Alexina Louie is one of Canada’s most highly regarded and most often performed composers. 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. Louie's mini-opera Toothpaste (2001) was created for television with librettist Dan Redican, and has been broadcast in over a dozen countries. The six-minute opera is about a marriage that crumbles over the wife's mistreating a tube of toothpaste, much to her husband's dismay. Using the power of operatic emotion to express a seemingly innocuous (and hilariously Pythonesque domestic squabble), it slyly demonstrates the powerful, hidden emotions behind the fight, as it quickly transforms itself into a total melt-down of the relationship. Watch Alexina Louie's Toothpaste, with soprano Barbara Hannigan and tenor Mark McKinney . . . one of this week's FEATURED NEW MUSIC VIDEOS.

Bernadette Speach's work as a composer embraces a variety of styles, including solo, chamber and orchestral compositions, and her works have been played by numerous performers in venues across the world. She has performed as pianist throughout her life in a variety of capacities: as soloist; with her husband, guitarist Jeffrey Schanzer as the Schanzer/Speach Duo; and in both improvising and chamber ensembles. She has been the recipient of numerous awards and commissions, and her music is recorded on Mode Records, and published by Kallisti Press. In addition to her composing, Speach's efforts as an administrator, fundraiser, board member, presenter and educator continue to bring the work of a broad range of artists to audiences in the New York metropolitan area and beyond. Watch Tiny Temple (2009), a collaboration between Bernadette Speach and choreographer Anne Burnidge  . . . it's our DANSES PYTHEUSES for the week.


Christopher Marshall was born in Paris, France (of New Zealand parents), educated in Australia and New Zealand, and is currently Adjunct Professor of Composition at the University of Central Florida, in Orlando. Because of his wide cultural background - French, New Zealand, Australian, as well as living several years in Samoa, his music moulds diverse influences into a distinctive personal style marked by memorable melody and rhythmic ingenuity. Marshall’s orchestral, wind ensemble, chamber and choral music has been very widely performed and broadcast particularly in the United States and Europe. It's music that is accessible, idiomatically written and often exhilarating in its rhythmic ingenuity. It also places great emphasis on expressive memorable melody and frequently delights in integrating diverse stylistic elements. Listen to Christopher Marshall's Synergy, from "Three Aspects of Spring" (1995) . . . it's one of our PYTHEAS EARFULS for the week.


Jack Anderson (nytheatre-wire.com) writes of Out of Place (2008), a collaboration between choreographer Wendy Osserman and Czech violinist and vocalist Iva Bittová . . . "Wendy Osserman's choreography and Iva Bittová's music made Out of Place a journey to a haunted place of ghosts, spirits, werewolves, and spells somewhere in Eastern Europe where venerable Slavic and Yiddish traditions mingle and the air is filled with scraps of old ballads and fragments of almost-forgotten, yet still disquieting, folk tales. Bittová did much to maintain a sense of mystery. She can fiddle and sing at the same time, blending folk, classical, and jazz styles, her voice sounding delicate one moment, gruff and throaty the next. Some of her music was live. But she also performed in counterpoint with recordings. And this production revealed that her movements can be as impressive as her music, for her stage presence made her resemble a village story-teller, or clairvoyant crone. Osserman and her dancers collaboratively created what could be described as a plotless suite of musical and choreographic episodes, each with its own neat little title." Watch Sea (2008), from "Out of Place" . . . it's this week's FROM THE PYTHEAS ARCHIVES.

