Gabriela Lena Frank Danza Peruana (2008) . . . one of this week's FEATURED NEW MUSIC VIDEOS.

Elmer Bernstein A Musical Tribute . . . our second FEATURED NEW MUSIC VIDEO for the week.

Henri Dutilleux Concertos and Orchestral Works . . . our FEATURED RECORDING this week.

Libby Larsen Deep Summer Music (1982) . . . this week's FROM THE PYTHEAS ARCHIVES.

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

American composer Alvin Lucier counts his 1965 composition Music for Solo Performer as the proper beginning of his compositional career. In that piece, EEG electrodes attached to a performer's scalp detect bursts of alpha waves generated when the performer achieves a meditative, non-visual brain state. These alpha waves are amplified and the resulting electrical signal is used to vibrate percussion instruments distributed around the performance space. According to Lucier, this kind of performance requires quite a deal of concentration to produce a steady stream of alpha waves from the brain, instead of just isolated bursts. And as Adam Strohm writes, this is "one of the most direct lifelines between the mind and sound in modern music, taking an even more unfettered approach than anything stream of consciousness or improvisation can produce." Watch a performance of Lucier's Music for Solo Performer by Steffi Weismann . . . one of this week's FEATURED NEW MUSIC VIDEOS.

"Ástor Piazzolla's Bandoneón Concerto (1979) was also titled Aconcagua by his publisher Aldo Pagani, because "this is the peak of Ástor's oeuvre, and the highest mountain peak in South America is Aconcagua". The Bandoneón Concerto is cast in the classic fast-slow-fast three movement disposition. The soloist enters immediately with a fiercely focused tango, goosed by harp and percussion under powerful string chords. The first movement includes a singing central section and two cadenzas before driving to a whooping close (John Henken/Los Angeles Philharmonic)." Watch a performance of Piazzolla's Bandoneón Concerto with the composer himself as soloist and the Kolner Radio Orchestra, conducted by Pinchas Steinberg . . . our second FEATURED NEW MUSIC VIDEO for the week.

This October the Pytheas Center mounted Yarmouth Contemporary Music Days 2010 through a grant from Yarmouth Arts (Yarmouth, Maine). Our first new music event was an exciting experience, though quite a bit of work for our fledgling organization to fit in, in just four days! Thanks to all those who participated in YCMD 2010 and helped to make it a success. Have a look at some of the festivities at the YCMD webpage: Ten by Ten and Music as Inspiration - Enjoy!

Nora Nettlerash writes, "Stars rarely arrive fully formed, even ones as uniquely iconic as Vincent Price. Price floated around Hollywood for almost a decade in various supporting roles, some of them quite prestigious. The trouble was, no-one had yet figured out where he really belonged. Dragonwyck (1946) changed all that. "Where" is an appropriate term, because a persona like Price's not only needs the right kind of character but the right kind of world to exist in. There was no shortage of creepy villains on Price's resume up to this point, but he had yet to find himself in the land of "Grand Guignol" where he would ever after be at home. Fortunately this Gothic melodrama lays on the "Grand Guignol" as thickly as the darkness in a crypt, from the gloom-laden cinematography of Arthur Miller to the constant brooding presence of Alfred Newman's score. The acting is appropriately intense without being overly hammy, with Anne Revere at her most aloof, Spring Byington uncharacteristically sinister and Gene Tierney white-faced and innocent. And in the centre of them all we have the surrealism of Vincent Price as some relic of feudalism in nineteenth-century America, rolling his eyes in mania and curling his voice menacingly round the script." Watch an excerpt from Dragonwyck with Alfred Newman's wonderful score . . . our PYTHEAS SIGHTING this week.

Toward the Sea is a work by Japanese composer Toru Takemitsu, commissioned by Greenpeace for their Save the Whales campaign. The work is divided into three sections — The Night, Moby-Dick, and Cape Cod. These titles reference Melville's novel Moby Dick. The composer wished to emphasise the spiritual dimension of the book, quoting the passage, "meditation and water are wedded together". In the words of the composer, "The music is an homage to the sea which creates all things and a sketch for the sea of tonality." Watch a performance of Takemitsu's Toward the Sea by the flute and marimba duo Hespérides XXI . . . this week's FROM THE PYTHEAS ARCHIVES.

