![Max Brand Synthesizer (1968) [11], also known as “Moogtonium” [12], is a custom made Mixtur-Trautonium version of Moog modular](http://web.archive.org./web/20110522182639im_/http://cdn.wn.com/pd/d4/e8/1a232c2c5cf865e3310f807daed1_grande.jpg "Max Brand Synthesizer (1968) [11], also known as “Moogtonium” [12], is a custom made Mixtur-Trautonium version of Moog modular")
This text is licensed under the Creative Commons CC-BY-SA License. This text was originally published on Wikipedia and was developed by the Wikipedia community.
| Name | Uri Caine |
|---|---|
| Landscape | yes |
| Background | non_vocal_instrumentalist |
| Born | June 08, 1956Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States |
| Instrument | Piano |
| Genre | Jazz |
| Occupation | Pianist, Composer |
Caine began playing piano at seven and studied with French jazz pianist Bernard Peiffer at 12. He later studied at the University of Pennsylvania where he came under the tutelage of George Crumb. He also gained a greater familiarity with classical music in this period and worked at clubs in Philadelphia.
He played professionally after 1981, and by 1985 had his recording debut with the Rochester-Gerald Veasley band. In the 1980s he moved to New York City where he lives now. He also appeared on a klezmer album with Mickey Katz and played with modern jazz musicians Don Byron and Dave Douglas.
Caine, who has recorded 16 albums, is celebrated for his eclectic and inventive interpretations of the classical repertoire. His 1997 jazz tribute to Gustav Mahler received an award from the German Mahler Society, while outraging some jury members. Caine has also reworked Bach's Goldberg Variations, Beethoven's Diabelli Variations, as well as Wagner, Schumann and Mozart.
In 2001 he teamed up with drummer Zach Danziger to conceive an original project fusing live jungle and drum'n'bass beats with fusion jazz called "Uri Caine Bedrock 3", they have toured worldwide including a New York based Dj called Dj Olive. Also in 2001 he released with Ahmir "Questlove" Thompson (drum player with internationally acclaimed hip hop band The Roots), and Christian McBride an eclectic album called The Philadelphia Experiment which contains jazz, funk, instrumental hip hop and jazz fusion. This album was produced by Aaron Levinson, and features collaborations such as Pat Martino on guitar and Jon Swana on trumpet. In 2006 he recorded an album of John Zorn's Masada compositions - .
In 2005, Caine was named Composer-in-Residence of the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra through the 2008–2009 Season. In 2010 he was named a United States Artists Fellow and awarded an unrestricted grant.
Category:Avant-garde jazz musicians Category:American jazz pianists Category:Jewish American musicians Category:Musicians from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania Category:Living people Category:1956 births Category:Pew Fellows in the Arts
This text is licensed under the Creative Commons CC-BY-SA License. This text was originally published on Wikipedia and was developed by the Wikipedia community.
| Name | Robert Cummings |
|---|---|
| Caption | Trailer for Saboteur (1942) |
| Birthdate | June 09, 1910 |
| Birthname | Charles Clarence Robert Orville Cummings |
| Birth place | Joplin, Missouri, U.S. |
| Deathdate | December 02, 1990 |
| Deathplace | Woodland Hills, Los Angeles, California, U.S. |
| Occupation | Actor |
| Yearsactive | 1933–1986 |
| Spouse | Regina Young was an American motion picture and television actor. |
| Name | Cummings, Robert |
| Alternative names | Cummings, Charles Clarence Robert Orville |
| Short description | Actor |
| Date of birth | June 10, 1910 |
| Place of birth | Joplin, Missouri, U.S. |
| Date of death | December 2, 1990 |
| Place of death | Woodland Hills, Los Angeles, California, U.S. |
This text is licensed under the Creative Commons CC-BY-SA License. This text was originally published on Wikipedia and was developed by the Wikipedia community.
Beaser has received numerous awards and commissions from orchestras such as the New York Philharmonic and the Chicago Symphony. He was appointed Professor and Chairman of the Composition Department at the Juilliard School in New York in 1993. In 1999, Beaser was co-commissioned by Glimmerglass Opera, the New York City Opera and WNET-TV to compose The Food of Love, with Terrence McNally as Librettist, which was performed at both venues, aired on PBS, and was nominated for an Emmy Award in 2000.
