Benjamin Lees was one of the senior figures in American music, with a large catalogue of powerful and inventive music to his credit. His piano works span almost sixty years of compositional activity but are unified by a number of consistent stylistic features: a wiry and muscular athleticism with its distant roots in Prokofiev and Bartók, a quasi-Impressionist awareness of piano sonority, a tough, no-nonsense sense of humour and an exhilarating onward drive. Experience Lees' intense and powerful music with a performance of his Fantasia (1954) . . . one of this week's FEATURED NEW MUSIC VIDEOS.

The Portland Chamber Music Festival is a local, community-based organization that has gained an outstanding regional and national reputation since its founding in 1994. The festival brings nationally recognized artists to Portland, Maine to present a wide range of classical chamber music, including the music of living composers. The PCMF has played to a nationwide audience on National Public Radio; twice has been awarded an Aaron Copland grant for performance of American contemporary music; has been recorded and broadcast by WGBH radio in Boston; and has been featured in both local and national press. Performers in recent years have included members of the Vermeer, Mendelssohn, Borromeo, and Brentano String Quartets, world-renowned baritone Sanford Sylvan, and National Symphony Concertmaster Nurit Bar-Josef. Resident Composers have included Grammy winner Osvaldo Golijov and internationally celebrated composer Earl Kim. PCMF also works to develop excitement for classical music among young people and the greater Portland community, hosting a free children’s concert, a Young Artist Apprentice Program, concerts in Gardiner and at Bates College, and adult chamber music workshops. The festival also conducts an annual Composer’s Competition, culminating in the winning work’s premiere performance . . . . . . it's this week's FEATURED NEW MUSIC FESTIVAL.

Leonard Rosenman is one of a handful of film composers who have successfully incorporated contemporary compositional techniques into conventional film scoring. Rosenman's use of Arnold Schoenberg's 12-tone technique set a standard for the use of various avant-garde, atonal, and serial effects. The first ever twelve-tone score [for a major studio film] was his score for "The Cobweb" (1955). The composer has also demonstrated an ability to employ authentic period music in a number of films dealing with historical subject matter, such as "Barry Lyndon" (1975) and "Bound for Glory" (1976). Hear Rosenman's music in an excerpt from the 1979 eco-thriller Prophecy . . it's this week's PYTHEAS SIGHTING.

Pierre Schaeffer Etude Noire (1948) is an early piece of musique concrete. "Etude Noire" means black study…making this the progenitor of all dark ambient music. Schaeffer is singularly responsible for launching the Musique Concrete movement in the late 1940s and with it, the course of much of the experimental music of the 20th Century. According toe Wikpedia, Schaeffer is generally acknowledged as being the first composer to make music using magnetic tape. "From the contemporary point of view, 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"
. . . this week's FROM THE PYTHEAS ARCHIVES.

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

Iva Bittová is a phenomenon in contemporary Czech music – the avant-garde violinist, singer and composer has developed a music style all her own, blending the music of many cultures into what she terms her "personal folk music" and drawing deeply on her emotions and the sounds of nature. Her vocal utterances range from traditional singing to chirping, moaning, yelps and deep throat noises that keep audiences mesmerized. Her style is not easily defined but perhaps one of the most accurate comments made about her is that she brings the human voice back to the natural world in a way that transcends barriers and touches audiences the world over. Hear and see her sing Ne nehledej/Stop Searching ... one of this week's FEATURED NEW MUSIC VIDEOS.

American composer Benjamin Lees has traveled the world over in his 85 years. Born in Harbin, China of Russian parents, he arrived in the United States at age 2. After military service in World War II, Lees entered the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. In 1954 he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship, enabling him to leave the U.S. and travel to Europe, where he eventually settled in a small village near Paris. His aim was to remain uninfluenced by the turbulent American scene in order to create his own style. He remained in Europe for seven years before returning to the U.S. to settle in California. The highly personal style of Lees lends his music the lofty grandeur and sardonic wit, not only of Shostakovich but also of the Cubist and Surrealist artists whom he so greatly admires. He also shares Britten’s refined sense of harmony, delighting in contrasts and surprises, enthralling the listener at every turn from the lyrical to the burlesque, the romantic to the brusque. His String Quartet No. 5 (2002) was chosen by Chamber Music America as one of its "101 Great Ensemble Works". Check out the Cypress String Quartet's Naxos recording of the String Quartet No. 5 (as well as Nos. 1 and 6) ... Pytheas' current FEATURED RECORDING.

We're all familiar (hopefully!) with Aaron Copland's great works for modern dance - Appalachian Spring, Billy the Kid and Rodeo. Less well known are the scores he composed for the movies - perhaps most frequently heard is the music he wrote for the film The Red Pony (1948). This week at Pytheas we feature another of his film scores, namely the one written for William Wyler's 1949 classic The Heiress starring Olivia de Havilland and Montgomery Clift. Take a look and listen at this week's PYTHEAS SIGHTING.

In 1951 Benjamin Britten turned for inspiration to Ovid, the exiled Roman poet who died in 17 A.D. in obscurity on the northwest coast of the Black Sea. Ovid's greatest work, Metamorphoses, is a fifteen-volume treatise of the disillusionment of his generation described in terms of the instability of nature. Britten titled his Six Metamorphoses After Ovid (1951) using the names of the some of the legendary figures who appear in the great Roman poet's work. Enjoy a performance of Narcissus by oboist Nicholas Daniel ... this week's FROM THE PYTHEAS ARCHIVES.

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