Tag: Composers

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When Europe Supplied Black Composers an Ear

When Europe Offered Black Composers an Ear

Running the festival was not an easy task. It involved translating dozen of black American art songs from English into German. In addition, historical negligence shaped which scores and voices the orchestra and singers were able to find. “This music has been forgotten,” said conductor Roderick Cox of William Dawson’s “Negro Folk Symphony”. “It was neglected; They couldn’t get access to this music through the publishers; the parts were in ruins. “

In fact, Dawson’s Symphony – once hailed as a brilliant success – rested in the United States for decades. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the only recent recording of it was made in Vienna.

But praising Europe for providing a platform for the music of black American composers leaves out an important part of the story. White European support and advocacy for black American musicians has often come at the expense of their own black populations. As many black European intellectuals and activists have pointed out, do Europeans know the names of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and Trayvon Martin, but do they know the names of Oury Jalloh, Stephen Lawrence and Jerry Masslo?

Renowned music institutes such as Darmstadt in Germany have rarely invited black composers to join their international communities, or given German-based black composers such as Robert Owens and Benjamin Patterson their rights. In the city of Hamburg with a black population from the 19th summer were almost entirely white.

Europe has been lax in promoting its own historical black composers and musicians such as George Bridgetower, Amanda Aldridge, Chevalier de Saint-Georges, and Avril Coleridge-Taylor. Many of the recent high profile performances by black European performers and composers can be attributed more to the Chineke Orchestra in England – Europe’s first ensemble with a majority of colored musicians – than to white European music institutions. Other black European composers such as Werner Jaegerhuber, a Haitian-German composer who lived in Germany from 1915 until his escape from the Nazis in 1937, have not yet received significant European attention.

Recognizing black composers on every stage puts pressure on institutions to grapple with their racist past and envision a better future. Nearly a century apart, Rudolph Dunbar’s performance of Still’s Afro-American Symphony and Roderick Cox’s of Dawson’s Negro Folk Symphony suggest that efforts to promote racial justice go hand in hand with commitment to the power of music to use. Performing the music of black composers is not easy or just an opportunity to correct historical errors. It should also not be considered equivalent to eating your proverbial broccoli. Rather, it is an invitation to the most exquisite dishes. Fighting for the music of black composers means fighting for a better world.

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Asian Composers Replicate on Careers in Western Classical Music

Asian Composers Reflect on Careers in Western Classical Music

Asian composers who write in Western classical musical forms, like symphonies and operas, tend to have a few things in common. Many learned European styles from an early age, and finished their studies at conservatories there or in the United States. And many later found themselves relegated to programming ghettos like Lunar New Year concerts. (One recent study found that works by Asian composers make up only about 2 percent of American orchestral performances planned for the coming season.)

At times, the music of Asian composers has been misunderstood or exoticized; they have been subjected to simple errors such as, in the case of Huang Ruo, who was born in China, repeated misspellings of his name.

For all their shared experiences, each of these artists has a unique story. Here, five of them provide a small sampling of the lessons, struggles and triumphs of composers who were born in Asia and made a career for themselves in Western classical music. These are edited excerpts from interviews with them.

Music is my language. To me “West” and “East” are just ways of talking — or like ways of cooking. I’m a chef, and sometimes I find my recipe is like my orchestrations. It would be so boring if you asked me to cook in one style. Eastern and Western, then, have for me become a unique recipe in which one plus one equals one.

I am in a very special zone historically. I’m 63, and part of the first generation of Eastern composers after the Cultural Revolution to deal with Western forms. But it’s just like rosemary, butter and vegetables. You can cook this way, that way — and that’s why the same orchestras sound so different, from Debussy to Stravinsky to myself.

I’m lucky. When I came to the United States as a student, my teachers and classmates gave me enormous encouragement to discover myself. And I learned so much from John Cage. After this, it felt so easy to compose. And when people approach me for commissions, I re-approach them about what I’m thinking about. I remember when Kurt Masur asked me to write something for the New York Philharmonic — the Water Concerto for Water Percussion and Orchestra — I said, “Can I write something for water?” He said, “As long as you don’t flood our orchestra.”

Yes, we often are misunderstood. It’s like when you cook beautiful black bean with chili sauce and chocolate. They may say, “Hey, this is a little strange.” But you explain why, and that can be very interesting. Thank God I love to talk. And there has been progress for us. I am the first Eastern composer to be the dean of a Western conservatory, at Bard. That’s like a Chinese chef becoming the chef of an Italian restaurant. That’s the future: a different way of approaching color, boundary-less, a unity of the soul.

One thing about composers like Tan Dun: They came out of the Cultural Revolution, after a door had closed for so many years. So there was so much focus on what China was doing, a lot of curiosity — curiosity rather than active racism. Our generation — I’m 44 — is so different.

