Talking about his work The Horse with the Lavender Eye (1997), composer Stephen Hartke writes, "I've always been fascinated by non-sequiturs, and the way that sense can suddenly appear out of nonsense. I also find imagery derived from words and pictures to be a great stimulus to my musical thinking, even if the relationships between the images I seize upon are not necessarily obvious or logical. The sources for the titles of this trio are quite disparate [Music of the Left; The Servant of Two Masters; Waltzing at the Abyss; Cancel My Rumba Lesson], ranging from Carlo Goldoni to Japanese court music to the cartoonist R. Crumb, as well as 19th century Brazilian novelist Machado de Assis and Looney Tunes. A bewildering array of references, to be sure, but one that somehow whets my musical appetite." Watch a performance of Stephen Hartke's The Horse with the Lavender Eye, played by clarinetist Jerome Simas, violinist Anna Presler, and pianist Eric Zivian . . . one of this week's FEATURED NEW MUSIC VIDEOS.

Parthenia, hailed by The New Yorker as "one of the brightest lights in New York's early-music scene," is a quartet of viols dedicated to the performance of ancient and contemporary repertoires. Parthenia has presented concerts across America, produced its own concert series in New York City, collaborates regularly with the world's foremost early music artists and ensembles, and has been featured on radio and television as well as festivals and series as wide-ranging as Music Before 1800, the Pierpont Morgan Library, Columbia University's Miller Theatre and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Yale Center for British Art, the Harriman-Jewell Series in Kansas City, and the Tage Alter Musik Festival in Regensburg, Germany. Parthenia's unique variety of performances range from its popular touring program, "When Music & Sweet Poetry Agree", a celebration of Elizabethan poetry and music with actor Paul Hecht and mezzo-soprano Jacqueline Horner-Kwiatek of Anonymous 4, to the complete viol fantasies of Henry Purcell and complete instrumental works of Robert Parsons, as well as commissions and premieres of many new works by composers such as Phil Kline, Richard Einhorn, Brian Fennelly, Will Ayton, Max Lifchitz, Kristin Norderval, David Glaser, and Frances White. Read more about Parthenia and the new music they have commissioned . . . they're our FEATURED ENSEMBLE, and the subject of our FEATURED THOUGHTS & IDEAS.

Hailed as a "virtuoso" by the New York Times, "unique sound" by the Daily Star, and "engagingly flamboyant" by the L.A. Times, clarinetist and composer Kinan Azmeh is one of Syria's rising stars. His utterly distinctive sound is now fast gaining international recognition. Born in Damascus, Azmeh is a graduate of New York's Juilliard school, and the first Arab to win the premier prize at the 1997 Nicolai Rubinstein International Competition, Moscow. A Sad Morning, Every Morning (2012), Azmeh's collaboration with visual artist, Kevork Mourad is "a little prayer for home. Dedicated to all those who have fallen in Syria in the past year." Listen to Kinan Azmeh's perform his A Sad Morning, Every Morning, with visuals by Kevork Mourad . . . it's one of our PYTHEAS EARFULS for the week.

American composer George Tsontakis composed the movements of his Four Symphonic Quartets as follows: Other Echoes (1996), Perpetual Angelus (1992), The Dove Descending (1995), and Winter Lightning (1993). The title of each is based on one of the Four Quartets by T. S. Eliot, but not in the order of his cycle of meditative poems. Tsontakis does not attempt to set Eliot to music, either impressionistically or programmatically. In fact, he says he scarcely consulted the poems while writing his pieces. Instead, he sought to create aural landscapes that were somehow Eliotic in expanse and depth. This is much the same relationship as between Eliot's poems and the late Beethoven String Quartets, from which the poet sought to create in language a depth of meditative introspection and breadth comparable to the composer of the previous century. Whatever one may think of Eliot's craving for spiritual absolutes and his sometimes slippery mysticism, The Four Quartets are one of the most aurally sonorous and reverberant works of 20th century poetry in the English language. And any reader who has read them with absorption aloud must have found their rhythms and phrases impressed on the aural memory indelibly. The third Quartet, The Dove Descending, concerns potentiality in reserve - conservation and expectation. This is why Tsontakis says that even though it is the gentlest and most consoling movement it also hides a kind of terror. How it is able to hold potentiality together for such length without collapsing into exhaustion or erupting into climax is the mystery the ear revisits with each re-hearing [notes thanks to Don Mager/Making Time]. Listen to a performance of George Tsontakis' The Dove Descending (1995) . . . this week's FROM THE PYTHEAS ARCHIVES.

