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A long time Later, a Composer Revisits the Piano Concerto

Decades Later, a Composer Revisits the Piano Concerto

It took the composer William Bolcom over 40 years to follow his first piano concerto with a second one.

When Bolcom was putting the finishing touches on that first concerto, in 1976, he had already gained fame as part of the era’s ragtime revival. A pianist as well, he interpreted pieces by Scott Joplin and other originators, while also contributing to a new wave of writing for the form, on albums like “Heliotrope Bouquet.”

Milestones came after the concerto’s premiere. Bolcom’s prismatic “Twelve New Etudes for Piano” — which contained a crucial dollop of ragging energy — won the Pulitzer Prize for music in 1988. That decade, his expansive and amazing setting of William Blake’s “Songs of Innocence and of Experience” was a polyglot Achievement, full of music that might take stylistic succor from reggae or Tin Pan Alley, from one minute to the next.

Even as symphonies and other works for soloist and orchestra kept coming from the Bolcom workshop, no new piano concerto followed — a peculiar development, given his own stature as a keyboardist. But this April, that streak came to a close when Igor Levit and the Mahler Chamber Orchestra gave the world premiere performance of Bolcom’s Piano Concerto No. 2.

Don’t bother asking whether the premiere took place in the United States, where major presentations of music by Bolcom, an American, have fallen out of fashion. Instead, this new concerto was presented in Germany, at the Heidelberg Spring Festival. That organization, which commissioned Bolcom’s new concerto with Levit in mind, thankfully also documented the performance. And recently, it posted the video on YouTube.

In a phone interview, Levit described Bolcom as one of “the very essential composers of our time,” and also recounted with delight the way in which this composer, now 84, participated in the rehearsal process: by video conference, from his home in Ann Arbor, Mich. “You can tell that this piece, and writing music — any music — really means the world to him,” Levit said. “He was, in the most beautiful way, childishly happy.”

Bolcom, in a joint interview from his home with Joan Morris — his wife and collaborator, who finished some sentences and added cabaret-style jokes — recalled seeing, and enjoying, Levit’s performance of Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 4 at the Gilmore Piano Festival, in Kalamazoo, Mich., in 2018.

“I said,” Bolcom added, “’Now this is a guy I could write for.’”(He also called the Beethoven “probably my favorite concerto.”)

“I’m interested in a dialogue,” he said, describing his ideal relationship between a pianist and an orchestra, “like in a Mozart concerto, in which nobody is expecting the other person to try to win over the other.”

Bolcom’s second piano concerto, at a running time of 24 minutes, reflects that balance while synthesizing various musical traditions. In the early going, some tender yet mystic motifs suggest the songful chromaticism of Olivier Messiaen. But before long, in a transition that few composers could handle so successfully, stark pianistic marching leads the orchestra into the punchy environments of percussive Americana.

In an accompanying documentary that the festival produced and posted online, Levit says that Bolcom described the concerto to him as “a gentle piece for non-gentle times.” There is a hint, there, of Bolcom’s proclivity for political commentary. He described the finale of his Trio for Horn, Violin and Piano, from 2017, as a “resolute march of resistance” in response to the 2016 presidential election. And as far back as that first piano concerto, written during the post-Watergate bicentennial of American independence, Bolcom wrote that it was one of “one of the bitterest pieces” he’d conceived so far.

But such steady disillusionment has not staggered Bolcom’s imagination. Whereas his first concerto ends in a parade of riotous, Ives-like quotations — a cynical pileup of putatively patriotic melodic sentiments — the second is less obvious in its moods. Its melancholy, though impossible to miss, is also left by some ebullient twists, all of which are well served by Levit and the Mahler Chamber Orchestra, conducted by Elim Chan.

This blend of delight and an almost pained, Romantic yearning likewise comes to the fore in another recent recording of Bolcom’s music — by the pianist Marc-André Hamelin, who first recorded “Twelve New Etudes” and has also released an album with the first piano concerto.

Hamelin’s new recording, “Bolcom: The Complete Rags,” is — truth in titling! — the only survey of this catalog that manages to sweep up a few stray syncopated pieces the composer has ventured this century. If it lacks just a touch of the rambunctious energy that Bolcom himself brought to rags like “Seabiscuits Rag,” as heard toward the end of “Heliotrope Bouquet,” Hamelin’s interpretations are a marvelous, moving account of this lushly complex music.

Bolcom’s ability to move between poles of emotion, in his rags and concertos, is part of the great charm of his music. When I asked him about the surprising appearance of an electric keyboard part in his Symphony No. 3, I described it as sometimes sounding like a parody of midcentury American modernism and at other points as reminiscent of fusion-era Miles Davis. He let out a belly laugh.

“First of all: What’s not interesting to me is to make it all completely explicable,” he said. “It’s not explicable to me. I mean, I fly by the seat of my pants, musically.” And although he declined to be pinned down on any point of musical reference, he did admit, “Since the beginning, I’ve had love for the theater.”

That’s evident not only in his comic operas, such as “Lucrezia,” but also in the wild transitions embedded within his instrumental works. The new piano concerto, too, manages to surprise even as it is not interested merely in shock value.

For Levit, the concerto has “a great mastery of writing and level of seriousness and dedication to every little detail.” But for all that refinement, Levit said, it also shares a key trait with music of American artists like Esperanza Spalding, Fred Hersch and Frederic Rzewski — all of whom Levit cited as carrying a form of the colloquial spirit that is also present in Bolcom’s music .

“They never lost the connection to the people who would listen to the music,” Levit said. “This wire to the audience, the wire to the dimension in the hall, is really something which I find deeply inspiring.”