We learn Western music with such rigorous systems. And we do not close our ears to different traditions or styles; that attitude determines early on that you don’t have that kind of boundary, or ownership. But you still hear those conversation topics about “East meets West.” It’s so tiring. East has been meeting West for thousands of years; if we’re always still just meeting, that’s a problem.

Programming Chinese composers around Lunar New Year is in general very problematic. Do we need to celebrate the culture? Yes. Do we need to celebrate the tradition? Absolutely. But it can be part of the main subscription series, or a yearlong series. Then you can really tell stories, not just group people by a country.

My name does not give me ownership of Chinese culture. There are so many things I don’t know. There are so many burdens and fights — as the woman, the woman of color, the Chinese woman — that I decided to fight nothing and just create my own stuff. I told myself that if I had a great body of work, that would speak to what a Chinese woman can do.

I never wanted to be pigeonholed, to be a reduced representation. I wanted to always open that Pandora’s box of messiness — and I encourage others to celebrate messiness, the unclean narrative of your life. Every immigrant has her own path; your work should absolutely be reflective of that. So if I’m a spokesperson, it’s for my own voice. And through that particular voice, I hope there is something that resonates.

When I left China, it was a time of economic and cultural reform. I’m glad I came to the United States, but I do have a little bit of guilt. I probably could have done more there. At the time, my ambition was to try to learn Western music and become the best composer, pianist and conductor I could be. I was fortunate to work with many fantastic musicians and meet Leonard Bernstein, who took me under his wing for five years. Now, at 65, when someone asks me if I consider myself a Chinese or American composer, I say, in the most humble way, “100 percent both.” I feel well-versed in both cultures.

Occasionally, there has been racism and misunderstanding, but that is inevitable. Would that be different if there were more Asian people running orchestras? Maybe. My response has just been to try to produce the best music I can. I wrote an opera for San Francisco Opera — “Dream of the Red Chamber,” which they’re reviving. It’s based on a very popular Chinese story, and when I worked on it with David Henry Hwang, we asked ourselves: “Is this for a Western audience or Asian audience?” We decided first and foremost it should just be good, and it had to be touching. Good art should transcend.

Years ago, I wrote an orchestral piece, “H’un (Lacerations),” which premiered at the 92nd Street Y in New York. It is about my recollections growing up during the Cultural Revolution, and is thus sonically harsh and dramatic, with no melody. My mother was there, and she said it brought back a lot of painful memories. I was also sitting next to an old Jewish woman, and after I took a bow onstage, she leaned over and said, “If you changed the title to ‘Auschwitz,’ this would be just as appropriate.” That was the highest compliment.

The Korea of my childhood and adolescence was a very different place from what it is today. In the 1960s, it was an impoverished developing country, devastated by colonialism and by the Korean War, and until the late 1980s, there was a military dictatorship in place. In order to develop as a composer, one had to go abroad, as there didn’t exist an infrastructure for new music. Now 60, and having lived for 35 years in Europe, it remains important for me to contribute to the contemporary music scene in Asia.

When I moved to Germany, there was a tendency to put composers in certain boxes, with all the aesthetic turf wars back then. Since I was neither interested in joining any camp or fashionable avant-garde or other trends, fulfilling exotic expectations, or assumptions of how a woman should or should not compose, I had to start a career in other countries while still living in Germany. Prejudices such as viewing an Asian composer or performing musician only through “sociological” lenses are still relatively common in various countries, but times are changing. Of course, there exist prejudices and complacency in the whole world, including in Asia. Perhaps the only remedy to this apparently, and sadly, all-too-human impulse is try to retain a sense of wonder and attempt to find distance to oneself.

I have worked in different countries for decades, and have felt a need to stay curious about different musical cultures, traditions and genres. I believe in multiple identities and think that without curiosity, any musical style or culture atrophies and risks becoming a museum: Art has always thrived when there has been cross-fertilization.

At the same time, one should be wary of the danger of exoticism and superficial cultural appropriation. I think that a contemporary composer needs to study different cultures, traditions and genres, but make use of those influences in a selective, historically conscious and self-critical manner.

When people heard I came from China, they would often say, “Does your music sound like Tan Dun?” I don’t think they meant any harm, but it shows a certain ignorance. I tried to explain that China is a big country, and we all speak with our own voice.

I started as an instrumental composer, and a lot of those works got programmed at Asian-themed or Lunar New Year concerts. I didn’t notice at first, but you begin to see patterns. I don’t feel my work has any less quality than my other colleagues who are not minority composers, but for conductors, programmers and artistic directors, it doesn’t seem to come to their mind that you can naturally program an Asian composer’s work next to Beethoven or Tchaikovsky.