David Lang's impetus for Cheating, Lying, Stealing (1993) was to be the opposite of a big-brained, I-am-so-smart composer. Instead, Lang wanted to focus more on the more appalling and snide aspects of life. Lang tries to get every bang for his buck out of the musical material that he has. His composition is like a ten-minute-long machine that follows a set of laws that he invented, at which point the music seems to have simply written itself. He tweaks one aspect of the conventions, and cheats his way into having even more material. The piece, composed for the Bang on a Can All-Stars and scored for bass clarinet, cello, piano, and two percussionists (who play junk metals on opposite ends of the stage), is angular, edgy, and repetitious . . . Watch a performance of Cheating, Lying, Stealing with Sam Chernoff, Paul Kerekes, Hiromi Nishida, Derek Kwan, Austin Shadduck, and Joe Fee, with Matthew Kasper conducting . . . one of this week's FEATURED NEW MUSIC VIDEOS.

The Pytheas Center's director Vinny Fuerst writes: "The Richard Rodgers/Robert Russell Bennett score of the NBC documentary series Victory at Sea [26 half hour episodes which first aired from October 26, 1952 through May 3, 1953] has always held a special place in my heart. My mother tells the story of how I, age 5, would sit in front of the stereo and listen over and over again to the album of highlights for Victory at Sea. I must have been swept away by the drama, adventure and heroism evoked in that famous score. Just recently, I've found out the fascinating details behind the collaboration between Richard Rodgers (one of the most famous composers in American musical theater) and Robert Russell Bennett (a composer, too, and one of the most famous and sought after arrangers and orchestrators of the 20th century); how Bennett took Rodgers' twelve themes and a total of seventeen pages of music, and arranged (transformed, really) them into over 11 hours of music". Watch part of the first episode of Victory at Sea . . . it's this week's PYTHEAS SIGHTING.

And read more about the Richard Rodgers/Robert Russell Bennett collaboration . . . here at Pytheas.

In his fifty career, Brian Fennelly has contributed more than ninety works to the repertoire of twentieth-century music. He brought the discipline garnered by studies in mechanical engineering at Union College in Schenectady, New York to graduate studies in music at Yale University, from which he received Master of Music and Ph.D. degrees. His most significant teachers were Mel Powell, Donald Martino, Gunther Schuller, George Perle, and Allen Forte. From 1968 to 1997 he was Professor of Music in the Faculty of Arts and Science at New York University, where he is now Professor Emeritus. In addition to a Guggenheim fellowship, his awards include three fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, two commissions from the Koussevitsky Foundation as well as commissions from the Fromm Foundation, Meet the Composer/Reader’s Digest, the Hudson Valley Philharmonic, and others. In 1997 he received a lifetime achievement award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Fennelly's music has been performed by orchestras including the Rochester Philharmonic, American Composers Orchestra, and The Louisville Orchestra, as well as by chamber ensembles such as the American and Empire Brass Quintets, and the Concord and Audubon String Quartets. In addition to composing and teaching, he has been active as a pianist, and co-directs the Washington Square Contemporary Music Society, which he founded in 1976. Hear a performance of Brian Fennelly's Sukhi! (1999) for clarinet, violin, cello and piano (1999) . . . one of our PYTHEAS EARFULS this week.

According to American composer Gian Carlo Menotti, "One of the essential ingredients for music to sound 'modern'... is the constant and unrelieved use of dissonances. I don't know why dissonance per se should be more exciting or interesting than consonance ... There are people who consider it essential for contemporary music to be nervous and intense. Again, why should tension be more interesting than serenity? Artists struggling to be original seem to be unaware that there is only one way to be honestly and candidly oneself ... I am convinced that composition is more an act of discovery than of creation ... and only when I feel I have reached the inner chambers of my heart, I know that I have become an original composer." The human voice played a significant role in Menotti's work, and the bulk of his output consists of opera, musical theater, and choral music, for most of which he composed both music and text. He created the first opera for radio, The Old Maid and the Thief (1939), and for television, Amahl and the Night Visitors (1951), and wrote a number of ballets and works for children. Menotti received the Pulitzer Prize in music and Drama Critics' Circle Award for both The Consul (1949) and The Saint of Bleecker Street (1954). In 1958 Menotti founded the Spoleto Festival of Two Worlds in Italy, devoted to cultural collaboration between Europe and America; in 1977 he founded Spoleto USA in Charleston, South Carolina. Menotti's Concerto for Violin and Orchestra was commissioned in 1952 by Efrem Zimbalist, violinist and then director of the Curtis Institute of Music, of which Menotti was a former student. The work was premiered by Zimbalist and the Philadelphia Orchestra in December of that year. Divided into three movements, the concerto is a conventional showpiece for the virtuoso soloist, with a lyricism and tonality characteristic of much of Menotti's work. The final movement features a section for oboe, tambourine, and Indian drum reminiscent of the Middle Eastern influences found in Menotti's opera Amahl and the Night Visitors. Hear a performance of Menotti's Violin Concerto by violinist Ruggiero Ricci with the Pacific Symphony Orchestra, Keith Clark conducting . . . this week's FROM THE PYTHEAS ARCHIVES.

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