Walter Piston was a leading light among those mid-twentieth century American composers who opted to explore traditional musical forms and language. Although he was perhaps better known as a teacher and the author of a widely used book on harmony than as a composer, Piston's music displays superb craftsmanship within his selected neo-Classic-Romantic idiom. Piston wrote his Piano Quintet in 1949 on commission from the University of Michigan. The sense of elegance and calm that opens the work seems to flow from the French roots of the composer's studies with Nadia Boulanger; indeed, the spirit of Piston's work at times recalls the chamber music of Gabriel Faure. His treatment of his thematic material is more a matter of textural variation rather than formal development; the music is by turns flowing, staccato, and stormy, the piano taking a concerto-like solo role throughout. In the finale, a jittery syncopated rhythm creates a jazz-like atmosphere, interrupted by a contrasting central section [our thanks on this note to the AllMusicGuide]. Watch a performance of Piston's Piano Quintet played by pianist Leonid Treer and the Miami String Quartet . . . one of this week's FEATURED NEW MUSIC VIDEOS.

During the second half of the 20th century Manuel Enríquez was the predominant personality on the Mexican musical scene, not only as a composer, but also as an administrator, teacher, diffuser and active member of the most prestigious cultural institutions in the country. His dynamic presence, and abundant musical activity for three decades, made him a  pillar in Mexican music. He received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1971, and went to the Center of Electronic Music at Columbia University to experiment with Electronics and to study the new resources afforded by contemporary technology. He considered electronics to be just another tool for the contemporary composer. And because of his desire to keep up with new tendencies in composition, he attended the renowned international courses of Darmstadt where he made contacts with the great European avant-garde composers: Berio, Xenakis, Stockhausen, Penderecki and Ligeti. Between 1975 and 1977, Enríquez lived in Paris, commissioned by the Mexican government to promote Mexican music in Europe. He gave recitals (he was also a renowned violinist) in Vienna, Paris, Bonn, Warsaw, Bourges, etc. This intense activity also included lecturers on new music in Mexico and helped to make known Mexican composers in Europe. In many ways Enríquez was a pioneer in the field of new execution techniques and in specializing in contemporary repertoire. Yet his most important field remained composition. Heir to the school of Bernal Jimenez, he quickly broached new directions that included poly-tonality, dodecaphonism, alleatoric and electronic music. His extensive catalogue of nearly 150 works, includes all genres of instruments, sporadic encounters with vocal music, electroacoustic music, and music with purely electronic sounds and multimedia. Listen to Manuel Enríquez's Viols (1971) . . . it's our SOUND ART for the week.

Concert musician (oboe and English horn), piano accompanist and composer Ayser Vançin is passionate about poetry and literature, finding inspiration from the poet-humanists. Her deep embrace of words and notes is a bridge between East and Occident. Among her compositions are works for ensembles including winds, with or without piano. Her latest works for musical theater include: Nuage Amoureux (Cloud of Love), D'Exil en Exil (Of Exile in Exile) [on text and emotive poems of Nazim Hikmet], Regard Noir, Langue de Feu (Black Gaze, Tongue of Fire) [on text of Senghor], La Rencontre Aragon-Hikmet (The Aragon-Hikmet Meeting) [on texts of these writers], Voyage Poetico-Musical en Orient Express: Paris-Istanbul (A Poetic-Musical Voyage on the Orient Express: Paris-Istanbul) [show route, literature and music, a bridge between France and Turkey], Chants de la Vigne (Songs of the Vine) [an intoxicating spectacle of poetry and music bacchanalia around wine], Chants des Hommes (Songs of Men) [a show of words and notes about universal writers and poets] and a delicious spectacle of songs [texts from Verlaine, Aragon, Hikmet, Supervielle, Maeterlinck, Lent, Molin, Vian, Ungaretti] called Vers a Chanter, Vers Enchantes (Towards Singing, Towards the Enchanted) featuring singer Mathieu Chardet. Listen to a performance of Ayser Vançin's Les plaintes d'un Icare (2004) . . . it's one of our PYTHEAS EARFULS for the week.