From 1978-1990 he served as co-Music Director and Conductor (along with Daniel Asia) of the innovative contemporary chamber ensemble Musical Elements at the 92nd Street Y, bringing premieres of over two-hundred works to Manhattan. From 1988-1993 he was the Meet the Composer/Composer-in-Residence with the American Composers Orchestra at Carnegie Hall, and served as the ACO’s artistic advisor until January 2001, when he assumed the role of Artistic Director. Beaser founded the Whittaker New Music Readings (currently the Underwood New Music Readings) with the ACO in the early 1990s, providing an opportunity for young composers to receive hearings of their orchestral works. Along with Tania Leon, Beaser spearheaded the Sonidos de Los Americas Festival from 1993–99, bringing composers and works from the Americas to Carnegie Hall. He currently serves as trustee for the American Academy in Rome, the MacDowell Colony, and the American Composers Orchestra. He was elected to the membership in the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2004.
His works are published by Schott Music.
A complete work list can be found at Schott Music's website (http://www.schott-music.com/shop/persons/featured/1639/products/).
This text is licensed under the Creative Commons CC-BY-SA License. This text was originally published on Wikipedia and was developed by the Wikipedia community.
| Name | Philip Glass |
|---|---|
| Background | non_performing_personnel |
| Born | January 31, 1937Baltimore, Maryland, United States |
| Genre | Minimalist, Classical, Contemporary classical, Ambient |
| Occupation | Composer |
| Years active | 1956–present |
| Label | CBS RecordsNonesuch/Elektra RecordsSony Classical/SME RecordsOrange Mountain Music |
Although his music is often, though controversially, described as minimalist, for his later work he distances himself from this label, describing himself instead as a composer of "music with repetitive structures." Although his early, mature music is minimalist, he has evolved stylistically. Currently, he describes himself as a "Classicist", pointing out that he is trained in harmony and counterpoint and studied Franz Schubert, Johann Sebastian Bach and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart with Nadia Boulanger.
Glass is a prolific composer: He has written works for his own musical group which he founded, the Philip Glass Ensemble (for which he still performs on keyboards), as well as operas, musical theatre works, eight symphonies, ten concertos, solo works, string quartets, and film scores. Three of his film scores have been nominated for Academy Awards.
Glass counts many artists among his friends and collaborators, including visual artists (Richard Serra, Chuck Close), writers (Doris Lessing, David Henry Hwang, Allen Ginsberg), film and theatre directors (including Errol Morris, Robert Wilson, JoAnne Akalaitis, Godfrey Reggio, Paul Schrader, Martin Scorsese, Christopher Hampton, Bernard Rose, and many others), choreographers (Lucinda Childs, Jerome Robbins, Twyla Tharp), and musicians and composers (Ravi Shankar, David Byrne, the conductor Dennis Russell Davies, Foday Musa Suso, Laurie Anderson, Linda Ronstadt, Paul Simon, Joan LaBarbara, Arthur Russell, David Bowie, Brian Eno, Roberto Carnevale, Patti Smith, Aphex Twin, Lisa Bielawa, John Moran, Bryce Dessner and Nico Muhly). Among recent collaborators are Glass's fellow New Yorker Woody Allen, Stephen T. Colbert, and poet and songwriter Leonard Cohen.
Glass then went on to the Juilliard School of Music where the keyboard became his main instrument. His composition teachers included Vincent Persichetti and William Bergsma and fellow students included Steve Reich. During this time, in 1959, he was a winner in the BMI Foundation's BMI Student Composer Awards, one of the most prestigious international prizes for young composers. In the summer of 1960, he studied with Darius Milhaud at the summer school of the Aspen Music Festival and composed a Violin Concerto for a fellow student, Dorothy Pixley-Rothschild. After leaving Juilliard in 1962, Glass moved to Pittsburgh and worked as a school-based composer-in-residence in the public school system, composing various choral, chamber and orchestral music.