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

Igor Stravinsky's Symphonies of Wind Instruments (1920) strikes the listener as singular for several reasons. The use of the word "symphonies" for a 10-minute piece single movement seems odd until we think back to the ancient word of "sounding together in harmony" (although as musicologist William Austin has pointed out, "nowhere before the final chord is there an unquestionable tonic or a complete and unclouded major scale"). Stravinsky clarified the use of the word, somewhat, by calling his piece "an austere ritual which is unfolded in terms of short litanies between different groups of homogeneous instruments." The lack of strings was also odd for a piece called "symphonies." Some have pointed to Stravinsky's shunning of the lush, romantic qualities of string instruments, others to post-war economic woes that made works written for smaller forces more likely to earn a performance. But the sonority of the Symphonies is so strikingly perfect to its content that one can't imagine it in any other setting. It is, again in
the words of Austin, "one of Stravinsky's most poignantly beautiful masterpieces, with a form as original and convincing as that of the Rite of Spring, and as hard to define." Watch a performance of Stravinsky's Symphonies of Wind Instruments performed by Netherlands Wind Ensemble with Reinbert De Leeuw conducting . . . one of this week's FEATURED NEW MUSIC VIDEOS.

William Schuman's 60-year career as a composer and an educator left an indelible mark on several generations of American musicians. He began exploring jazz and popular music while attending public school. After abandoning a career in commerce, Schuman enrolled in the Juilliard Summer School, and, in 1933, entered Columbia University's Teacher's College, eventually taking his bachelor's and master's degrees. He not only studied with American composer Roy Harris, he found an ally in conductor Serge Koussevitsky. Between 1938 and 1945 Schuman served as director of publications for G. Schirmer, Inc. as well as on the faculty of Sarah Lawrence College, leaving this post to take over as president of the Juilliard School. Other administrative positions throughout his long career include serving as president of the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts (1962-1969), director of the Koussevitsky Music Foundation, director of the Chamber Music Society at Lincoln Center, and director of the Walter W. Naumberg Foundation. Already an established composer in the early 1940s, Schuman was thrust into the national and international limelight when the very first Pulitzer Prize in music was bestowed upon him in 1943 for his cantata A Free Song. His Third Symphony (1941), is considered by many to be one of the pinnacles of American symphonic achievement. Hear Schuman talk about his life and music . . . our current COMPOSER PORTRAIT.

According to composer AND choreographer Miro Magloire, "a choreographer setting an existing piece of music faces a dilemma: music written for the concert hall is often too dense to be successfully juxtaposed to dance. Many interesting results could be won from just such a misalignment, but it is rarely consciously exploited. Instead, choreographers tend to either choose music that is so simple as to approach banality, providing them with peace of mind and a rhythmic flow, or humbly distort their choreography, stretching and pulling it until it fits the dimensions of a musical masterwork - but almost loses its own identity in the process. I have been guilty of both offenses. Writing my own music for Reflections allowed me a way out of this conundrum: the dance starts with no music at all, giving the steps a chance to establish their own rhythm. Later, the dancer slows to near stillness as the music gets a chance to be heard. In the end, both what is heard and what is seen is spare enough to need the other for completion. Watch a performance of Magloire's Reflections I (2007) performed by members of the New Chamber Ballet . . . our DANSES PYTHEUSES this week.

Jonathan Elliott, a native of Philadelphia, is a composer, pianist and sound designer. His music has been heard internationally in concert and broadcasts. He has received numerous awards and honors for his music, including fellowships from the MacDowell Colony,Yaddo, the Ragdale Foundation, the New State Council on the Arts, the International Festival of New Music at Darmstadt, Centre Acanthes, the Aspen Music Festival, and the W.K. Rose Trust. In addition he he has won prizes from BMI, ASCAP, the Chicago Symphony, the American Composers Forum, Forum 91/UNESCO, and has been a nominee for the American Academy of Arts and Letters music awards. Hear a performance of Elliott's Odd Preludes (2000) for alto sax and piano . . . this week's FROM THE PYTHEAS ARCHIVES.