Swedish composer Stefan Klaverdal is from Stockholm and studied composition with Maurice Karkoff and Hans Gefors, among others. He graduated in 2003 with a Master of Arts in composition from the Malmo Academy of Music. He is one of his generation's most active and performed composers and his music has been performed countless times in Europe and elsewhere. In recent years, his focus has been on purely vocal and instrumental pieces in combination with live electronics. A prominent and long-standing feature of Klaverdal’s work is cross-genre collaboration, especially his music for dance performances and for dance and art films. He was originally a singer, and strives to reproduce these lyrical and human qualities in his compositions. With live electronics as an active extension of his own voice, he paints acoustic-electronic landscapes from a palette of passion, drama and beauty. Listen to a performance of Stefan Klaverdal's piece for alto saxophone and computer Prayer of a King (2004) . . . it's this week's FROM THE PYTHEAS ARCHIVES.

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.

Ney Rosauro is recognized as one of the most original and dynamic symphonic percussionists and composers today. Born in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, he started studying percussion in 1977, receiving degrees at the Hochschule fur Musik Wurzburg (Germany) and the University of Miami, and studying composition at the Universidade de Brasilia (Brazil). As a composer he has published over 40 pieces for percussion, as well as several percussion method books. His compositions are very popular worldwide and have been recorded by internationally acclaimed artists such as Evelyn Glennie and the London Symphony Orchestra. His Concerto for Vibraphone and Orchestra (1996) is dedicated to Evelyn Glennie. The first and last movements are constructed using scales quite often found in the folk music of northeastern Brazil. The first movement represents the constant life struggle of the poor people in the dry lands of northeastern Brazil. The second movement is based on the Brazilian folk lullaby called Tutu Maramba, and depicts a child's peaceful passage to a dream-filled slumber. The last movement depicts the flight of seagulls, which was inspired by time spent by the composer at Ipanema Beach in Rio de Janeiro, while watching a breathtaking view of the sun setting over the Arpoador rock formations. Watch a performance of the third movement of Ney Rosauro's Concerto for Vibraphone and Orchestra played by Diana Melo, vibraphone, and the Orquesta Filarmónica de Bogotá Colombia, Germán Céspedes conducting . . . one of this week's FEATURED NEW MUSIC VIDEOS.

Composer Elizabeth Hoffman has lived and worked in New York City since joining the Arts and Science Faculty at New York University (NYU) in 1998, where she founded and directs the Washington Square Computer Music Studio in NYU's Department of Music. Hoffman’s musical interests center around texture, timbre, tuning, harmony at the border of noise, and spatialization. She has written electroacoustic music since the early 1990s, and recognition for her electroacoustic music has come from the Bourges International Electroacoustic Music Competition, Prix Ars Electronica competition, Seattle Arts Commission, and Jerome Foundation. Her score for Globeland (2002) came about from a commission - with video artist Ryan Dorin - for a video composition for the 2002 Sonic Circuits International Festival of Electronic Music and Art. Enjoy Globeland, a video by Ryan Dorin with music by Elizabeth Hoffman . . . it's our PYTHEAS SIGHTING for the week.

The title of Olivier Messiaen's Un vitrail et des oiseaux [Stained glass and birds], composed in 1986, invokes two of the composer's most poignant and favored images: the myriad colors of stained glass, and the endless melody of birdsong. Such an evocative title should not be seen as an arbitrary abstraction; both images correspond not only to the overall atmosphere of the piece, but also to specific components of Messiaen's compositional process. Messiaen always insisted that birds - "our little servants of immaterial joy" - were creating music in a very real way when engaging in song. As a self-trained ornithologist, Messiaen recorded and transcribed birdsongs from all around the world; a long list of these bird-borrowed motives appear in his works, many of which advertise their birdsong content in their titles. As might be expected, Un vitrail et des oiseaux relies heavily upon birdcalls, not only as melodic seeds, but also as structural points. The duality of the title can be seen and heard immediately in the structure of the work. The first section features a xylophone trio initiating a flittering series of nightingale calls. This is followed by a chorale passage, which immediately sets the image of a stained-glass church window adjacent to that of the xylophone's nightingale. The chorale texture is not just meant as a pointer to a mental image; Messiaen's harmonies are deliberately crafted to depict a spectrum of sonic hues - which Messiaen is bold enough to associate with particular visual colors. The piece poses enormous rhythmic challenges to the performers, which Messiaen addresses in his cryptic introductory note, "... the birds are more important than the tempos, and the colors are more important than the birds. More important than everything is the aspect of the invisible" [notes thanks to Jeremy Grimshaw, Rovi/AllMusicGuide]. Hear a performance of Messiaen's Un vitrail et des oiseaux . . . it's one of our PYTHEAS EARFULS for the week.