That’s one of the reasons I turned to opera. I thought, there must be no opera company having a themed season devoted to Asian composers. So finally, I got to be programmed next to “Fidelio” and “Madama Butterfly.” That was my revenge. Also, I’ve wanted to write on subjects that reflect Asian or Asian American topics, to really share these stories. In this case it is actually me making the choice.

Someone once told me I speak English with an accent. I said, “Otherwise, how would you know that’s me speaking?” I feel the same way as a composer. I want to have my own originality, to speak with my own accent — with my love of Western musical styles, but also this heritage I carry of Chinese culture.

Without coming to the United States, I would be a different composer. If I went to Europe instead, I would also be very different. But I feel I made the right decision, and at 44 I fully embrace who I am today, and where I am as well.

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The Enduring Enchantment of Italian Composers’ Dramatic ‘Library Music’

The Enduring Appeal of Italian Composers’ Dramatic ‘Library Music’

One day in the summer of 2011, Lorenzo Fabrizi and a friend drove to an abandoned warehouse far outside Rome. The building’s manager, who said he bought it for around $ 100, let her in to see the contents: 10,000 vinyl LPs, by Fabrizi’s estimate. They were allowed to take as much as they wanted, said the owner; he brewed beer in the room and had no use for it.

Fabrizi was just beginning his career as a lover of rare records. This collection, previously owned by Radio Vaticana (the station owned by the Vatican), was undesirable by almost everyone in Italy at the time. But Fabrizi found something he’d never seen before: “library” music – obscure records with songs written directly for radio, television, or ad placement, in this case the lavish, string-laden, funk and jazz-informed arrangements Italian composers trained in classical music.

“When I started, there was no interest in this stuff,” Fabrizi said on a recent Zoom call from Rome, where he has been running the reissue label Sonor Music Editions since 2013. “They had printed 200, 300, 500, 1,000 copies, but they weren’t intended for stores or dealerships. They were only given to internal circles of music supervisors, journalists and people who worked on television. “

Sonor is one of several labels that have revived Italian classics from the European library genre in recent decades (in July, Nico Fidenco’s lost soundtrack for the 1977 film “Emmanuelle in America” and Sandro Brugnoli’s “Utopia” will be released). From the 1960s to the 1980s, there was a lot of money to be made with topics: TV and radio producers needed music for opening credits, action or love scenes, game show sequences or advertising. Well-trained composers had access to large ensembles and budgets, and the Italians in particular swung for the fences.

“You listen to a lot of this stuff and laugh because you think this was recorded on extremely expensive equipment, and there’s no way they thought this topic would work in a movie,” said Mike Wallace, a Collector in San Diego who produced a compilation of the works of the Italian composer Piero Umiliani in 2017. “It’s just too outside.”

The most recent album by producer and composer Adrian Younge “The American Negro” contains similar orchestral flourishes over crisp backbeats. “It was like asking classically trained musicians to do modern black music, but for Europe, so you would have these crazy orchestrations, but it still gets funky,” said Younge. “They had a lot more leeway because they weren’t making this music for a specific audience,” he added. “So if they needed something dramatic, they could just do the weirdest [expletive] and wouldn’t have to deal with someone who says, ‘This is not pop enough.’ “

Since it had no commercial life, the work of many talented composers was hidden for years. But in the late 1990s, labels like Easy Tempo began to reissue soundtracks and compilations of the Italian works. By adding these decade-old nuggets to the Venn diagram of hip-hop producers, record collectors, and fans of the short-lived lounge revival, it created a wave.

Ennio Morricone, the composer best known for his dramatic scores for the so-called “spaghetti westerns” such as “The Good, the Bad and the Ugly”, was the greatest of this era of Italian music. But as collectors started digging up the recordings of Umiliani, Brugnoli and Alessandro Alessandroni, the source of talent from Italy seemed much deeper.

The rampant experimentalism of the Italian library catalog must also be examined in the context of its epoch. The late 1960s to early 1980s – known as “anni di piombo” or “years of leadership” – were full of turmoil between left, right-wing and neo-fascist demonstrators in Italy. “It was devastating,” said Fabrizi. “There were people who shot in the streets, clashes with the police.” While these composers were locked in studios, the fantastic sounds they made were like portals to another world.

In this tense atmosphere, Italy’s composers also listened to the music of black Americans. Classic rock of the era was influenced by innovators like Robert Johnson, Howlin ‘Wolf, and Chuck Berry; Boundaries were pushed by Miles Davis, Thelonious Monk, and Charles Mingus; and funk and R&B simmered on labels like Stax and Motown. And then of course there were Blaxploitation movie soundtracks like “Shaft” and “Superfly”.

