Classical Music News:
Vienna (AFP) – The complete printed NMA (New Mozart Edition) is now available to download from The Mozart Institute website: “The purpose of this website is to make Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s musical compositions widely and conveniently accessible to the public, for personal study and for educational and classroom use,” the Mozarteum said in a statement. The website draws from the original Neue Mozart Ausgabe paper version developed since 1954 by internationally renowned musicologists and comprising over 125 booklets of sheet music, whose origin has been painstakingly authenticated, the Salzburg foundation said.
The “Digital Mozart Edition” (DME) website (http://dme.mozarteum.at) features over 600 works by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, separated into ten categories, from concertos for orchestra to chamber music and pieces for piano.
Archives for December 2006
Oliver Knussen – British Composer
Interview / Classical Book Recommendation of the month:
This is a condensed version of an interview with British composer and conductor Oliver Knussen (b. 1952) by Paul Griffiths. It’s part of several interviews included in Griffith’s “New sounds, new personalities: British composers of the 1980’s
(the format of this interview is similar to the format we will be using at composersnewpencil.com for interviewing composers and performers).
Oliver Knussen’s music occupies a regularly revisited place in concert and opera programmes worldwide. His Third Symphony, his opera Where the Wild Things Are and Violin Concerto are among the most frequently performed British works of recent times.
Paul Griffiths: Do you keep regular hours for composing?
Oliver Knussen: I’m trying to learn how to. My regular hours used to be from 11 at night till 4 in the morning, largely because that’s when the phone doesn’t ring and there are less things to think about. [Read more…]
Zappa – Does Humor Belong in Music?
Performance / Video:
Frank Zappa. The Purple Lagoon. Saturday Night Live NBC, 11 December 1976. Featuring John Belushi as Samurai “Be-Bop” Futaba on saxophone, Ruth Underwood on marimba, Patrick O’Hearn on bass and Terry Bozzio on drums. Born in Baltimore, Maryland on December 21, 1940, Frank Zappa was a counter-culture icon. Leading a life devoted to composition, he worked in almost every musical genre. He wrote for pop, rock and jazz ensembles (producing more than fifty albums) as well as for classical chamber ensembles and orchestras. “What do you do for a living, Dad?” If any of my kids ever asked me that question, Zappa said, the answer would have to be: “What I do is composition. I love putting little black dots on music paper…I’d sit for sixteen hours at a time, hunched over a chair with a bottle of India ink, and draw beams and dots. [Read more…]
Edgard Varèse – Offrandes
Performance / Video:
Pierre Boulez conducting the Ensemble Intercontemporain, with singer Anna Steiger, in a 1991 concert recorded at the Alte Oper Frankfurt, Germany. Born in Paris, 22 December 1883, Varèse referred to his basic ideas as “sound masses”, or elements of musical sound characterized mainly by their instrumentation, registration, rhythmic shape, intervallic relationship, and volume. Offrandes, for soprano and chamber orchestra was written in 1921, and was his first work to be performed in the US. It is divided into two sections, both of which are settings of poems in French. Varèse’s catalogue contains only a handful of surviving pieces (the pieces written before 1920 were all destroyed by him or lost in a fire), but he is now considered to be one of the principal innovators of the first half of the 20th century. He died in New York, 6 November 1965.