. . . also listen to Messiaen talk about the music of French composer Claude Debussy, colors in Debussy's music, and his beloved birds . . . it this week's COMPOSER PORTRAIT.

Maija Hynninen started her composition studies in 2003 at Sibelius Academy with Paavo Heininen, at the same time completing her violin studies (bachelor of music) at Oslo Academy of Music in 2004. As well as writing for acoustic instruments Hynninen has made some explorations in electro-acoustics and live-electronics in composing music for acoustic instruments and live-electronics (with Max/MSP), tape music for dancers and art installations and purely for concert performances. Her music has been broadcast by Finnish Radio (YLE), and played in concerts and festivals in Finland as well as abroad. She has received grants from the Society of Finnish Composers Sibelius Foundation, the City of Vantaa, Finnish Cultural Foundation, the Sibelius Academy and Luses. Her works have been commissioned by Yle (Finnish broadcasting company), Viitasaari Time of Music Festival, the Helsinki Chamber Choir, and Avanti! Chamber Orchestra, among others. Hear a performance of Maija Hynninen's Kaiku 2 (Echo 2) (2007) . . . it's this week's FROM THE PYTHEAS ARCHIVES.

Composer Robert McCauley talks about his Kamrick Variations (2010): "Oboist Janet Rarick and bassoonist Benjamin Kamins are legends in the Houston orchestra arena; both teach at Rice University's Shepherd School of Music, and they happen to be married. It is in Janet's capacity as artist, teacher and chamber music coach that I got to know her, as I tried to get some of my wind pieces programmed in the school's wind chamber music program. What impressed me even in my dealings with her more than her musicality and professionalism was her warmth and caring. After a number of years, I thought that I'd like to write a piece for her, and of course I thought, 'I've got to include her husband Ben, too.' They both said they would be delighted to look over the piece once I finished it. It took six weeks in the spring of 2010 to write a theme and 10 variations for oboe, bassoon and piano - the most famous 20th century piece for that combination being the Trio by Francis Poulenc. After reading through the piece, they accepted the work as their own. I wanted to call the piece "Rarick Variations", but in a gesture of modesty Janet demurred, so I combined Rarick and Kamins to form Kamrick, and thus Kamrick Variations. Watch a performance of Robert McCauley's Kamrick Variations played by oboist Scott Bell, bassoonist Jim Rodgers, and pianist Alaine Fink . . . one of this week's FEATURED NEW MUSIC VIDEOS.

According to composer Barry Truax, his work Riverrun (1986) . . . "creates a sound environment in which stasis and flux, solidity and movement co-exist in a dynamic balance. The corresponding metaphor is that of a river, always moving yet seemingly permanent. From the smallest rivulet to the fullest force of its mass, a river is formed from a collection of countless droplets and sources. So too with the sound in this composition which bases itself on the smallest possible 'unit' of sound in order to create larger textures and masses. The title is the first word in James Joyce's Finnegan's Wake. Riverrun is entirely realized with the method of sound production known as granular synthesis. With this method small units or 'grains' of sound are produced, usually with very high densities (100-2000 grains/sec), with each grain having a separately defined frequency and duration. When the grains all have similar parameters, the result is a pitched and amplitude modulated sound, but when random variation is allowed in a parameter, a broad-band noise component is introduced." Hear a performance of Barry Truax's Riverrun . . . it's our SOUND ART for the week.

