Twentieth Century

Common Tones in Simple Time: John Adams’ Gradually Shifting Sonic Landscape

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Something really interesting happens to your perception of time, space, and motion when you listen to John Adams’ Common Tones in Simple Time. It’s music which is cinematic and topographical. One critic likened it to the experience of “flying or gliding over a landscape of gently changing colors and textures.” The composer Nico Muhly called it, “distinctly American music: the music of the cross-country road trip, the slowly changing landscape above the quickly moving pavement.”  Muhly’s last …

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Ned Rorem’s “Little Elegy”

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It’s amazing how much can be said in the small space of sixteen measures. A case in point is Little Elegy, a song by American composer Ned Rorem (b. 1923). Rorem, who was born in Richmond, Indiana and will turn 93 in October, produced a series of operas, three symphonies, countless concertos, and chamber works over the course of his long career. But he’s most known for his prolific contribution to a genre …

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Celebrating the Music of Brazil’s Greatest Composer, Heitor Villa-Lobos

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As the eyes of the world turn to Rio this week, let’s explore the music of Brazil’s most celebrated composer, Heitor Villa-Lobos (1887-1959). It’s music in which multiple worlds harmoniously collide. The sounds of native Brazilian folk music and the casual strains of Rio’s street bands blend with European modernism and hints of Debussy and Stravinsky. A “body of music in which European sophistication and native wit and energy compete for supremacy” was Bernard Holland’s …

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Five Pieces Inspired by the Olympics

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The Olympics are a wonderful metaphor for world cooperation, the kind of international competition that’s wholesome and healthy, an interplay between countries that represents the best in all of us.  -John Williams Music has served as a celebratory backdrop for the Olympics since the first modern games in Athens in 1896. As the 2016 Summer Olympic Games unfold in Rio, let’s listen to five pieces which form an Olympic soundtrack: Josef Suk: …

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Time For Three’s “Firework” Cover

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The eclectic string trio, Time For Three isn’t interested in categories. The original members, violinists Nick Kendall and Zachary DePue and double bassist Ranaan Meyer, began jamming together as students at the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia. The result was a vibrant and free-flowing mix of musical styles and genres, including bluegrass, jazz, rock, and hip-hop. This “classically trained garage band” continued to perform together after Curtis, although DePue left to become concertmaster of the Indianapolis …

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Arvo Pärt’s Credo: The Powers of Order and Chaos

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Arvo Pärt’s Credo, written in 1968, is the music of revolution. It’s an expression of disintegration, collapse, and reawakening. It’s a piece in which the pristine, well established order of modernism’s 12-tone-row and the rational counterpoint of J.S. Bach, give way to a terrifying, chaotic, total breakdown. For a moment we hear raging noise…an anguished sound world unimaginable before the twentieth century. Scored for piano, orchestra and chorus (an instrumentation that mirrors Beethoven’s Choral Fantasy, Op. 80), Credo is …

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A Ravel Snapshot with the Lydian String Quartet

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The Boston-based Lydian String Quartet has a new first violinist. Andrea Segar recently succeeded Daniel Stepner, who served as the Quartet’s first violinist for 29 years. Segar was a student of Donald Weilerstein (former first violinist of the Cleveland Quartet) at New England Conservatory, and Philip Setzer (a founding member of the Emerson String Quartet) and Soovin Kim at SUNY Stony Brook. Last week, the Lydian Quartet posted this informal rehearsal clip featuring the …

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