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Mikis Theodorakis, ‘Zorba’ Composer and Marxist Insurgent, Dies at 96

Mikis Theodorakis, ‘Zorba’ Composer and Marxist Rebel, Dies at 96

As Greece’s most illustrious composer, Mr. Theodorakis wrote symphonies, operas, ballets, film scores, music for the stage, marches for protests and songs without borders — an oeuvre of hundreds of classical and popular pieces that poured from his pen in good times and bad, even in the confines of drafty prison cells, squalid concentration camps and years of exile in a remote mountain hamlet.

He also wrote anthems of wartime resistance and socialist tone poems about the plight of workers and oppressed peoples. His most famous work on political persecution was the haunting “Mauthausen Trilogy,” named for a World War II Nazi concentration camp used mainly to exterminate the intelligentsia of Europe’s conquered lands. It has been described as the most beautiful music ever written on the Holocaust.

Mr. Theodorakis’s music made him a wealthy Communist. Having paid his dues to society, he did not apologize for his privileged life as a member of Parliament, with homes in Paris, Athens and the Greek Peloponnesus; for being feted at premieres of his work in New York, London and Berlin; or for counting cultural and political leaders in Europe, America and the Middle East as friends.

During World War II, he joined a Communist youth group that fought fascist occupation forces in Greece. After the war, his name appeared on a police list of wartime resisters, and he was rounded up with thousands of suspected Communists and sent for three years to the island of Makronisos, the site of a notorious prison camp. There he contracted tuberculosis, and he was tortured and subjected to mock executions by being buried alive.

Mr. Theodorakis studied at music conservatories in Athens and Paris in the 1950s, writing symphonies, chamber music, ballets and assorted rhapsodies, marches and adagios. He set to music the verses of eminent Greek poets, many of them Communists. He also deepened his ties to Communism: When Greece became a Cold War battleground, he blamed not Stalin but the C.I.A.

He was profoundly affected by the assassination in 1963 of Grigoris Lambrakis, a prominent antiwar activist, who was run down by right-wing zealots on a motorcycle at a peace rally in Thessaloniki. His murder — a pivotal event in modern Greek history that was portrayed in thinly fictionalized form in the Costa-Gavras film as the work of leaders of the subsequent junta — provoked mass protests and a national political crisis.

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R. Murray Schafer, Composer Who Heard Nature’s Music, Dies at 88

R. Murray Schafer, Composer Who Heard Nature’s Music, Dies at 88

On his return to Toronto, Mr. Schafer in 1962 co-founded the innovative concert series Ten Centuries, which presented new and rarely heard music.

As his career picked up, he answered requests for new works with irreverence, composing “Son of Heldenleben,” a parodic riff on the tone poem by Richard Strauss, and “No Longer Than Ten (10) Minutes,” in which an orchestra tunes up, a conductor walks on and offstage, and the players crescendo each time the audience tries to applaud. His 1966 “Requiems for the Party-Girl,” written for the mezzo-soprano Phyllis Mailing, is a darkly virtuosic monodrama in which a woman sings of her impending suicide.

Mr. Schafer married Ms. Mailing in 1960, and they divorced in 1971. His second marriage, to Jean Reed, from 1975 to about 1999, also ended in divorce. He married Ms. James in 2011 after a long partnership. Along with her, he is survived by his brother, Paul.

Mr. Schafer began his research on soundscapes after joining the faculty at Simon Fraser University in 1965. He also invented a radical approach to teaching, calling it “creative music education.” In a series of influential booklets, he provided exercises to encourage children’s creativity, asking them to “bring an interesting sound to school” or hum along with a tune that they had heard on a street corner.

Alongside the mythic theater of “Patria,” Mr. Schafer composed more conventional scores, among them 13 string quartets and “Letters from Mignon,” a neo-Romantic song setting of love letters written to him by Ms. James. His genre-spanning oratorio “Apocalypsis” was first performed with a cast of more than 500 in 1980; it received a triumphant, career-capping revival at the Luminato Festival in Toronto in 2015.

In a 2009 short film directed by David New, Mr. Schafer offers philosophical musings on listening amid the snowy soundscape outside his home, a remote farmhouse in the Indian River area in southern Ontario.

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Peter Zinovieff, Composer and Synthesizer Innovator, Dies at 88

Peter Zinovieff, Composer and Synthesizer Innovator, Dies at 88

Peter Zinovieff, a composer and inventor whose pioneering synthesizers shaped albums by Pink Floyd, David Bowie, Roxy Music and Kraftwerk, died on June 23 in Cambridge, England. He was 88.

His death was announced on Twitter by his daughter Sofka Zinovieff, who said he had been hospitalized after a fall.

Mr. Zinovieff oversaw the design of the first commercially produced British synthesizers. In 1969, his company, EMS (Electronic Music Studios), introduced the VCS3 (for “voltage controlled studio”), one of the earliest and most affordable portable synthesizers. Instruments from EMS soon became a staple of 1970s progressive-rock, particularly from Britain and Germany. The company’s slogan was “Think of a sound — now make it.”

Peter Zinovieff was born on Jan. 26, 1933, in London, the son of émigré Russian aristocrats: a princess, Sofka Dolgorouky, and Leo Zinovieff. His parents divorced in 1937.

Peter’s grandmother started teaching him piano when he was in primary school. He attended Oxford University, where he played in experimental music groups while earning a Ph.D. in geology. He also dabbled in electronics.

“I had this facility of putting pieces of wire together to make something that either received or made sounds,” he told Red Bull Music Academy in 2015.

He married Victoria Heber-Percy, then 17, who came from a wealthy family. She and her parents were unhappy with the extensive travel that a geologist’s career required. After Mr. Zinovieff worked briefly for the Air Ministry in London as a mathematician, he turned to making electronic music full time, supported by his wife.