Miriam Gideon’s Of Shadows Numberless (1966) takes its title from a phrase in John Keats’ poem, Ode to a Nightingale, and each of its six movements, likewise, draws inspiration from a phrase in Keats’ work. Ode to a Nightingale addresses the popular Romantic trope of a bird as an idealized version of a poet, a version who – according to Shelley’s analogous work, To a Skylark – "pourest [his] full heart in profuse strains of unpremeditated art," or according to Wordsworth’s To a Cuckoo, is "an invisible thing / a voice, a mystery." Keats’ poem focuses on the bird-poet dichotomy by following the fanciful journey of a depressed subject who is thrown into further despair when confronted with the unreachable beauty of the nightingale’s "plaintive anthem." The piece, like the poem, is full of shadows and mazes. Whereas Keats writes of "verdurous glooms and winding mossy ways," and "fad[ing] away into the forest dim," Gideon writes dense, dark music filled with half-step, major seventh, and minor ninth relationships, crowded clusters, and incessantly mumbling inner voices. Although the melodies are tuneful and usually simple, Gideon often includes some oddity in the phrasing or intervallic structure that makes the tune feel just out of reach, transported a step beyond the realm of ordinary music (thanks to Jeremy Siskind for these notes!). Listen to a performance of Miriam Gideon's Of Shadows Numberless by pianist Paula Ennis Dwyer . . . it's one of our PYTHEAS EARFULS for the week.

John Tavener's choral work Song for Athene (1993) is an elegiac tribute, not, as one might suppose, to the mythological goddess Athene, but to a young family friend, Athene Hariades, half Greek, a talented actress who was tragically killed in a cycling accident. "Her beauty," writes Tavener, "both outward and inner, was reflected in her love of acting, poetry, music and of the Orthodox Church." Tavener had heard Athene reading Shakespeare in Westminster Abbey and, rather as in the case of his Little Requiem For Father Malachy Lynch, conceived the piece after her funeral, lighting on the effective ideas, so touchingly realized, of combining words from the Orthodox liturgy with lines from Shakespeare's Hamlet. Between each line is a monodic "Alleluia", and, following the example of traditional Byzantine music, the whole piece unfolds over a continuous "ison" or drone. The music also received its most famous performance at the funeral of Diana, Princess of Wales. Hear a performance of John Tavener's Song for Athene sung by the Westminster Abbey Choir . . . this week's FROM THE PYTHEAS ARCHIVES.

"Music, a mysterious form of time," says a famous line by the poet Jorge-Luis Borges. The work of Ramon Lazkano originates in this basic dimension of music. The way his pieces progress and the gradual "erosion" of the elements linking them (a process of erosion that demands a certain materiality of the sound, which thus becomes its most striking characteristic) make allusion to how we understand and sense the passage of time, how wear and tear set in, leading to the inevitable but unimaginable end of everything it contains. The progression of his pieces "enables us to grasp our own passage towards death." Since music is time, every time we listen brings us one step nearer the ultimate end. Lazkano is a contemporary Spanish Basque composer whose works have been played around the globe, played both by him and by some of the most prestigious orchestras in the world. He is currently professor of orchestration at the Higher Academy of Music of the Basque Country "Musikene." Listen to Ramon Lazkano's Wintersonnenwende (2005) performed by Trío Arbós and Neopercusión . . . one of this week's FEATURED NEW MUSIC VIDEOS.

