According to composer Jesse Ayers, his piece Jericho (2005) is "a surround-sound piece employing expanded instrumentation, multiple antiphonal effects, narration, and extensive and unorthodox audience participation. It is based on the Biblical account of the Battle of Jericho (Joshua 6), in which the famed walls of Jericho fell down flat. The work was composed over a 17-month period from Oct 2003 - Feb 2005, and was premiered April 22, 2005, by the Valparaiso University Chamber Concert Band under the direction of Dr. Jeffrey Scott Doebler. The score carries the dedication 'to Ted, from whom I learned about risk taking and breakthrough.' Compositionally, Jericho makes extensive use of the 15th-century melody Veni Emmanuel (O come, O come, Emmanuel). It is used to generate motivic ideas; it appears as a cantus firmus in the bass in the long pedal tones; a three-voice, fifth species harmonization of Veni is used to generate harmonic cycles; and finally it is quoted directly in the last section of the piece as the audience sings the phrase O Come, O Come, Emmanuel." Watch a performance of Jesse Ayers' Jericho by narrator Kenneth Cox with the Lamont Symphony Orchestra and Chorale, conducted by Lawrence Golan. . . . one of this week's FEATURED NEW MUSIC VIDEOS.

Composer Richard Maxfield is one of the little-sung names in American avant-garde music. "For someone nearly forgotten today, Maxfield had a tremendous impact—largely through his classes at The New School in New York, which attracted radically avant-garde musicians such as Joseph Byrd, Dick Higgins, and even John Cage himself. Born in Seattle in 1927, Maxfield had studied with Krenek, Babbitt, Sessions, and Dallapiccola, but left this Eurocentric background behind to move toward a Cagean experimentalism." Eventually he made contributions to the so-called "minimalism" movement, while forecasting a wide range of developments in the future of electronic music. His Amazing Grace (1960) mixes tape loops from two sources: a speech by revivalist James G. Brodie and electronic fragments from Maxfield's 1958 opera Stacked Deck. The loops play back at various speeds, causing the fragments to overlap in complex ways. This method would later be explored further by Terry Riley, Steve Reich and others. "It is astonishing how many threads of 1960s music seem to begin with the ideas Maxfield explores, and it is a tragedy that his early death, from leaping out a window at age 42, kept him from participating in the more rewarding scene that would later appear" (our thanks to New World Records' liner notes). Listen to Maxfield's Amazing Grace . . . it's our SOUND ART for the week.

Louise Talma was born in Arcachon, France to American parents. Her pianist father died during her infancy, and her mother, an opera singer, moved the family to New York City in 1914. She studied at the Institute of Musical Arts (later the Juilliard School), New York University and Columbia University, where she received her Master’s of Arts in 1933; she also spent sixteen summers in Fontainebleau, France studying piano with Isidor Philipp and composition with Nadia Boulanger, who was the first to suggest that she compose. Talma's many awards include two Guggenheim Fellowships, a Fulbright Grant to compose the opera The Alcestiad (1958) (featuring a libretto by Thornton Wilder), the Sibelius Medal for Composition, the Bearns Prize for Composition, and a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Humanities. And in 1974, she became the first woman composer to be elected to the National Institute of Arts and Letters. In addition, she served on the music faculty of Hunter College in New York for over fifty years. Her best-known choral work is the charming three movement cycle Let's Touch the Sky (1952) for chorus, flute, oboe and bassoon to words by e.e. cummings. Listen to the Jane Hardester Singers performing "If ups the word...", the third movement of Louise Talma's Let's Touch the Sky . . . it's one of our PYTHEAS EARFUL for the week.

In October 1918, Charles Ives suffered a heart attack brought on by exhaustion and undiagnosed diabetes. This marked a turning point in his career. As Ives' biographer Jan Swafford points out, for the remainder of his life the primary focus of Ives' musical efforts would be promoting his works, rather than composing. The very first work that he chose to show to the world - after fifteen years of nearly absolute artistic isolation - was his Second Piano Sonata, subtitled "Concord, Mass., (1840-1860). Ives had a special regard for the work. He took great pains to explain his aims in his Essays Before a Sonata, a programmatic overview of the sonata that Ives included when he published the work (at his own considerable expense) in 1921. In short, the sonata is a series of meditations on four great Transcendentalist writers: Emerson, Hawthorne, "The Alcotts," and Thoreau. The fourth movement is dedicated to Thoreau, who Ives describes as "a great musician, not because he played the flute, but because he did not have to go to Boston to hear 'the Symphony'". (note by Scott Mortensen/MusicWeb International) Listen to a performance of the Thoreau movement of Ives' Piano Sonata No. 2 . . . this week's FROM THE PYTHEAS ARCHIVES.

This week the Pytheas Center honors American composer Milton Babbitt, who died this week at the age of 94. Read about Babbitt's life and music in Allan Kozinn's obituary from The New York Times.

Then hear Milton Babbitt himself talk about his life and electronic music in this week's COMPOSER PORTRAIT.

And listen to two featured works by Babbitt. His Composition for 12 Instruments (1948/54) . . . one of this week's FEATURED NEW MUSIC VIDEOS.

And Philomel (1964), composed for soprano and electonically synthesized sound . . . our FEATURED SOUND ART.