He bought tape recorders and microphones and found high-quality oscillators, filters and signal analyzers at military-surplus stores. Daphne Oram, the electronic-music composer who was a co-founder of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, taught him techniques of making music by splicing together bits of sound recorded on magnetic tape in the era of musique concrète.

But Mr. Zinovieff decided that cutting tape was tedious. He built a primitive sequencer — a device to trigger a set of notes repeatedly — from telephone-switching hardware, and he began working on electronic sequencers with the electrical engineers Mark Dowson and David Cockerell. They realized that early digital computers, which were already used to control factory processes, might also control sound processing.

Mr. Zinovieff’s wife sold her pearl and turquoise wedding tiara for 4,000 British pounds — now about $96,000 — to finance Mr. Zinovieff’s purchase of a PDP-8 computer designed by the Digital Equipment Corporation. Living in Putney, a district of London, Mr. Zinovieff installed it in his garden shed, and he often cited it as the world’s first home computer. He added a second PDP-8; the two units, which he named Sofka and Leo, could control hundreds of oscillators and other sound modules.

The shed was now an electronic-music studio. Mr. Cockerell was an essential partner; he was able to build the devices that Mr. Zinovieff envisioned. Mr. Cockerell “would be able to interpret it into a concrete electronic idea and make the bloody thing — and it worked,” Mr. Zinovieff said in the 2006 documentary “What the Future Sounded Like.”

In 1966, Mr. Zinovieff formed the short-lived Unit Delta Plus with Delia Derbyshire (who created the electronic arrangement of Ron Grainer’s theme for the BBC science fiction institution “Doctor Who”) and Brian Hodgson to make electronic ad jingles and other projects.

The programmer Peter Grogono, working with Mr. Cockerell and Mr. Zinovieff, devised software to perform digital audio analysis and manipulation, presaging modern sampling. It used numbers to control sounds in ways that anticipated the Musical Instrument Digital Interface (MIDI) standard that was introduced in 1983.

On Jan. 15, 1968, Mr. Zinovieff brought his computer to Queen Elizabeth Hall in London for Britain’s first public concert of all-electronic music. His “Partita for Unattended Computer” received some skeptical reviews: The Financial Times recognized a technical achievement but called it “the dreariest kind of neo-Webern, drawn out to inordinate length.”

Mr. Zinovieff lent a computer to the 1968 exhibition “Cybernetic Serendipity” at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London. Visitors could whistle a tune and the computer would analyze and repeat it, then improvise variations.

Continually upgrading the Putney studio was expensive. Mr. Zinovieff offered to donate the studio’s advanced technology to the British government, but he was ignored. To sustain the project, he and Mr. Cockerell decided to spin off a business.

So in 1969, Mr. Zinovieff, Mr. Cockerell and Tristram Cary, an electronic composer with his own studio, formed EMS. They built a rudimentary synthesizer the size of a shoe box for the Australian composer Don Banks that they later referred to as the VCS1.

In November, they unveiled the more elaborate VCS3, also known as the Putney. It used specifications from Mr. Zinovieff, a case and controls designed by Mr. Cary and circuitry designed by Mr. Cockerell (who drew on Robert Moog’s filter design research). It was priced at 330 pounds, about $7,700 now.

Yet the VCS3 was smaller and cheaper than other early synthesizers; the Minimoog didn’t arrive until 1970 and was more expensive. The original VCS3 had no keyboard and was best suited to generating abstract sounds, but EMS soon made a touch-sensitive keyboard module available. The VCS3 also had an input so it could process external sounds.

Musicians embraced the VCS3 along with other EMS instruments.

EMS synthesizers are prominent in songs like Pink Floyd’s “On the Run,” Roxy Music’s “Virginia Plain” and Kraftwerk’s “Autobahn,” and the Who used a VCS3 to process the sound of an electric organ on “Won’t Get Fooled Again.” King Crimson, Todd Rundgren, Led Zeppelin, Tangerine Dream, Aphex Twin and others also used EMS synthesizers.

“I hated anything to do with the commercial side,” Mr. Zinovieff told Sound on Sound magazine in 2016. He was more interested in contemporary classical uses of electronic sound. In the 1970s, he composed extensively, but much of his own music vanished because he would tape over ideas that he expected to improve.

He also collaborated with contemporary composers, including Harrison Birtwistle and Hans Werner Henze. “I didn’t want to have a commercial studio,” he said in 2010. “I wanted an experimental studio, where good composers could work and not pay.” Mr. Zinovieff and Mr. Birtwistle climbed to the top of Big Ben to record the clock mechanisms and gong sounds they incorporated in a quadraphonic 1971 piece, “Chronometer.”

Like other groundbreaking synthesizer companies, EMS had financial troubles. It filed for bankruptcy in 1979 after branching into additional products, including a video synthesizer, a guitar synthesizer and a vocoder.

Mr. Zinovieff handed over his full studio — including advanced prototypes of an interactive video terminal and a 10-octave pressure-sensitive keyboard — to the National Theater, in London, which belatedly found that it couldn’t raise funds to maintain it. The equipment was dismantled and stored for years in a basement, and it was eventually ruined in a flood.

Mr. Zinovieff largely stopped composing for decades. During that time he taught acoustics at the University of Cambridge.

But he wasn’t entirely forgotten. He worked for years on the intricate libretto for Mr. Birtwistle’s 1986 opera “The Mask of Orpheus,” which included a language Mr. Zinovieff constructed using the syllables in “Orpheus” and “Eurydice.”

In 2010, Mr. Zinovieff was commissioned to write music for a sculpture in Istanbul with 40 channels of sound. “Electronic Calendar: The EMS Tapes,” a collection of Mr. Zinovieff’s work and collaborations from 1965 to 1979 at Electronic Music Studios, was released in 2015.