The music of American composer David T. Little has been described as "dramatically wild…rustling, raunchy and eclectic," showing "real imagination" by New York Times critic Anthony Tommasini, and his work "completely gripped" New Yorker critic Alex Ross: "every bad-ass new-music ensemble in the city will want to play him." Little’s highly theatrical, often political work draws upon his experience as a rock drummer, and fuses classical and popular idioms to dramatic effect. His music has been performed throughout the world - including in Dresden, London, Edinburgh, LA, Montreal, and at the Tanglewood, Aspen, MATA and Cabrillo Festivals - by such performers as the London Sinfonietta, eighth blackbird, So Percussion, ensemble courage, Dither, NOW Ensemble, PRISM Quartet, the New World Symphony, American Opera Projects, and many others. He has received awards and recognition from The American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Mid Atlantic Arts Foundation, Meet The Composer, the American Music Center, the Harvey Gaul Competition, BMI, and ASCAP, and has received commissions from Carnegie Hall, the Baltimore Symphony, the Albany Symphony, the New World Symphony, Pittsburgh New Music Ensemble, the University of Michigan, and Dawn Upshaw’s Vocal Arts program at the Bard Conservatory. Watch Witness in Sound, an interview with David T. Little at NewMusicBox . . . it's our FEATURED COMPOSER for the week.

Thea Musgrave's Narcissus (1987) was written for four American flautists, in response to a commission from the National Endowment for the Arts. The composer has subsequently arranged the work for solo clarinet specially for F.Gerald Errante. It is intended as a concert work but it can also be performed as a ballet for two dancers (Narcissus and His Reflection). The work follows the myth of Narcissus closely: the "live" flute taking the part of Narcissus and the echo effects produced by the digital delay system evoking Narcissus' reflection. Perhaps the story is best summed up in the quotation from Hermann Melville's Moby Dick: 'And still deeper the meaning of that story of Narcissus, who because he could not grasp the tormenting mild image he saw in the fountain, plunged into it and was drowned. But that same image, we ourselves see in all rivers and oceans. It is the image of the ungraspable phantom of life...' Listen to a performance of Thea Musgrave's Narcissus (1987) played by flutist Carolyn Keyes . . . it's one of our PYTHEAS EARFULS for the week.

Lee Hyla's music is profoundly individual. Its extremes of expression are all unmistakable facets of one wide-ranging musical personality. Hyla has fashioned a personal language capable of both the simple, exquisitely polished opening of his String Quartet No. 3 and the raw Jerry Lee Lewis-like riffs in his Piano Concerto No. 2. This Jekyll-and-Hyde nature is to some extent the natural consequence of a musical background informed equally by classical music, improvisation, and rock-and-roll. The diversity of his background and the way it finds an outlet in the music may explain why his music appeals to a variety of listeners, including both uptown and downtown audiences. Appealing though it is, the music is not cynically ingratiating: Hyla consistently shies away from emulating the commercial end of each of these musics. Unlike many of his contemporaries, Hyla actually was a practicing rocker (as well as an accomplished new-music keyboardist and improviser), and has an insider's knowledge of rock's glories and limitations. What he brings from rock is its energy, and, on occasion, its brute power and rhythmic sensibilities, so different from those of jazz and classical music. From his classical training he brings a gift for musical organization and, unapologetically, a modernist aesthetic; from jazz, a melodic and gestural language that he separates from its traditional harmonic underpinnings. All of this makes for very listening indeed: Hyla's music is always direct, its drama visceral, its organic unity palpable (Eric Moe/New World Records). Watch a performance of Lee Hyla's Ciao, Manhattan (1990) played by counter)induction . . . this week's FROM THE PYTHEAS ARCHIVES.

Colin McPhee  Nocturne (1958) . . . one of this week's FEATURED NEW MUSIC VIDEOS.

John H. Beck  Overture for Percussion Ensemble (1976) . . . it's our BANG, CLANG and BEAT, our New Music for Percussion for the week.

Edgar Varèse  Arcana (1925-27) . . . it's one of our PYTHEAS EARFULS for the week.

Richard Rodney Bennett  Guitar Sonata (1983), mvt III – Vivo . . . this week's FROM THE PYTHEAS ARCHIVES.