Glass later stated in his autobiography Music by Philip Glass (1987) that the new music performed at Pierre Boulez's Domaine Musical concerts in Paris lacked any excitement for him (with the notable exceptions of music by John Cage and Morton Feldman), but he was deeply impressed by new films and theatre performances. He encountered revolutionary films of the French New Wave, such as those of Jean-Luc Godard and François Truffaut, which ignored the rules set by an older generation of artists., and Glass made friends with American visual artists (the sculptor Richard Serra and his wife Nancy Graves), actors and directors (JoAnne Akalaitis, Ruth Maleczech, David Warrilow, and Lee Breuer, with whom Glass later founded the experimental theatre group Mabou Mines). Together with Akalaitis (they married in 1965), Glass in turn attended performances by theatre groups including Jean-Louis Barrault's Odéon theatre, The Living Theatre and the Berliner Ensemble in 1964 to 1965. These significant encounters resulted in a collaboration with Breuer for which Glass contributed music for a 1965 staging of Samuel Beckett's Comédie (Play, 1963). The resulting piece (written for two soprano saxophones) was directly influenced by the play's open-ended, repetitive and almost musical structure and was the first one of a series of four early pieces in a minimalist, yet still dissonant, idiom. on a film score (Chappaqua, Conrad Rooks, 1966) with Ravi Shankar and Alla Rakha, which added another important influence on Glass's musical thinking. His distinctive style arose from his work with Shankar and Rakha and their perception of rhythm in Indian music as being entirely additive. He renounced all his compositions in a moderately modern style resembling Milhaud's, Aaron Copland's, and Samuel Barber's, and began writing pieces based on repetitive structures of Indian music and a sense of time influenced by Samuel Beckett: a piece for two actresses and chamber ensemble, a work for chamber ensemble and his first numbered string quartet (No.1, 1966).
Glass then left Paris for northern India in 1966, where he came in contact with Tibetan refugees and began to gravitate towards Buddhism. He met Tenzin Gyatso, the 14th Dalai Lama, in 1972, and has been a strong supporter of the Tibetan independence ever since.
Between summer of 1967 and the end of 1968, Glass composed nine works, including "Strung Out" (for amplified solo violin, composed in summer of 1967), Gradus (for solo saxophone, 1968), Music in the Shape of a Square (for two flutes, composed in May 1968, an homage to Erik Satie), "How Now" (for solo piano, 1968) and 1+1 (for amplified tabletop, November 1968) which were "clearly designed to experiment more fully with his new-found minimalist approach", as the musicologist Keith Potter pointed out. The first concert of Philip Glass's new music was at Jonas Mekas's Film-Makers Cinemathèque (Anthology Film Archives) in September 1968. This concert included the first work of this series with Strung Out (performed by the violinist Pixley-Rothschild) and Music in the Shape of a Square (performed by Glass and Gibson). The musical scores were tacked on the wall, and the performers had to move while playing. Glass's new works met with a very enthusiastic response by the open-minded audience that consisted mainly of visual and performance artists who were highly sympathetic to Glass's reductive approach.
Apart from his music career, Glass had a moving company with his cousin, the sculptor Jene Highstein, and worked as a plumber and cab driver (in 1973 to 1978). During this time he made friends with other New York based artists such as Sol LeWitt, Nancy Graves, Michael Snow, Bruce Nauman, Laurie Anderson, and Chuck Close, who created a now famous portrait of Glass. (Glass returned the favour in 2005 with "A Musical Portrait of Chuck Close" for piano, dedicated to the visual artist.)
With "1+1" and "Two Pages" (composed in February 1969) Glass turned to a more "rigorous approach" to his "most basic minimalist technique, additive process", pieces which were followed in the same year by Music in Contrary Motion and Music in Fifths (a kind of homage to his composition teacher Nadia Boulanger, who pointed out "hidden fifths" in his works but regarded them as cardinal sins). Eventually Glass's music grew less austere, becoming more complex and dramatic, with pieces such as Music in Similar Motion (1969), and with Music with Changing Parts (1970). These pieces were performed by The Philip Glass Ensemble in the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1969 and in the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in 1970, often encountering hostile reaction from critics, Eno described this encounter with Glass's music as the "most extraordinary musical experiences of [his] life", as a "viscous bath of pure, thick energy", concluding "this was actually the most detailed musics I'd ever heard. It was all intricacy exotic harmonics". In 1970 Glass returned to the theatre with composing music for the theatre group Mabou Mines, resulting in his first minimalist pieces employing voices: Red Horse Animation and Music for Voices (both 1970, and premiered at the Paula Cooper Gallery).