Mr. Zinovieff learned new software, on computers that were exponentially more powerful than his 1970s equipment, and returned to composing throughout the 2010s, including pieces for cello and computer, for violin and computer and for computer and the spoken word. In 2020, during the pandemic, he collaborated with a granddaughter, Anna Papadimitriou, the singer in the band Hawxx, on a death-haunted piece called “Red Painted Ambulance.”

Mr. Zinovieff’s first three marriages ended in divorce. He is survived by his fourth wife, Jenny Jardine, and by six children — Sofka, Leo, Kolinka, Freya, Kitty and Eliena — and nine grandchildren.

A former employee, Robin Wood, revived EMS in 1997, reproducing the vintage equipment designs. An iPad app emulating the VCS3 was released in 2014.

Even in the 21st century, Mr. Zinovieff sought better music technology. In 2016, he told Sound on Sound that he felt limited by unresponsive interfaces — keyboards, touchpads, linear computer displays — and by playback through stationary, directional loudspeakers. He longed, he said, for “three-dimensional sound in the air around us.”

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Evaluate: A Composer Creates Her Masterpiece With ‘Innocence’

Review: A Composer Creates Her Masterpiece With ‘Innocence’

AIX-EN-PROVENCE, France – “Innocence”, the new opera by Kaija Saariaho, begins in a soft, gloomy gloom. A shadowy cymbal mist rises from long, ghastly tones in the bass and contrabassoon, before a screeching bassoon fragment penetrates the silence with melancholy singing.

It’s only a few seconds of music, but a mood has established itself – comprehensive, unforgettable and yet subtle. Before we know the plot of “Innocence”, we feel it: Something dark and deep has happened, out of which the memory swings into an uncertain future, engraved with grief.

We feel it again and again in the following hundred minutes when we get to know a tragedy and its aftermath. Great yet reserved, a thriller that is also a meditation, “Innocence” is the most powerful work Saariaho has written in his career in the fifth decade.

Seen here at the festival in Aix-en-Provence until July 12th (and streamed on arte.tv on Saturday), after its planned debut in 2020 was canceled, it would be the premiere of the year even in a normal season – even if his audiences weren’t so hungry for real, great, important live opera after so many months. It deserves to travel well beyond an already global itinerary: Helsinki, Amsterdam, London, San Francisco, the Metropolitan Opera in New York.

This is undoubtedly the work of a mature master who has mastered her resources so well that she can simply focus on telling a story and illuminating characters. In contrast to so many contemporary operas, “Innocence” – with the mighty London Symphony Orchestra, conducted with sensitivity and control by Susanna Malkki – does not seem like a sung piece with a more or less incoherent, artistically self-centered orchestral soundtrack.

In fact, during the performance I attended on Tuesday, I tried to listen only to the instrumental lines and their interplay from time to time, but despite the apparent virtuosity and density of the score, my ears kept lifting up to the stage, to the clear, relentless ones Action, the integrated theatrical whole. Porous and agile; Boils under and around the voices; and only occasionally, exploding briefly, is this music as a vehicle for exploring and intensifying the drama. It’s complex but confident enough not to exist just for its own sake.

With a libretto by the Finnish writer Sofi Oksanen and translations in more than half a dozen languages ​​by Aleksi Barrière, “Innocence” is set in Helsinki 21st. The plot alternates between a memory of the disaster by six students and a teacher who went through it , and a wedding reception that takes place 10 years later.

It quickly becomes clear that the two events are related. The bridegroom is the brother of the Sagittarius, and his family, ostracized and desperate about what happened, withheld the whole thing from the bride. (If that wasn’t enough, there’s a reason a waitress crept around the edge of the wedding with clenched jaws: She’s the mother of one of the victims.)

For an innocent young woman who is blindly led by her lover into a world of violence and deception, there are plenty of role models in opera: think of Bartok’s “Bluebeard’s Castle” and Debussy’s “Pelléas et Mélisande”. In its relatively modest, non-stop length, “Innocence” is reminiscent of this as well as the cruel economy of Berg’s “Wozzeck” and Strauss’s “Elektra”.

But “Innocence” is a large part of our time and – in its play with several languages ​​and speaking and song registers – very much itself. Saariaho gave it the working title “Fresco”; It was inspired by “The Last Supper”, from which she derived the size of the cast (13 soloists) and the wider guilt questions of the piece and the related but separate experiences of people who shared a trauma.

Members of the wedding party sing: the groom, a tenor, in loud admonitions; the bride, a soprano, with sweet lyrics. A priest, the family’s only friend, mumbles ominously about his lost faith.

The surviving students and teachers, on the other hand, speak – but in precise rhythms that are artfully coordinated with their respective languages ​​Czech, Swedish, French, German, Spanish, Greek and English. The waitress’s daughter, Marketa (a memorably rapt Vilma Jaa), appears as a kind of phantom and sings in the incredibly simple style of Finnish folk music. The Estonian Philharmonic Chamber Choir sings backstage, a touch of a world beyond the feverish hustle and bustle of the action. All these disparate vocal worlds are connected by the orchestra, which wraps itself easily and smoothly around the singers – never underlining them explicitly, never competing.

The cast matches Saariaho’s score in their dedication and discipline, their refusal to lapse into dubbing or grand guignol. As a waitress, Magdalena Kozena is a laser beam of pain; As the groom’s mother, Sandrine Piau conjures up the eerie effect of a voice thinned to a thread from suffering.