Aulis Sallinen is one of the most prominent figures in Finnish music, and his music often focuses on figures from Finnish history. While his lyric writing shows a strong Sibelius influence, there is also a certain acerbic touch in both his subject matter and his music that is strongly reminiscent of Prokofiev, Shostakovich and Weill. His opera The Red Line (1978), in particular, has a sardonic, slightly bitter tone that strongly resembles Shostakovich's Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk. And like Kurt Weill, he also used jazz elements, as in the ironic song in in the opera Kullervo (1988) in which Kullervo learns that he has slept with his own sister. Hear a performance of Sallinen's Some Aspects of Peltoniemi Hintrik's Funeral March (1981), a work for string orchestra derived from his String Quartet No. 3 . . . one of our PYTHEAS EARFULS this week.

The instrumental and electroacoustic music of composer Alexandra Gardner combines explorations into the rich details of acoustic sound with a visceral percussive energy to create dynamic sonic landscapes. Drawing inspiration from sources ranging from mythology and contemporary poetry, to her training as a percussionist, Gardner is building new audiences for contemporary music with an expressive sound and a flair for the imaginative and unexpected. A native of Washington, DC, Gardner's compositions have been featured at festivals and venues throughout the U.S. and internationally. Watch a performance of her Bloom (2009) performed by cellist Joshua Roman . . . this week's FROM THE PYTHEAS ARCHIVES.

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

Greg Sandow writes, "Measured by index space in Paul Griffiths’s Modern Music, Milton Babbitt is the most important living American nonexperimental composer, and apart from John Cage, the most notable American composer of any kind. But Griffiths can't show nonspecialists why they should care. Babbitt's Second String Quartet, he says, "is based on an all-interval series which is introduced interval by interval, as it were, with each new arrival initiating a development of the interval repertory acquired thus far, each development being argued in terms of derived sets." This comes close to what George Bernard Shaw dismissed as "parsing", and which parodied with an "analysis" of "To be or not to be." Shakespeare, Shaw wrote, "announces his subject at once in the infinitive, in which mood it is presently repeated after a short connecting passage in which, brief as it is, we recognize the alternative and negative forms on which so much of the significance of repetition depends." Musical parsing is far more defensible now than it was in Shaw's time -- styles vary so much that musical grammar can't be taken for granted – but Griffiths does too much of it. He doesn't say how the structures he talks about really work, how Babbitt's derived sets "argue" (whatever that means) each new "development"(oh, really?); and Griffith has only passing remarks about the music's "wit", "surface rhythmic appeal", and the work's "sure musical continuity" - nothing about how Babbitt's music sounds or how it might make a listener feel. This isn't entirely his fault, though, because composer Milton Babbitt talks about music the same way." With all that in mine, let's just sit back and LISTEN to Babbitt's music - in this case his String Quartet No. 4 (1970) - and enjoy the sound world of one of the great composers of our time . . . one of this week's FEATURED NEW MUSIC VIDEOS.

"Take an Argentine composer of Jewish extraction, mix in the dance rhythms of Africa – by way of Brazil and Cuba – and you might just get a flavor of Osvaldo Golijov’s La Pasión según San Marcos (St. Mark Passion) - a work which has been rapturously received by audiences everywhere. So, without hearing a note of La Pasión según San Marcos it’s clearly as far from Johann Sebastian Bach’s own Passions and Lutheran sensibilities as it’s possible to get. Golijov was able to start from a clean slate as it were, since the score of Bach’s St. Mark Passion, premiered in Leipzig in 1731, is lost. One can only wonder what the venerable old organist would have made of the forces assembled by Golijov – choir, all-important percussionists, trumpets, trombones, guitars (including bass), piano, strings, Berimbau (a Brazilian instrument of African origin), vocalists and dancers. Indeed, only the stoniest of hearts could fail to be moved – and moved mightily – by this searing work." [Dan Morgan, MusicWeb International] . . . read more about the latest recording of this groundbreaking work and hear, and watch, excerpts from Golijov's St. Mark Passion . . . it's our FEATURED RECORDING for the week.

"The Seven Deadly Sins marks the end of Kurt Weill’s European career and the beginning of a nearly two-decade hiatus in Bertold Brecht’s. It was Weill’s last collaboration with Brecht and the last enduring work that he composed in his European theater style. This style is characterized by its directness, which is a product of Weill’s use of elements from popular music – in the case of this work, dance music and the barbershop quartet – as well as his use of established musical forms, like the church chorale. Weill would adapt his style to Broadway when he came to the United States in 1935, and he really never composed anything quite like The Seven Deadly Sins again." [John Mangum/The LA Philharmonic] Hear a performance of "Anger" from Weill’s The Seven Deadly Sins (1933) by Measha Brueggergosman, Peter John Buchan, Scott Reimer, Kris Kornelsen, Derek Morphy and the Manitoba Chamber Orchestra with Ann Manson conducting . . . our current PYTHEAS EARFUL.

Born in 1876 in Cadiz, Spain, the historical seaport town at the southern-most tip of Andalucia, Manuel de Falla was the greatest Spanish composer of the 20th century. After the death of Claude Debussy in 1918, Falla was asked to contribute to a planned memorial issue of La revue Musicale, one of the most famous musical publications of the time. Though the request was for an article, Falla preferred to respond with a piece of music. The result was his Homenaje (Homage) - The tomb of Debussy (1920). Watch a performance by the great Julian Bream . . . this week's FROM THE PYTHEAS ARCHIVES.

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