Benjamin Lees was one of the senior figures in American music, with a large catalogue of powerful and inventive music to his credit. His piano works span almost sixty years of compositional activity but are unified by a number of consistent stylistic features: a wiry and muscular athleticism with its distant roots in Prokofiev and Bartók, a quasi-Impressionist awareness of piano sonority, a tough, no-nonsense sense of humour and an exhilarating onward drive. Experience Lees' intense and powerful music with a performance of his Fantasia (1954) . . . one of this week's FEATURED NEW MUSIC VIDEOS.

The Portland Chamber Music Festival is a local, community-based organization that has gained an outstanding regional and national reputation since its founding in 1994. The festival brings nationally recognized artists to Portland, Maine to present a wide range of classical chamber music, including the music of living composers. The PCMF has played to a nationwide audience on National Public Radio; twice has been awarded an Aaron Copland grant for performance of American contemporary music; has been recorded and broadcast by WGBH radio in Boston; and has been featured in both local and national press. Performers in recent years have included members of the Vermeer, Mendelssohn, Borromeo, and Brentano String Quartets, world-renowned baritone Sanford Sylvan, and National Symphony Concertmaster Nurit Bar-Josef. Resident Composers have included Grammy winner Osvaldo Golijov and internationally celebrated composer Earl Kim. PCMF also works to develop excitement for classical music among young people and the greater Portland community, hosting a free children’s concert, a Young Artist Apprentice Program, concerts in Gardiner and at Bates College, and adult chamber music workshops. The festival also conducts an annual Composer’s Competition, culminating in the winning work’s premiere performance . . . . . . it's this week's FEATURED NEW MUSIC FESTIVAL.

Leonard Rosenman is one of a handful of film composers who have successfully incorporated contemporary compositional techniques into conventional film scoring. Rosenman's use of Arnold Schoenberg's 12-tone technique set a standard for the use of various avant-garde, atonal, and serial effects. The first ever twelve-tone score [for a major studio film] was his score for "The Cobweb" (1955). The composer has also demonstrated an ability to employ authentic period music in a number of films dealing with historical subject matter, such as "Barry Lyndon" (1975) and "Bound for Glory" (1976). Hear Rosenman's music in an excerpt from the 1979 eco-thriller Prophecy . . it's this week's PYTHEAS SIGHTING.

Pierre Schaeffer Etude Noire (1948) is an early piece of musique concrete. "Etude Noire" means black study…making this the progenitor of all dark ambient music. Schaeffer is singularly responsible for launching the Musique Concrete movement in the late 1940s and with it, the course of much of the experimental music of the 20th Century. According toe Wikpedia, Schaeffer is generally acknowledged as being the first composer to make music using magnetic tape. "From the contemporary point of view, the importance of Schaeffer's musique concrète is threefold. He developed the concept of including any and all sounds into the vocabulary of music. At first he concentrated on working with sounds other than those produced by traditional musical instruments. Later on, he found it was possible to remove the familiarity of musical instrument sounds and abstract them further by techniques such as removing the attack of the recorded sound. He was among the first musicians to manipulate recorded sound for the purpose of using it in conjunction with other sounds in order to compose a musical piece. Techniques such as tape looping and tape splicing were used in his research, often comparing to sound collage. The advent of Schaeffer's manipulation of recorded sound became possible only with technologies that were developed after World War II had ended in Europe. His work is recognized today as an essential precursor to contemporary sampling practices. Schaeffer was among the first to use recording technology in a creative and specifically musical way, harnessing the power of electronic and experimental instruments in a manner similar to Luigi Russolo, whom he admired and from whose work he drew inspiration"
. . . this week's FROM THE PYTHEAS ARCHIVES.

Explore, Listen and Enjoy!
Vinny Fuerst
Pytheas Center for Contemporary Music