Saariaho’s previous operas – beginning with the stylized medieval parable “L’Amour de Loin” (2000) – were mostly collaborations with the director Peter Sellars, who even gives canonical works the abstraction of ritual. Here, however, she benefits from a hypernaturalistic staging by Simon Stone, whose style “Innocence” anchors in reality without losing its surreal fluidity. (Chloe Lamford’s rotating, ever-changing two-story set, a terrifying mix of school and restaurant, is a key player in the drama.)

The story unfolds with the crushing inevitability – and disgusting surprises – of ancient Greek drama. Different feelings of guilt slowly seep out from the Sagittarius to encompass even seemingly impeccable characters. A weapon was accidentally provided; suspicious behavior was not reported; a boy was mercilessly bullied and attacked.

This is not an unknown plot, and like any great opera, “Innocence” would appear flat if its text were delivered as a play. It is thanks to the music that it has brooding nuances instead; the varieties of utterance; Saariaho’s suggestion, though it gives a clear story, that there is much more than what is being said. The opera here is still a home for emotions that can seem flat, implausible, extreme, but are now mysterious and natural.

“Innocence” also gains depth from the politics and history from which it emerged. When you watch events of this kind happen in and around an international school during this period, it is difficult not to think of Europe itself and its formation as a Union in the wake of unspeakable violence. There was a dream that trauma would prove unifying; we have gradually come to realize that the opposite is the case. In the transition from earlier times – mother tongues and folk songs – to the lingua franca of English and musical modernity, this stage company seems to have gained little. Certainly not the ability to fully integrate new members, to function.

But the last moments of the opera are not without a certain hopeless hope. Students describe small steps they took to overcome tragedy; the daughter’s vision prompts the waitress not to buy her birthday presents anymore, to let them go. The music simmers sadly, but the dissonance runs through a sublime moment of consonance – around the sunshine – before it drifts back into tension and then fades up into pure shimmer, almost tonelessly. So it is through both the music and beyond the music that Saariaho comes to an end that, if not happy, is oddly completely exhilarating.

innocence

Until July 12th at the Festival of Aix-en-Provence, France; and livestream on arte.tv July 10th; festival-aix.com.

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Wayne Peterson, Pulitzer Prize-Profitable Composer, Dies at 93

Wayne Peterson, Pulitzer Prize-Winning Composer, Dies at 93

Wayne Peterson, a prolific composer whose winning 1992 Pulitzer Prize sparked the debate over whether the best judges of music were the experts or the average listener, died in San Francisco on April 7th. He was 93 years old.

His son Grant confirmed the death in a hospital that he said came just seven weeks after that of Mr. Peterson’s decade-long companion, Ruth Knier.

Mr. Peterson won the Pulitzer for his composition “The Face of the Night, the Heart of Darkness”, but it was only after the 19-member Pulitzer Committee rejected the advice of the three-member music jury that Ralph Sheay’s “Concerto Fantastique” received the award.

The jury consisted of composers who had the opportunity to study the scores of the works under consideration, while the members of the committee, mainly journalists, had no particular musical expertise. The dedusting began when the jury’s recommendation to the committee only presented one piece, Mr. Shapey’s, and not the usual three candidates.

The committee returned the recommendation and requested at least one more name. When the jury responded with the work of Mr. Shapey and Mr. Peterson and indicated that Mr. Shapey’s work was the first choice, the committee awarded the award to Mr. Peterson instead. The judges responded with a sharply worded complaint, which in part said: “Such changes by a committee with no professional musical expertise, if continued, will guarantee a regrettable devaluation of this uniquely important award.”

The incident sparked considerable contemplation as to whether experts or a more general body should determine the winner of the music award, an issue the Pulitzers previously faced in other genres. The argument was puzzling because, as the New York Times music critics later wrote, it wasn’t necessarily that Mr. Peterson’s work was more listener-friendly than Mr. Shapey’s – both men wrote atonal works. Some authors suggested that it was simply the Pulitzer Committee, which reiterated its dominance over the jury.

In any event, the controversy put Mr. Peterson in an awkward position because he knew the judges who had objected to the decision and because he showed admiration for Mr. Shapey’s work.

“He would have been thrilled to finish second,” said Grant Peterson.

“There was no bad blood,” he added. “It was just kind of crap because he didn’t do it.”

Mr Peterson himself admitted that the argument left him with mixed feelings.

“I had submitted the work as a lark and I didn’t think I had any remote chance of winning at all,” he told The Times in 1992. “I’ve won other awards, but the Pulitzer’s prestige is greater than that.” that of the others. The controversy made it a little different. I just hope the Pall that cast it doesn’t jeopardize what the Pulitzer could mean to get my music into circulation. “

Grant Peterson said the episode turned out to be a plus in that regard – the award increased his father’s notoriety and earned him more lucrative jobs.

Wayne Turner Peterson was born on September 3, 1927 in Albert Lea, Minnesota. His father, Leslie, was “a victim of the Depression,” he told The Associated Press in 1992, who “jumped from one thing to another”. ;; His mother, Irma (Turner) Peterson, died when he was young, and he lived with his grandmother afterwards, his son said.

His musical skills, which he said came from his mother’s side, showed up early on.

“I was very interested in jazz piano and was a professional jazz musician from the age of 15,” he said. “I made my way through college playing jazz, three degrees from the University of Minnesota” – a bachelor’s, master’s, and doctoral degree, all of which were earned in the 1950s.

In 1960 he became professor of music at San Francisco State University, where he taught composition for more than 30 years. He was living in San Francisco when he died.

Mr. Peterson’s career as a composer began in 1958 with the performance of his “Free Variations” by the Minnesota Orchestra. He composed for orchestras, chamber ensembles and other, sometimes unusual, groups. “And the Winds Shall Blow”, which premiered in Germany in 1994, was described as a fantasy “for saxophone quartet, wind instruments and percussion”. There was also his duo for viola and violoncello.

