Z blog

“This should sound like your wife screaming” was the composer’s first comment to the London Sinfonietta trombonist during rehearsals for his piece “Run” in the large dance rehearsal studio at the Royal Theatre in central Copenhagen.

“Ah yes!” he said as I whacked sfffffz hell out of my cello fingerboard with the wood of the bow. “A real catastrophe!” (He’d probably have been pleased to know that my brand new bow fell apart during the opening bars of a performance seminar I gave music students in Copenhagn a few days later). [Read more…] about The Bridge

“Curlew River” is perhaps not the first title one would imagine Japanese actors rushing to pronounce, but Tokyo University of the Arts, Japan’s leading specialist music and arts college, was more than up for having a go during their recent UK performances of the Noh play Sumidagawa and the operatic piece Benjamin Britten closely based on it.

I had the good fortune to get to see this rare performance combo one sunny afternoon at St. Bartholomew’s Church, Orford (below), in deepest Suffolk where “Curlew River “ (Op. 71), also known as the “Church Parables” was premiered in 1964. [Read more…] about New ways of breathing

“I mean who wants to listen to four and half minutes of silence? It’s really too much to impose on people. And have you ever really heard those chance pieces? It’s just not music and gives everyone terrible license to make bad art.”

These words, spoken by Shirley Perle, pianist and widow of distinguished composer and musical theorist George Perle, may come as blackest heresy to some, but goodness me, what a refreshing opinion in this anniversary year of wall-to-wall Cage events buoyed up by the unquestioning approval of performers and punters alike.

[Read more…] about Copland kills cow

If you take the Hutchinson River Parkway, or “The Hutch” as it’s known, in a northerly direction from the Bronx NY, NY, there are an impressive number of dead composers who line the route to Connecticut. Bartok, Zemlinsky, Rachmaninov and Percy Grainger all lived within leafy travelling distance of the Big Apple, as did Charles Ives whose country home (left) I got to visit a couple of weeks back.

In 1912, Ives bought a plot of land across the road from the site of General Putnam’s headquarters in the Revolutionary War, set deep within the verdant rolling hills of Redding, Connecticut, and had a house and barn built to his specifications. A year later he moved in with his wife Harmony (is that not the perfect composer’s wife name?) and stayed there until his death in 1954, at which point the house remained in the Ives family. [Read more…] about An answered question

There’s a wonderful story in Joel Sachs’ fantastic biography of composer, pianist and musical theorist Henry Cowell, of when he went round to composer Carl Ruggles’ house.

King of Cantankerous Old Man, composer Carl Ruggles aged 132.

“Ruggles was sitting at the old piano, singing a single tone at the top of his raucous composer’s voice, and banging a single chord at intervals over and over. He refused to be interrupted in this pursuit, and after an hour or so, I insisted on knowing what the idea was. [Read more…] about The test of time