A performance of Mingus’s Epitaph will take place at Lincoln Center in New York City, on April 25, 2007. The music will be directed by composer Gunther Schuller, who also directed the premiere 18 years ago. Epitaph is a two-hour composition that was completely discovered during the cataloguing process after Mingus’s death. It was premiered by a 30-piece orchestra on June 3, 1989, ten years after his death (watch some video clips from the Epitaph performance from 1989 here). Because of this event, we felt the need to share something about him. These are the liner notes written by Charles Mingus for his album: “Let My Children Hear Music” that was released on Columbia Records, in 1971. They appear on the record under the tittle of “What is a Jazz Composer?”, and present some of Mingus’s thoughts on being a jazz composer and musician. [Read more…]
Archives for March 2007
Why is “Ugly” Music so Hard to Understand?
Classical Column. The Composer Speaks: Pablo Santiago Chin
Paraphrasing Berg’s article “Why is Schoenberg ‘s Music so Hard to Understand?”, it seems that this question is more relevant today than ever before if it is to be applied to “abstract” music. I use the term “abstract” after hearing a professor of composition of a prestigious American university expressing his regrettable opinions on avant-garde music. The mentioned professor (and composer) believes that Shostakovich’s music is more human and expressive than Boulez’s music, and supports his argument in the fact that Shostakovich is played all around the world while Boulez is only played in selective circles. [Read more…]
Stravinsky on Music Composition
Classical Book Highlights:
During the academic year 1939-1940, when he was about 58 years old, Stravinsky delivered the Charles Eliot Norton Lectures at Harvard University. Speaking in French, (an English translation was published in 1947 by Arthur Knodel) he began by saying: “I cannot conceal from you how happy I am to be speaking for the first time to an audience that is willing to take the trouble of listening and learning before judging.” These lectures appeared with the name of Poetics of Music in the Form of Six Lessons, on which Stravinsky deals with different topics like: the phenomenon of music, the composition of music, musical typology, the avatars of Russian music, and the performance of music. The following paragraphs are a collection of a few reading highlights we gathered on Stravinky’s views on composition. They are presented here in a different order than they appear in the book, and we also added subtitles in order to make the reading more organized, as they are as we just mentioned, fragments of some of Stravinsky’s thoughts. [Read more…]