Music & the Arts
February 19, 2025 • 5:56 pm Comments Off on Adès Conducts Adès
Here’s the essay I wrote for the Cleveland Orchestra’s program this week featuring guest conductor and composer Thomas Adès:
Among the preeminent composers of our era, Thomas Adès has likened the practice of creating art — whether music, literature, or painting — to fashioning “a simulacrum of the real world, a reflection”…
Filed under: Charles Ives, conductors, program notes, Saariaho, Sibelius, Thomas Adès
November 24, 2016 • 12:19 am Comments Off on Charles Ives: Thanksgiving and Forefathers’ Day
Filed under: American music, Charles Ives, San Francisco Symphony
July 4, 2015 • 11:30 am Comments Off on A Fourth with Ives
Celebrate American music! And you can’t do much better than Tilson Thomas and the San Francisco Symphony for this rep.
As Charles Ives impishly recalled about this third movement from his Holidays Symphony :
I did what I wanted to, quite sure that the thing would never be played, although the uneven measures that look so complicated in the score are mostly caused by missing a beat, which was often done in parades. In the parts taking off explosions, I worked out combinations of tones and rhythms very carefully by kind of prescriptions, in the way a chemical compound which makes explosions would be made.
And for good measure:
Filed under: American music, Charles Ives, John Adams, Michael Tilson Thomas, San Francisco Symphony
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MEMETERIA by Thomas May