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

Ofer Ben-Amots The Dybbuk - Between Two Worlds (2007) . . . one of this week's FEATURED NEW MUSIC VIDEOS.

Leonard Rosenman Interview with Charles Amirkhanian . . . it's our current COMPOSER PORTRAIT.

Delia Derbyshire Blue Veils and Golden Sand (1967) . . . SOUND ART FEATURE this week.

Libby Larsen Deep Summer Music (1982) . . . this week's FROM THE PYTHEAS ARCHIVES.

Gian Carlo Menotti's The Medium (1946) is something of a cautionary tale, which had its genesis in a séance attended by the composer himself. The plot of the opera runs as follows: Living in conditions of near-squalor, Baba poses as a medium with her daughter, Monica, posing as ghosts from the beyond. She takes in Toby, a mute, as a lodger but distrusts him. The business continues until, during a séance, she feels a 'cold hand' tightening about her throat. When her customers return for another session, she tells them that she is a fake and demonstrates her tricks, but her clients protest that she must be real, that it was not Monica's voice they heard. She drives them out and resolves to cast out Toby as well. When Toby returns, she shoots and inadvertently kills him. At the conclusion, she still wonders if it had been Toby". According to Barbara Eisner Bayer "The Medium is a musical theater piece, dependent upon the interactions of three principal singer/actors, one of whom's a mute whose actions and expressions are intrinsic to the plot's dramatic impact. Without Toby's 'voice', the story lacks heart". The Black Swan, from the end of Act I, is a haunting lullaby of the damned, and Menotti's magical musical lyricism is magnified by characters camaraderie and close vocal timbres. Watch a performance/collage by Madlenianum Opera Theatre Belgrade, directed by Nenad Glavan . . . one of this week's FEATURED NEW MUSIC VIDEOS.

American Composer Judith Shatin is a sonic explorer whose music spans chamber, choral, dance, electroacoustic, installation, multimedia and orchestral genres. Her inspirations range from myth, poetry and her Jewish heritage to the calls of the animals around us and the sounding universe beyond. The Washington Post has called her music "highly inventive . . . hugely enjoyable and deeply involving, with a constant sense of surprise." This week we are privileged to present an exclusive Interview @ Pytheas with Judith Shatin by the Pytheas Center's director, Vinny Fuerst. Shatin talks about her life as a composer, her current compositions and activities, technology and music, and her thoughts on contemporary music . . . it's our current COMPOSER PORTRAIT.

For those of you who'll be in southern Maine during the last weekend of October, please stop in to the Pytheas Center's Yarmouth Contemporary Music Days, a series of music events taking place Thursday through Sunday, October 28-31, involving Maine composers, musicians, educators, artists, and students. All events are FREE and made possible by a grant from Yarmouth Arts . The four day Yarmouth Contemporary Music Days features contemporary music with film, visual art, and live performances. Day One, Let's Talk Music [Thursday, Oct 28th, 6:30 PM, Bay Square at Yarmouth] will be a 'listening group' (similar to the concept of a 'book group'), open to the public, and focusing on the idea of "moving from hearing to active listening". Day Two, Film and Music [Friday, Oct 29th, 7:30 PM, The Log Cabin, Yarmouth] features film excerpts and music and focuses in on how soundtracks influence our perception of the visual and dramatic experience. Day Three, Ten by Ten [Saturday, Oct 30th, 2 PM, North Yarmouth Academy, Higgins Hall] is a performance of 10 pieces by 10 contemporary composers (a good number of them Maine-based), and many of the pieces performed by the composers themselves. And lastly, Day Four, Visual Art and Music: Music as Inspiration [Sunday, Oct 31st, 2 PM, Yarmouth High School Art Room] is a musical gallery walk through art inspired by contemporary music and created by area artists and students. It is the culmination of a project in which Yarmouth High School and Elementary School art students, teachers and area visual artists listened to selections of contemporary music and then created art in reaction to it. The day of the event will also include a "live art creation" by area visual artists. You can find the Yarmouth Contemporary Music Days webpage here and a YCMD poster here . Please come and join the Pytheas Center for an exciting weekend!