“The duo is a nervous, effectively written piece, filled with dark melodies that are well suited to these lower string instruments. It reaches a quick and exciting climax,” wrote Michael Kimmelman in The Times when the work was on 92nd Street in 1988 Y was listed.

Mr. Peterson felt it was important for a composer to hear the works of others across a broad spectrum.

“I don’t limit myself to a group of composers,” he told The San Francisco Chronicle in 1991. “I try to hear everything and when I hear something I like it gets distilled in my psyche and comes out somewhere in my music. “

His love for jazz found its way into his compositions, including “The Face of the Night, the Heart of Darkness”.

“There’s a lot of syncopation that can be associated with jazz,” he said of the work, “but it’s not a jazz piece.”

It was premiered by the San Francisco Symphony in October 1991. George Perle, the chairman of the Pulitzer jury who recommended the Shapely piece, endeavored to praise Mr. Peterson’s composition despite the controversy.

“It’s absolutely worthy of a Pulitzer Prize,” he said in 1992. “But the Pulitzer Prize is supposed to be for the best job of the year, and on that occasion we felt there was one job that was more impressive.” ”

Even Mr Shapey, who died in 2002 and was known for being open-minded, came to view his missed award with a touch of humor.

“A Chicago critic called me ‘Ralph Shapey the Non-Pulitzer Prize Winner,'” he told The Times in 1996. “You have to put that on my tombstone.”

Mr. Peterson’s marriage to Harriet Christensen ended in divorce in the 1970s. In addition to his son Grant, three other sons, Alan, Craig and Drew, as well as two grandchildren survive.

Grant Peterson said that since his father’s death he had looked through his papers and marveled at his productivity – not just about his 80 or so finished compositions, but also the countless fragments.

“There is the stuff that is bound and ready and released,” he said, “but mixed in with it is the chicken scratch on yellow tablets. The guy was a music machine.”

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Pauline Anna Strom, Composer of Enduring Digital Sounds, Dies at 74

Pauline Anna Strom, Composer of Enduring Electronic Sounds, Dies at 74

Ms. Strom did not address her blindness (“Blindness is more of a nuisance to me than anything,” she once said), although mastering her synthesizers was an experimental process, since in the 1980s when the instruments were still relatively new ‘There were no user manuals for the blind. Ultimately, she thought, her poor eyesight made her music worse.

“In my opinion, my hearing and my inner visualization have developed to a higher level than might otherwise have been the case,” she said in 1986 in a rare interview in her early career to the publication Eurock, also technical standpoint. It is entirely possible to program synthesizers and effects devices, precisely record your own work, and use a mixer. I do all of this with sound. “

“Indeed,” she added, “I prefer to work in the dark.”

Pauline Anna Tuell was born on October 1, 1946 in Baton Rouge, La., The daughter of Paul and Marjorie (Landry) Tuell. Growing up in Kentucky in a Roman Catholic household, she said chants and other types of church music influenced her musical ideas, as did the works of Bach, Chopin, and others.

She was married twice, to Bob Strom and then to Kevin Bierl, but the dates of these marriages and how they ended, like many details of their life, are hard to come by. She moved to San Francisco when her husband – it is unclear which one – was stationed there during the military. Withdrawn by nature, she lived in the same apartment in San Francisco for decades. (“Thank goodness this town is in control of the rent,” she told the listentothis.info website in 2018.)

Her early musical endeavors included some do-it-yourself sound effects like in “Emerald Pool,” but she gradually became more adept at using the multiple synthesizers she had accumulated to get the sound she wanted. She was influenced by the work of the German band Tangerine Dream and the German composer Klaus Schulze, pioneers of electronic music.

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Elias Rahbani, Lebanese Composer Who Sought New Sounds, Dies at 82

Elias Rahbani, Lebanese Composer Who Sought New Sounds, Dies at 82

On the Friday evening before the coronavirus hit Beirut, a pulsating crowd of partygoers stomped on the roof of a warehouse overlooking the harbor, dancing retro and fresh to music at the same time. His beat was unstoppable, his sound a mixture of lush Arabic diva melody, French pop from the 1960s and disco.

The musical mix did not require modern adjustments by a DJ. It was just another Elias Rahbani experiment.

From the 1960s to 1980s, Mr Rahbani, a Lebanese composer and lyricist who died of Covid-19 on January 4 at the age of 82, wrote instant classics for the Arab world’s most popular singers, commercial jingles, political anthems, movie soundtracks and Music for underground and experimental Arab artists.

The Rahbani sound was omnipresent. Many Lebanese people remember the jingles he wrote for picon cheese or Rayovac batteries, or the love themes he composed in 1974 for popular TV shows and films such as “Habibati” (“My Beloved”). His style changed often: he was one of the first composers to combine western electric instruments with traditional Arabic and combine western genres – prog rock, funk, R&B – with traditional Lebanese dabke folk dance music.

“His music is engraved in the memory of all Lebanese,” said Ernesto Chahoud, a Lebanese DJ who runs the Beirut Groove Collective, which hosted the camp parties. “He’s made great Arabic music, great Lebanese music, and at the same time he’s done all these western styles. That’s why it’s timeless. That’s why a lot of people want to hear his music today. “

He was never the face of the songs, unlike the celebrities he wrote for, including Fayrouz, the legendary Lebanese singer with the passed out voice, or Sabah, the film and music star with the golden hair. Along with his older brothers Mansour and Assi Rahbani – the musical duo of the Rahbani brothers – Elias Rahbani was popular among Lebanon’s political, religious and class divisions.

