Wolfgang Rihm has emerged as one of the most respected German composers of his day, with credentials that appeal to avant-garde and not-so-avant-garde audiences alike. Though the music in his corpus can be brash, brooding and explosive by turns, as would be expected for 'serious' contemporary music, its range is encompassing enough, and the compositions put together with such happy coincidence of inspiration and craft, as to provide the audience with many potential points of entry. It is a body of work in which different pieces appeal to different people for different reasons, and probably not every piece appeals to everyone. This stylistic variety of Rihm's work – he never seems to remain on the same trajectory for more than a handful of works, rather veering off wildly in reaction to whatever takes his fancy at the time – is a feature that has been seen as a negative one by some. How should one rightly assess a composer whose adherence to the force of whim has overtaken the serious responsibility of having a clear, homogenous style, a style that becomes gradually more developed as the composer matures over the years, moving towards the flowering of a late style (yawn… sorry) at the end of his or her career? It might be said that the only consistency with Rihm has been the inconsistency of his approach, but it is worth noting that that is a consistency all the same, and perhaps quite a strong one. For others, as mentioned, the stylistic heterogeneity of Rihm's work (which nonetheless displays some of the same formal concerns over the course of its diverse works) can only be a good thing. There is an obvious delight for Rihm in the explorative nature of the creative process – the composer as one who ventures along the outposts, using the occasion of the work to cast off in different directions, exploring the space made available by the musical work, all the while anchored by a concern for surprise, adventure and craftsmanship. A Romantic image, of course, but one suited to a music that could be characterised as very much continuing in the Romantic tradition (to be over reductive about it) [notes thanks to Liam Cagney / MusicalCriticism.com]. Watch an excerpt from a performance of Wolfgang Rihm's In-Schrift (1995) by the Gustav Mahler Jugendorchester with Claudio Abbado conducting . . . one of this week's FEATURED NEW MUSIC VIDEOS.

John H. Beck has been a member of the faculty at the Eastman School of Music since 1959. He received his bachelor’s degree (1955) and master’s degree (1962), as well as Performer’s Certificate from Eastman. He retired from Eastman in 2008 and continues as Professor Emeritus of Percussion and teaches a class in The History of Percussion. Beck's career as a performer and teacher includes posts as percussionist, timpanist, marimba soloist with the United States Marine Band (1955-59); principal percussionist with the Rochester Philharmonic (1959-62); and timpanist for the Rochester Philharmonic (1962-2002). He has made numerous solo appearances, including performances with the Eastman Wind Ensemble and Philharmonia Orchestra, Syracuse Wind Ensemble, Chautauqua Band, Rochester Chamber Orchestra, Corning Symphony, Rochester Philharmonic, Memphis State Wind Ensemble, Pennsylvania Festival Band, and Filharmonia Pomorska, Poland. He has also contributed articles to the Grove Dictionary of American Music and the World Book Encyclopedia. His Encyclopedia of Percussion (published by Routledge) is in its second edition. Among the honors Beck has received include being named the Mu Phi Epsilon Musician of the Year (1976); the Monroe County School Music Association Award (1996); Eastman’s Eisenhart Award for Excellence in Teaching (1997); and the Arts and Cultural Council of Greater Rochester Award for contributions to the arts (1999); and he was inducted into the Percussive Arts Society Hall of Fame in 1999. At the Eastman School's 2003 Commencement, Beck was awarded the Edwin Peck Curtis Award for excellence in undergraduate teaching. Since retirement in 2008, he has been awarded the Distinguished Service Award from the New York State School Music Association  (2009), The President’s Award from Rowan University  (2010), the Lifetime Achievement Award from KOSA International Percussion (2010) and the Life Time Achievement Award from Giornate della Percussione, Fermo, Italy (2010). Watch a performance of John Beck's Interactions for Timpani and Sound (1996) played by timpanist Robert Ford . . . it's our BANG, CLANG and BEAT for the week.

Born Vancouver, British Columbia, Alexina Louie is one of Canada’s most highly regarded and most often performed composers. She began piano studies, and at seventeen became an Associate of the Royal Conservatory of Music in Piano Performance. Louie continued her piano studies at the University of British Columbia where she also attended the composition classes of Cortland Hultberg, graduating in 1970 with a bachelor’s degree in music history. She went on to post-graduate work at the University of California at San Diego with Robert Erickson and Pauline Oliveros, completing an M.A. in composition in 1974. For the rest of the decade, Louie taught piano, theory and electronic composition at the City Colleges of Pasadena and Los Angeles. She has lived in Toronto since 1980, where she works as a freelance composer for concert, dance, television and film. Alexina Louie is the daughter of second-generation Canadians of Chinese descent, and her uniquely personal style blends both East and West, and draws on a wide variety of influences - from her Chinese heritage to her theoretical, historical and performance studies. Her music has been widely commissioned and performed by Canada’s leading orchestras, new music ensembles, chamber groups and soloists, including the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra, Montreal Symphony Orchestra, Toronto Symphony Orchestra, and pianist Jon Kimura Parker. Her awards and honors include the prestigious M. Joan Chalmers National Music Award, the Canadian Music Council's "Composer of the Year" for 1986, SOCAN Concert Music Award, Canada Council "A" Grant,  the Jules-Leger Prize for New Chamber Music, numerous "Juno" nominations for Best Classical Recordings, Composer in Residence with the Canadian Opera Company, and the Order of Ontario, the province’s highest and most prestigious honour. Listen to a performance of Alexina Louie's Winter Music (1989) featuring violist Steven Dan and the Vancouver New Music Ensemble . . . it's one of our PYTHEAS EARFULS for the week.

Frederic Rzewski is among the major figures of the American musical avant-garde to emerge in the 1960s, and he has been highly influential as a composer and performer. He first came to public attention as a performer of new piano music, having participated in the premieres of such monumental works as Stockhausen's Klavierstück X (1962). In 1966, he founded, with Alvin Curran and Richard Teitelbaum, the famous ensemble Musica Electronica Viva (MEV). MEV combined free improvisation with written music and electronics. These experimentations directly led to the creation of Rzewski's first important compositions, so-called "process" pieces, which combine elements of spontaneous improvisation with notated material and instructions. His improv-classical hybrids are some of the most successful of the kind ever produced thanks to the fervent energy at the core of his music. During the 1970s, his music continued to develop along these lines, but as his socialist proclivities began to direct his artistic course, he developed new structures for instrumental music that used text elements and musical style as structuring features. During the 1980s, Rzewski produced a number of surprising twelve tone compositions that (happily) provided fresh ideas of what could be done with serial systems. The 1990s saw him revisiting, via scored music, some highly spontaneous approaches to composition that recall his inspired experiments of the late 1960s. Rzewski's music is among that which defines postwar American new music. He has consistently given the exuberant boyish pleasures of a composer like Copland, within the rigorously experimental framework of a composer like Cage. Rzewski's People United Will Never Be Defeated! (1975) is a landmark in American piano literature. The work comprises 36 variations on a protest song of the same name by the Chilean composer Sergio Ortega. Almost every bar is laden with pianistic virtuosity, yet the listener is carried through some very complex music in a wholly natural way. The variations themselves all symbolize the different phases and aspects of a struggle: from angry, highly-energized modernism, via melancholic references to blues, calculated dense polyphony and nostalgic folk-music to written-out free jazz passages. Watch a performance of Frederic Rzewski's The People United Will Never Be Defeated! played by pianist Bobby Mitchell . . . it's this week's FROM THE PYTHEAS ARCHIVES.