then I chant it for thee, I glorify thee above all,
I bring thee a song that when thou must indeed come, come unfalteringly.

Approach strong deliveress,
When it is so, when thou hast taken them I joyously sing the dead,
Lost in the loving floating ocean of thee,
Laved in the flood of thy bliss O death.

From me to thee glad serenades,
Dances for thee I propose saluting thee, adornments and feastings for thee,
And the sights of the open landscape and the high-spread sky are fitting,
And life and the fields, and the huge and thoughtful night.

The night in silence under many a star,
The ocean shore and the husky whispering wave whose voice I know,
And the soul turning to thee O vast and well-veil’d death,
And the body gratefully nestling close to thee.

Over the tree-tops I float thee a song,
Over the rising and sinking waves, over the myriad fields and the prairies wide,
Over the dense-pack’d cities all and the teeming wharves and ways,
I float this carol with joy, with joy to thee O death.

Filed under: anniversary

June 30, 2018 • 3:14 am Comments Off on Happy Birthday, Esa-Pekka Salonen!

Happy Birthday, Esa-Pekka Salonen!

Today the Maestro turns 60 years young.

Great conductor, great composer:

Filed under: anniversary, conductors, Mahler

January 24, 2018 • 12:10 am Comments Off on Gottfried von Einem at 100

Gottfried von Einem at 100

Gottfried von Einem was born exactly 100 years ago today. Boosey & Hawkes has a useful introduction: Einem at 100 

Also from Boosey & Hawkes:
Gottfried von Einem was son of a military attaché and educated abroad in Germany and England * Studied composition with Boris Blacher in Berlin * First ballet, Princess Turandot, won him post of composer to the Dresden State Opera * Radical use of jazz elements in the Concerto for Orchestra led to conflict with the Nazi authorities * After the war, closely associated with the rejuvenation of the Salzburg Festival * Operas, including Dantons Tod, Der Prozess, Der Zerrissene and Der Besuch der alten Dame, soon brought recognition as Austria’s leading composer, and rapidly attracted international performances * Orchestral music conducted by the twentieth century’s leading maestros including Karajan, Furtwängler, Böhm, Ormandy, Sawallisch, Giulini, Dohnányi, Ozawa and Mehta.

Gottfried von Einem believed that it is only possible to experience the unexpected as new when it is presented against the background of music which seems familiar to a listener. If exclusively new elements are employed, this leads to a dulling of receptiveness to what is new and may even result in boredom. And to be boring – according to Gottfried von Einem – is the greatest sin an artist can commit. All his life, Gottfried von Einem knew how to avoid and avert this transgression. –Harald Kunz, 1998

—New York Times: “Saving Konrad Latte”

—profile by Tobias Sedlmaier (in German)

Filed under: anniversary, Gottfried von Einem

May 13, 2017 • 5:35 pm Comments Off on Lou Harrison’s 100th

Lou Harrison’s 100th

May 14 marks the 100th anniversary of the birth of Lou Harrison. NPR’s Tom Huizenga has this lovely appreciation:

The composer’s motto was “Cherish, Conserve, Consider, Create.” He was a published poet, a painter and a calligrapher, and was openly gay back in the 1930s. […]

Harrison was fond of saying, “Enjoy hybrid music, because that’s all there is.”

“He knew that all music actually comes from other musics and combinations,” [biographer Brett] Campbell says. “There’s no such thing as a pure music.”

And from Brett Campbell himself, at Oregon Arts Watch:

Since Harrison’s death, his music is played somewhere every day, often in dance works, several choreographed by his great friend and colleague Mark Morris. It’s a colorful story, told in Eva Soltes’s film Lou Harrison: A World of Music, and in the new biography I co-authored with Bill Alves, Lou Harrison: American Musical Maverick— and it all began here.

Harrison’s legacy extends into this century: his work with Asian musical forms and instruments and his exploration of new tuning systems opened a whole new world of possibilities to modern music, allowing composers to take resources from various cultures and use them to make new music.

 

 

Filed under: American music, anniversary, Lou Harrison

August 25, 2016 • 9:14 am Comments Off on Remembering Lenny

Remembering Lenny

In honor of Leonard Bernstein’s birthday — just two years away from the centenary now! — I’m reposting a link here to some thoughts from a few years ago.

Filed under: American music, anniversary, Bernstein

July 10, 2016 • 5:56 pm Comments Off on Proustiana

Proustiana

240x775July is my favorite birthday month for artists (Mahler, Kafka, Hesse, Neruda, Thoreau, GB Shaw, Klimt, Janáček, etc.), so it’s always pleased me that Proust, one of my supreme idols, managed to be born in the heart of summer.

In honor of Marcel Proust’s 145th birthday (10 July), here are some reflections that have been circulating recently.

Biographer William C. Carter, who believes À la recherche du temps perdu is “arguably the best book ever written about perception,” on Why You Should Read Proust:

I think he helps us to see the world as it really is, not only its extraordinary beauty and diversity, but his observations make us aware of how we perceive and how we interact with others, showing us how often we are mistaken in our own assumptions and how easy it is to have a biased view of another person.

Daniel Mendelssohn, one of  Literary Hub‘s Six Writers on the Genius of Marcel Proust rails against the cheapening of the term “Proustian,” which has come “nowadays to refer to pretty much anything sepia-toned, anything having to do with ‘memory.'” Time, he asserts:

is not just the subject, or one of the subjects, of In Search of Lost Time; it is also the medium in which the novel must be read, if it is to be understood. To read this novel takes time; there is no faking it, there are no short-cuts, like five-minute yoga (one of the many fatuities of a frenetic era that is obsessed with “wasting” time, as if to spend time on anything were somehow a loss).

And Laure Murat ponders How the French Reread Proust:

To read or reread Proust brings about this symbolic identification at every level. From the first example to the last, it has really only ever been a question of being named or naming oneself: from “I am a writer” to “I am asthmatic”(or both), the Remembrance systematically determines names given and names taken individually, thereby establishing a relationship between the reader-rereader, the author, and the book that has no other parallel in the accounts of rereading other texts I have gathered.

 

Filed under: anniversary, Proust

July 2, 2016 • 12:08 pm 3

Happy 101st, Randolph Hokanson!

hokanson

Randolph Hokanson with pianist Judith Cohen – a day before he turned 100 (photo by Thomas May)

This is a belated birthday salute, as Mr. Randolph Hokanson’s actual birthday happened on 22 June. He’s now into his second century. Today I’ll be attending a recital by Mr. Hokanson. In honor of the occasion, here’s a profile I wrote a couple of years ago about this remarkable pianist (also at work as a composer these days):

“I’ve seen it all!” announces Randolph Hokanson before losing himself in a mischievous gale of laughter. With someone else, you might be tempted to indulge that as hyperbole. With Hokanson, who was born in 1915 in Bellingham, it’s tempting to take it literally.
This gifted pianist and teacher has witnessed almost a century of not just ceaseless but accelerating change: epochal shifts in technology, in education, in how music and the arts are valued.

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Filed under: anniversary, pianists

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