According to composer Christopher Rouse Ogoun Badagris (1976) derives its inspiration from Haitian drumming patterns, particularly those of the Juba Dance. Hence, it seemed logical to tie in the work with various aspects of Voodoo ritual. Ogoun Badagris is one of the most terrible and violent of all Voodoo loas (deities) and he can be appeased only by human blood sacrifice. This work may thus be interpreted as a dance of appeasement. The four conga drums often act as the focal point in the work and can be compared with the role of the four most basic drums in the Voodoo religion — the be-be, the seconde, the maman, and the asator. The metal plates and sleighbells are to a certain extent parallels of the Haitian ogan. The work begins with a brief action de grace, a ceremonial call-to-action in which the high priest shakes the giant rattle known as the asson, here replaced by cabasa. Then the principle dance begins, a grouillère: this is a highly erotic and even brutally sexual ceremonial dance which in turn is succeeded by the Danse Vaudou at the point at which demonic possession occurs. The word reler, which the performers must shriek at the conclusion of the work, is the Voodoo equivalent of the Judaeo-Christian Amen". Watch a performance of Christopher Rouse's Ogoun Badagris by the Percussion Section Residentie Orkest/The Hague Philharmonic . . . it's our BANG, CLANG, and BEAT/NEW MUSIC for PERCUSSION this week.

The music of Canadian-American composer Karim Al-Zand has been called "strong and startlingly lovely" (Boston Globe). His compositions are wide-ranging, from settings of classical Arabic poetry, to scores for dance, and pieces for young audiences. His works explore connections between music and other arts, and draw inspiration from diverse sources such as 19th century graphic art, fables of the world, folksong and jazz. The themes of many of his pieces speak to his middle-eastern heritage as well. Watch a performance of Karim Al-Zand's Capriccio (2002) for solo violin performed by violinist Matt Detrick . . . this week's FROM THE PYTHEAS ARCHIVES.

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

Osvaldo Golijov is known for his musical hybridity in combining the traditions of classical chamber, Jewish liturgical, and klezmer music with hints of the tango of Astor Piazzolla in his compositions. He is the recipient of a MacArthur "Genius Grant" Fellowship, the Vilcek Prize, and the recording of his opera "Ainadamar" was awarded two Grammy Awards in 2006: Best Opera Recording, and Best Contemporary Composition. His piece for solo cello Omaramoor (1991) is described by Richard Buell (The Boston Globe) as "a kind of quest piece - the solo cello wanders toward some tantalizingly withheld realization - the near-statement, the composer tells us, of a song made famous by the Argentine tango specialist Carlos Gandel". Watch a performance of Omaramoor by cellist Amy Sue Barston . . . one of this week's FEATURED NEW MUSIC VIDEOS.

Richard Addinsell was a British composer most famous for his composition "Warsaw Concerto", which was written originally for the little-seen 1941 film "Dangerous Moonlight". Over the course of his career he composed scores for over 40 films, including "Blithe Spirit" (1945), "Under Capricorn" (1949) [with director Alfred Hitchcock], and "Scrooge" (A Christmas Carol) (1951), as well as music for Broadway musical plays and revues, orchestra and popular songs, especially in collaboration with Joyce Grenfell. Hear his moody and brooding score for director George Cukor's Gaslight (1944) . . . it's our current PYTHEAS SIGHTING.

Richard Maxfield was a composer of instrumental, electro-acoustic, and electronic music. Born in Seattle, he most likely taught the first University-level course in electronic music in America at the New School for Social Research. His electronic piece Amazing Grace (1960) mixes tape loops from two sources which are played back at various speeds, causing the fragments to overlap in complex ways, predating both Terry Riley’s and Steve Reich’s tape-loop pieces. "Amazing Grace" even uses a tape of a preacher, as Steve Reich's did in his famous "It's Gonna Rain" (1965); the results are at least equal to Reich's! Maxfield's pieces represent the state of new music just before minimalism was born. Sit back and listen to Richard Maxfield's Amazing Grace . . . it's one of our PYTHEAS EARFULS this week.