Still, he had ambitions that exceeded the borders of tiny Lebanon. One of his sons, Ghassan, said Mr Rahbani nearly signed a contract with a French company in 1976 that would have given him a wider audience and perhaps greater control over the rights to his music. it would also have meant moving to France. However, at the last minute he was overtaken by an onslaught of fondness for his country and decided not to sign.

Updated

Jan. 26, 2021, 7:36 ET

“My father lived with regret for the rest of his life,” said Ghassan Rahbani. Mr Rahbani died in a hospital in Beirut, his family said.

When he rejected the French treaty, Lebanon had just gotten into civil war. Hundreds of thousands of people died in the fighting from 1975 to 1990. When it became too dangerous for Mr. Rahbani to travel to his usual studio in Beirut, he set up a makeshift facility in his apartment north of the city. He later evacuated to a rental property further north.

But he stayed productive.

Mr. Rahbani produced more than 6,000 tunes, said Mr. Chahoud. He wrote for pop stars; He wrote for an Armenian-Lebanese band, The News, who rode Mr. Rahbani’s psychedelic rock compositions to gain international recognition. He has written for political parties across the spectrum, including the Baathist Party of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.

When asked about his political sympathies, he refused to be labeled. “I am above all, and everyone comes to me,” he once said, according to his son Ghassan.

Elias Hanna Rahbani was born on June 26, 1938 in Antelias, Lebanon, north of Beirut, to Hanna Assi Rahbani, a restaurant owner, and Saada Saab Rahbani, a housewife. The elder Mr. Rahbani played the bouzok, a lutel-like instrument. He died when Elias was 5 years old.

Elias Rahbani told Mr. Chahoud that he started playing the piano as a child after hearing hymns from the monastery near his family home. He became a pianist, but an injury to his right thumb forced him to switch to composing at the age of 19, said his son Ghassan. He finally got his big break while working for Radio Lebanon and writing songs for the singer Sabah.

Mr. Rahbani often worked with his older brothers who became famous for having written much of Fayrouz’s music. Although Mr. Rahbani wrote for many mainstream artists, he increasingly experimented with new sounds from around the world and often provided the material that helped kick-start the careers of little-known Lebanese bands and singers. Funk, French-Arabic, Latin American music, psychedelic rock and the French pop yé-yé all influenced his work.

In the 1970s, Mr. Rahbani was one of the first musicians to introduce western drums, electric guitars and synthesizers to Arabic music and use them in albums such as the traditional oud (which also resembles a lute) and the durbakke (a small hand drum) one inserted “Mosaic of the Orient.” Mr Chahoud said tracks on the album had been sampled far outside Lebanon, including by the Black Eyed Peas.

In recent years, Western-influenced Arabic music from Mr. Rahbani’s time has become popular in clubs and on internet radio in the Middle East and beyond. It is often played by DJs browsing vintage record and tape archives to find and promote songs by lesser known artists. well-known Arab artists.

But in Lebanon, Mr. Rahbani never left the soundtrack.

Hwaida Saad contributed to the coverage.

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Tyshawn Sorey: The Busiest Composer of the Bleakest 12 months

Tyshawn Sorey: The Busiest Composer of the Bleakest Year

“Everything changes, nothing changes”: Tyshawn Sorey wrote the string quartet that bears this title in 2018. But the feeling is so tailor-made for the past year that when the JACK quartet announced they would be streaming a performance of the work in December. I forgot for a moment and assumed that it was a premiere made for these turbulent but static times.

I should have known better. Mr. Sorey already had enough on his plate without cooking a new quartet. In the last two months of 2020 alone, two concert-like works were premiered, one for violin and one for cello, as well as a new repetition of “Autoschediasms”, his series of conducted ensemble improvisations with Alarm Will Sound.

That wasn’t all that has happened to him since November. Mills College, where Mr. Sorey works as composer in residence, has streamed his solo piano set. Opera Philadelphia shot a stark black and white version of its “Cycles of My Being” song sequence about black masculinity and racial hatred. JACK did “Everything Changes” for the Library of Congress, along with the violin solo “For Conrad Tao”. Da Camera from Houston put a performance of “Perle Noire” online in 2016, a tribute to Josephine Baker, which Mr. Sorey arranged with soprano Julia Bullock. His last album, “Unfiltered”, was released in early March, days before the lockdown.

He was the composer of the year.

Both of these are coincidental – part of this work was planned a long time ago – and not. Mr Sorey has been on everyone’s lips at least since winning a MacArthur Genius Scholarship in 2017, but the shock to the performing arts since late winter suddenly put him at the center of the music industry’s artistic and social concerns as an artist.

Indefinable, he speaks to almost everyone. He works on the blurred and productive boundary between improvised (“jazz”) and notated (“classical”) music, a composer who is also a performer. Because of his versatility he is valuable for ensembles and institutions – he can play both dark solos and great vocal works. And he’s black at a time when these ensembles and institutions are desperately trying to belatedly address racist representation in their program.

He is so in demand and has had so much success that the trolls came for him and dragged him onto Facebook to exaggerate the bio on his website. (Granted, it’s a bit adjective: “celebrated for its unparalleled virtuosity, effortless mastery”, etc.)

The style for which he has been best known since his 2007 album “That / Not”, his debut as a band leader, owes a lot to the composer Morton Feldman (1926-87): economical, spacious, icy, often quiet, but often threatening, focusing the listener only on the development of the music. Mr. Sorey has called this vision that of an “imaginary landscape in which pretty much nothing exists”.

There is a direct connection between Permutations for Solo Piano, a 43-minute study of calm resonance on this 2007 album, and the first of the two improvised solos in his most recent Mills recital, which was filmed on a piano at his home has been. Even the much shorter second solo, more frenetic and brighter, seems to want to settle down in gloomy shadows at the end.