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“In the late 1950s to early 1970s, black music moved to the fore in cinemas. European composers, Italian composers took this sound and synthesized it with their classical teachings, ”said Younge. “And that created a musical palette that generations later inspired hip-hop producers trying to find the coolest samples. For many of us it became a treasure trove. “

For the character-based narratives of hip-hop, a genre built on finding loops from records few had heard, these compositions were practically begging. The prolific producer Madlib was one of the first to try an Italian library record for a large audience on his 2000 album Quasimoto “The Unseen”. Cut Chemist used a track from Alessandroni’s most famous release “Open Air Parade” on his 2006 LP “The Audience’s Listening”. When the Italians became known, a collectors arms race began.

“I was very obsessed with Morricone and started buying a lot of his records and then you find guys like Bruno Nicolai, Alessandroni, Riz Ortolani,” said Sven Wunder, 37, a musician from Stockholm, whose new album “Natura Morta “, Which appears on Friday, is one of the closest modern equivalents to the Italian library work. “It feels like every record freak ends up in the library at some point.”

Wunder’s first two albums, “Eastern Flowers” ​​and “Wabi Sabi” from last year, reflect the influence of Middle Eastern composers and Japanese jazz, but “Natura Morta” is a clear nod to the Italian library pool. It was mainly written during the pandemic and contains the sluggish rhythmic pulse of these 1970s classics, crowned by a 15-piece string section. (“It should be 16, but we didn’t get the right number of meters between all the players,” said Wunder about the socially distant recording session. “The double bass players had to leave.”

“Natura Morta”, which is sold and promoted in the USA by the Rappcats webshop by Eothen Alapatt (owner of the reissue label Now-Again Records) and the label Light in the Attic, is full of sensual flute, clinking Fender Rhodes solos and long melodies doubled on a 12-string guitar and harpsichord. It’s delicate, stirring music – and also something most independent artists would find difficult to afford in 2021. (It was created with the help of a grant from the Swedish government.)

Alapatt praised the album as an innovation: “They’ve been trying to figure out how to make it both homage and non-derivative.”

Most of the composers whose works Fabrizi has presented to new audiences are no longer alive and more music is being discovered; Sonor will release another Alessandroni soundtrack this summer. A major challenge, said Fabrizi, is in the business area. When larger labels consolidated their catalogs in the last few decades, the library works got lost in the mess.

“It’s insanely difficult” dealing with the major labels, he said, implying that library music is not a priority for them. “The problem is, they don’t know they own it. They don’t know because they don’t have the documents. They don’t have any original contracts. “

But collectors like Wallace find a thrill in the hunt for what’s buried in these vaults. “One thing that is very frustrating about this, but also really fun, is that we learn new things every day,” he said. “We know more than we did five years ago. We know more than last year. “

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Love Classical Music? Anthony Tommasini Recommends Modern Composers

Love Classical Music? Anthony Tommasini Recommends Contemporary Composers

Gilbert asks: I have to say when I hear you describe these performances I miss the size of a concert hall as much as I miss the size of a movie screen. Part of experiencing art outside of my home is the potential to be overwhelmed, and as many speakers I have or as big as my TV, it obviously doesn’t feel that way. I’ve only really started watching live classical music in the last three or four years. You have been doing this for much longer and I have to imagine that the longing is deeper.

You recently wrote a wonderful piece, Notes Toward Reinventing the American Orchestra, which is full of clever suggestions on how classical music organizations could change after the pandemic. What don’t you want to change

Tony replies: Ah, what I don’t want to change about classical music, which in my opinion will never change, is the pure sensual pleasure, even ecstasy, in the sound of a large orchestra, a fine string quartet, a radiant soprano. And to experience that you have to experience this art form live.

As a child I got to know countless pieces through recordings. And during the pandemic, it often feels like we just have recordings. When I was growing up, I was enthusiastic about the pianist Rudolf Serkin and the New York Philharmonic under Bernstein in the Carnegie Hall in Beethoven’s mighty “Emperor” concert. and as a young teenager having a standing ticket to hear the famous soprano Renata Tebaldi in her voluptuous voice as Desdemona in Verdi’s “Otello” at the Metropolitan Opera; or a little later, when I hear Leontyne Price’s soft, sustained high notes rise up in “Aida” and surround me on a balcony seat in the Met. I only vaguely knew what these operas were about. I didn’t care.

And what I say also applies to more intimate music. Only when you hear a great string quartet performing works by Haydn, Shostakovich or Bartok in a hall with only a few hundred seats do you really understand what makes “chamber music” so overwhelming. But hearing a symphony by Mozart or Messiaen in a lively, inviting concert hall makes a big difference.

Gilbert asks: You’ve proven this to me several times over the past three years – I think about the time it took you to listen to “The Rite of Spring” at Carnegie Hall and I walked out amazed. (I know, such a newbie.) Or when my eyes flashed at the end of Samuel Barber’s “Knoxville Summer 1915” at David Geffen Hall. I just don’t think I would have had the same feelings if I’d heard these pieces at home.