Edgard Varese's Ionisation (1931) is credited with being the first Western work written for percussion alone, having no basis in traditional concepts of melody and harmony. As such, the implications of the work (from the standpoint of when the piece was written) questioned the meaning of the word music, as it was understood in the Western world. Viewed historically, it is actually a return to a very ancient Eastern tradition of percussion music, particularly in the aspect of timbre. Eastern concepts of sound and Western formal concepts of structure and logic merge, resulting in a musical entity which is universal (from "Tater Z the Anti-G and DJ Hunsmire's Musical Studies Index"). Watch a classic performance of Varèse's Ionisation by the Ensemble InterContemporain with Pierre Boulez conducting . . . this week's FROM THE PYTHEAS ARCHIVES.

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

According to David Weininger (Boston Globe), composer "David Rakowski is a laid-back, slightly geeky, funny guy who writes some very difficult music. Or, as Rakowski puts it on his home page, music that has "lots and lotsa notes." Rakowski never planned to add so many works to such an artistically suspect genre. He wrote the first étude, E-Machines, in 1988, more or less on a challenge from his then-roommate. "That turned out to be a fun piece and people actually liked it even though I thought it was worthless at the time. Well, I don’t know about worthless but certainly useless." Soon other pianists began asking for more; so did the publisher C.F. Peters. "And I would just write them as technique builders in between pieces or when I was stuck on a big piece I would write a little étude and then come back to the big piece refreshed. It usually kind of worked." Each étude must be written from start to finish without revision, and must take a maximum of six days to finish. And he plans to quit when he reaches 100. "I like the idea of putting closure on a project so that I can say that’s done. And seriously, it seems silly to be playing an Étude No. 101. Sounds more like a highway than an étude." His growing catalog of Études for piano has inspired performances and recordings by leading pianists on both sides of the Atlantic. Watch a performance of Rakowski's Étude No. 76, " Clave" (2007) by pianist Geoffrey Burleson . . . one of this week's FEATURED NEW MUSIC VIDEOS.

Sound is central in Mirjam Tally’s creations. Her music brims with playful contrasts – humorous, dramatic and poetic mixes of sound. She has written chamber and electronic music in which acoustic and electronic sounds often interweave, sometimes using Nordic or exotic instruments (Estonian kannel, didgeridoo, tanpura, accordion and others), treating sound material with a modernist open mind. According to Tally, "Work with electronics has considerably widened my imagination of sound. To me, color is really important in music. Lately I have discovered the recording of environmental sounds. This is a bit similar to photography – you just need to be at the right place at the right time to get a fascinating sound on tape, be it, for example, yacht masts swaying in the wind, clinks of ice floes on the coast or wind generators, not to mention the sounds of birds and nature in general. The further result (i.e. the composition) depends on if you have good ingredients; you don’t need to process and "bend" it in the studio at all. The main thing is to collect valuable sound material from the living environment." Watch Tally's collaboration with filmmaker Ülo Pikkov, their short film Tablemat of Baltic Sea (2006) . . . it's our current PYTHEAS SIGHTING.

Zoltán Kodály’s contributions to the musical life of Hungary in the 20th century were immense, and indeed, have gone far beyond mere nationalism. His orchestral compositions enjoy a place in the standard repertory. His researches into his country’s folk music have been models for ethno-musicologists. The program for folk music research drafted by him and Bela Bartok in 1913 resulted in the collection, classification and editing of over 100,000 folk songs. He also made significant contributions in the fields of music history, music criticism, history of literature, linguistics and language education. His teaching methods also went far beyond the borders of his native land with the worldwide use of the Kodály Method for teaching music in schools, the idea being general music literacy. Kodály was a vocal oriented composer; melody and lyricism were of prime importance to him. And at the core of his work is folk music. Hear Kodály talk about his ideas on music education in a rare video from Hungarian Television . . . our COMPOSER PORTRAIT this week.

Musique concrète ("concrete music" or "real music") is a form of electroacoustic music that utilizes acousmatic sound — sound one hears without seeing or knowing an originating cause — as a compositional resource. French composer Pierre Schaeffer is singularly responsible for launching the Musique concrète movement in the late 1940s and with it, the course of much of the experimental music of the 20th Century. From Wikipedia: "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." Etude Noire/Black Study (1948) is an early piece of musique concrete by Schaffer . . . and this week's FROM THE PYTHEAS ARCHIVES.

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