“Everything Changes, Nothing Changes”, a floating, slightly dissonant 27-minute gauze, is in this sense, as is the new work for violin and orchestra “For Marcos Balter”, which premiered on November 7th by Jennifer Koh and the Detroit became a symphony orchestra. In a program note, Mr. Sorey insists that this is a “non-certo” without the overt virtuosity of a traditional concert, the contrasting tempo or the lively interplay between soloist and ensemble.

“For Marcos Balter” is a steady, steadily slow keel, more of a community of players than a metaphorical give and take between an individual and society. Ms. Koh’s intentionally long tones, such as careful exhalation, have a spectral effect on the marimba. Soft piano chords reinforce soft string chords. At the end, a drum roll is muted so that it almost sounds like a gong. Mrs. Koh’s violin trembles copper-colored over it.

It’s flawless and elegant, but I prefer Mr. Sorey’s new cello and orchestral piece, “For Roscoe Mitchell,” which premiered on November 19th by Seth Parker Woods and the Seattle Symphony Orchestra. Here there is more tension between discreet, uncomfortable minimalism and an impulse for opulence, fullness – more tension between the receding soloist and his opinion.

The piece is less flawless than “Für Marcos Balter” and more restless. The ensemble backdrop consists of crystal clear, misty sighs, while the solo cello line expands to melancholy arias without words. sometimes the tone is passionate, dark colored nocturne, sometimes an ethereal lullaby. “For Roscoe Mitchell” feels like a composer who challenges himself and expresses himself confidently – testing the balance between introversion and extroversion, privacy and exposure.

But it is not right to make it appear an outlier in this regard; Mr. Sorey’s music was never just field manic silence. In Alarm Will Sound’s inspirationally well-executed virtual performance of “Autoschediasms,” Mr. Sorey video-chatted 17 players in five states quietly at his desk while writing symbols on cards and holding them in front of the camera, an obscure silent language that This resulted in a low hum of sounds differing in texture and then excitingly a spatial, oozy section characterized by sharp bassoon tones.

And he’s not afraid of falling into some kind of neo-romantic mood. “Cycles of My Being” with tenor Lawrence Brownlee and lyrics by poet Terrance Hayes nods to the passionately declarative mid-20th century American art songs of Samuel Barber and Lee Hoiby, as does “Perle Noire” near the end of a sweet sad instrumental anthem from Copland.

“Cycles,” which felt bulging in a voice-and-piano version three years ago, blossomed in Opera Philadelphia’s presentation of the original instrumentation, which adds a few energetic strings and a plaintive clarinet. And after a year of protests, what seemed like stiffness in both lyrics and music in 2018 seems to be more relentless now. (Opera Philadelphia presents another Sorey premiere, “Save the Boys,” with countertenor John Holiday on February 12th.)

“Perle Noire” still seems like Sorey’s best. Josephine Baker’s lively numbers turn into unresolved meditations. There’s both a polite, jazzy swing here and an icy expanse, an exploration of race and identity that is ultimately undecided – a mood of endless disappointment and endless desire. (“My father, how long”, Mrs. Bullock intones again and again towards the end.)

In works like this, the extravagant praise that some have ripped Mr. Sorey for on social media – like this bio or the JACK quartet that praises “the precision of Sorey’s chess mastery” – feels justified. And isn’t it a relief to speak of a 40-year-old composer with the immeasurable enthusiasm we generally reserve for the pillars of the classical canon?

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Harold Budd, Composer of Spaciousness and Calm, Dies at 84

Harold Budd, Composer of Spaciousness and Calm, Dies at 84

John Cage also had an influence, but less on his music than on his ideas and courage to forge a career outside the academy. Works like “Magnus Colorado” (1969) and the 24-hour program “Lirio” (1971) included reverberant gongs and controlled lighting, fusing Mr. Budd’s compositional ideas with his interest in visual art and installation. For “The Oak of the Golden Dream” (1970), Mr. Budd used the Buchla Box, an early synthesizer, to combine an imperturbable bass drone with an evocative high-altitude melody reminiscent of Terry Riley’s early works.

Gripped by a growing sense of sterility in the classical avant-garde while teaching composition at the California Institute of the Arts from 1970 to 1976, Mr. Budd retired from public work. privately, he explored the distinct melodic simplicity that he found in music of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance.

His composition “Madrigals des Rosenengel” (1972) was the hour of birth of his mature style. A recording of the piece reached Mr. Eno, whose own thinking about music, listening and atmosphere merged into what he would call “ambient” music – one of many labels including “New Age” that Mr. Budd opposed. “I’m just not interested in this at all,” he said in a 2014 interview with The Guardian of such categorization.

Despite the break with previous work, some of Mr. Budd’s early influences remained. On his album “The Pavilion of Dreams” the alto saxophonist Marion Brown could be seen, a colleague of John Coltrane. It contained the hymn “Let’s go into the house of the Lord” with an arrangement inspired by that of Coltrane acolyte Pharoah Sanders, and “Butterfly Sunday”, a rework of Coltrane’s “After the Rain”. Other collaborators on the album were the English experimental composers Michael Nyman and Gavin Bryars.

From this point on, and especially after “Ambient 2: The Plateau of Mirrors”, Mr. Budd set a course that seldom fluctuated, but still offered plenty of variety and discovery. He performed alone and with groups, recorded with poets and wrote his own poems and made two albums of improvisations with video artist Jane Maru.

Mr. Budd is survived by two sons, Matthew and Terrence, from his first marriage to Paula Katzman; and another son, Hugo, from his marriage to Ellen Wirth, who died in 2012. Mr. Budd’s brother and stepsister died before him. He lived in South Pasadena, California.