Elizabeth Vercoe has been a composer at the St. Petersburg Music Festival in Russia, the Cité International des Arts in Paris and the MacDowell Colony, and held the Acuff Chair of Excellence at Austin Peay State University in 2003. She has received numerous awards and commissions, along with grants from the Artists Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. To Music (2003) is a short, atmospheric solo for flute in four contrasting sections. At times the music is virtuosic, occasionally calling for multiphonics and other special effects. The titles of the four sections are taken from the haunting poetry of the Russian writer, Anna Akhmatova, a poet deeply interested in music. The work was commissioned by flutist Lisa Vanarsdel and written for her and the Laurels Flute Project. Watch a performance of Elizabeth Vercoe's To Music played by flutist Peter Bloom . . . one of this week's FEATURED NEW MUSIC VIDEOS.

American composer Dominick Argento is best known as a leading composer of lyric opera and choral music. Among his most prominent pieces are the operas Postcard from Morocco (1971), Miss Havisham’s Fire (1979), and The Masque of Angels (1963), and the song cycles Six Elizabethan Songs (1957) and From the Diary of Virginia Woolf (1974), the latter of which earned him the Pulitzer Prize for Music in 1975. In a predominantly tonal context, his music freely combines tonality, atonality and a lyrical use of twelve-tone writing, and Argento is particularly well-known for his sensitive settings of complex, sophisticated texts. As a student in the 1950s, Argento divided his time between America and Italy, and his music is greatly influenced both by his teachers in the United States and his personal affection for Italy, particularly the city of Florence, where he spends part of every year and where many of his works have been written. He has been a professor (and, more recently, a professor emeritus) at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis, and he frequently remarks that he finds that city to be tremendously supportive of his work. He has also developed close professional relationships with several prominent singers, notably Frederica Von Stade, Janet Baker, and Hakan Hagegard, and some of his best-known song cycles were tailored to their talents. Hear Dominick Argento talk about his life and his music - part of Minnesota Public Radio's series The Composer's Voice . . . it's our COMPOSER PORTRAIT for the week.

As a body of music, David Raksin's score for The Bad and the Beautiful (1952) has been lurking around record collectors' circles for decades - Raksin himself recorded a suite distilled down from its most important sections for the RCA Red Seal label in the early '70s, and it has been frequently mentioned as one of the finer instrumental scores to come out of the MGM studios. The music itself varies between deliberate period-style writing, intended to evoke the Hollywood conventions of a bygone age, and some very clever adaptations, such as a Tchaikovsky pastiche entitled "Ilyich All Over". The latter stretches tonality on the reeds, horns, and strings in all manner of unexpected directions without ever losing the audience or releasing you from the irony-laced arc of the story [notes thanks to Bruce Eder @ AllMusic]. Listen to David Raksin conduct his Scherzo, from The Bad and the Beautiful (1952) . . . it's one of our PYTHEAS EARFULS for the week.

The Chamber Concertos are typical of Elliott Schwartz's gleefully eclectic style, the presentation of the many facets of which is facilitated through his espousal of a deep and wide-ranging use of "collage" technique. What this means in practical terms is that the music presents a kaleidoscopically shifting assemblage of layers of material, which can range from literal quotations of classical or romantic models in their original tonal language to reminiscences of the styles of earlier music (of many kinds) to frankly atonal, abstract and complex gestures. The Chamber Concerto II was composed in 1976 and is scored for solo clarinet and nine players. This wonderful little concerto (the shortest of the first six) might remind the listener of an old story with an updated ending. The delightfully puckish clarinet in this work is ultimately subdued by a passing funeral. This story might be titled, "Till Eulenspiegel in New Orleans" [notes thanks to Stephen Guy Soderberg, BMOP/sound]. Listen to a performance of Elliott Schwartz's Chamber Concerto II (1976) played by clarinetist Paul Martin Zonn and the University of Illinois Contemporary Chamber Players, Edwin London conducting . . . it's this week's FROM THE PYTHEAS ARCHIVES.

Bruce Morley (New Zealand Music Magazine) writes about "View From Olympus" (2001), the double concerto for piano, percussion and orchestra by New Zealand composer John Psathas: "Our composer du jour has really done it this time. Psathas is a composer who seems to have listened to everyone from Ketelbey to Keith Jarrett, and is totally confident of his ability to create a new orchestral music. His compositions . . . are diverse, unclassifiable and fragmented, yet utterly organic. Engaged by the kinetic drive of Psathas' rhythms, classical listeners have taken to the results with enthusiasm". "View from Olympus" won for Psathas the 2002 SOUNZ Contemporary Award, as well as being chosen as one of the orchestral works presented in 2009 for the International Association of Music Information Centres' "IAMIC sounds of the Year". Watch a performance of John Psathas' "View From Olympus", with pianist Michael Houstoun, percussionist Leonard Sakofsky and the Christchurch Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Marc Taddei . . . one of this week's FEATURED NEW MUSIC VIDEOS.

During most of his years as a composer, Charles Knox has been employed as a performer or teacher. He was an instructor of contemporary, traditional, baroque and renaissance musical styles; director of student ensembles at small and large colleges and universities; and performer in symphonic and  jazz ensembles. This is often reflected in the choice and style of his creative work. Having held the position of Professor of Music at Georgia State University from 1965 to 1995, Knox now lives in academic - but not compositional - retirement in Atlanta, the city where he has spent most of his life. He has been called "the dean of Atlanta composers", and in 2001 he received the Mayor's Fellowship in the Arts (Award in Music) from the City of Atlanta. Listen to a performance of his 1998 chamber work "2002: Semordnilap No. 2" . . . it's one of our PYTHEAS EARFULS for the week.

A native of Washington, D.C., composer Elizabeth Vercoe has been called "one of the most inventive composers working in America today" by her hometown newspaper (The Washington Post). She has worked as a composer in the U.S. and abroad: at the Civitella Ranieri Center in Italy, the St. Petersburg Spring Music Festival in Russia, the Cite International des Arts in Paris, and the MacDowell Colony in New Hampshire. She has written works on commission for Wellesley College, Austin Peay State University, the Pro Arte Orchestra, and the First National Congress on Women in Music. Her awards include grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, Meet the Composer, the Artists Foundation, and the Massachusetts Arts Council. According to the Vercoe her work "Sonaria" (1980) "is a melodrama for solo cello written in memory of my father, an amateur cellist and violinist. Since the music was written as commentary on an imagined dance/mime either live or filmed, the listener is invited to 'screen' those private visual images sometimes evoked by music instead of hastily suppressing them and trying to 'pay attention.' The mood of the piece is at times tongue-in-cheek, but for the most part is entirely serious". Watch a performance of Vercoe's "Sonaria" played by cellist Jerome Desbordes . . . it's our second FEATURED NEW MUSIC VIDEO for the week.

According to composer Karl Henning, he "writes and plays music which no one else dare, in and near Boston. His music has been played and sung on three continents (NA, Yurp and Oz), and there is unconfirmed rumor that an Uruguayan zookeeper has papered adobe walls with the Henning organ Toccata. Karl has served at different times as Interim Choir Director and Composer-in-Residence at the Cathedral Church of St Paul in Boston, where he composed a 40-minute unaccompanied choral setting of the St John Passion (2008)". His work for 10 winds, "Out in the Sun" was premiered in 2006 by the New England Conservatory Wind Ensemble. Listen to a performance of Henning's Out in the Sun . . . this week's FROM THE PYTHEAS ARCHIVES.