After certain differences of opinion with Steve Reich in 1971, Though he finds the term minimalist inaccurate to describe his later work, Glass does accept this term for pieces up to and including Music in 12 Parts, excepting this last part which "was the end of minimalism" for Glass. As he pointed out: "I had worked for eight or nine years inventing a system, and now I'd written through it and come out the other end." As "Another Look at Harmony", "Einstein added a new functional harmony that set it apart from the early conceptual works". The piece was praised by the Washington Post as "one of the seminal artworks of the century."
Einstein on the Beach was followed by further music for projects by the theatre group Mabou Mines such as Dressed like an Egg (1975), and again music for plays and adaptations from the prose by Samuel Beckett, such as The Lost Ones (1975), Cascando (1975), Mercier and Camier (1979). Glass also turned to other media; two multi-movement instrumental works for the Philip Glass Ensemble which originated as music for film and TV: North Star (1977 for the Documentary "Mark di Suvero, sculptor" by Francois de Menil and Barbara Rose) and four short cues for Jim Henson's TV-series for children, Sesame Street, named (1977).
Another series, “Fourth Series” (1977–79), included music for chorus and organ ("Part One", 1977), organ and piano ("Part Two" and "Part Four", 1979), and music for a radio adaption of Constance DeJong's novel Modern Love ("Part Three", 1978). Part Two and Part Four were used (and hence renamed) in two dance productions by choreographer Lucinda Childs (who had already contributed to and performed in Einstein on the Beach). "Part Two" was included in Dance (a collaboration with visual artist Sol LeWitt, 1979), and "Part Four" was renamed as Mad Rush, and performed by Glass on several occasions such as the first public appearance of the 14th Dalai Lama in New York City in Fall 1981. The piece demonstrates Glass's turn to more traditional models: the composer added a conclusion to an open-structured piece which "can be interpreted as a sign that he [had] abandoned the radical nonnarrative, undramatic approaches of his early period", as the pianist Steffen Schleiermacher pointed out.
In Spring 1978 Glass received a commission from the Netherlands Opera (as well as a Rockefeller Foundation grant) which "marked the end of his need to earn money from non-musical employment." With the commission Glass continued his work in music theater, composing his opera Satyagraha (composed in 1978–1979, premiered in 1980 at Rotterdam), themed on the early life of Mahatma Gandhi in South Africa, Rabindranath Tagore, and Martin Luther King Jr.. On Satyagraha, Glass worked in close collaboration with two "SoHo friends": the writer Constance deJong, who provided the libretto, and the set designer Robert Israel. This piece also was in other ways a turning point for Glass, as it was his first one since 1963 scored for symphony orchestra , even if the most prominent parts were still reserved for solo voices (but now operatic) and chorus. Shortly after completing the score in August 1979, Glass met the conductor Dennis Russell Davies, studying the score in a piano-four-hands version for performances in Germany, and together they started the projecting of yet another opera to be premiered at the Stuttgart State Opera.
Glass also again collaborated with Robert Wilson on another opera, the CIVIL warS (1983, premiered in 1984), which also functioned as the final part – "the Rome section", of Wilson's epic work by the same name, originally planned for an "international arts festival that would accompany the Olympic Games in Los Angeles" (for the Opening of the Games Glass also composed a highly prestigious work for chorus and orchestra, "The Olympian: Lighting of the Torch and Closing"). The premiere of "The CIVIL warS" in Los Angeles never materialized and the opera was in the end premiered at the Opera of Rome. Glass's and Wilson's opera includes musical settings of Latin texts by the 1st-century-Roman playwright Seneca and allusions to the music of Giuseppe Verdi and from the American Civil War, featuring the 19th century figures Giuseppe Garibaldi and Robert E. Lee as characters.
In the mid-1980s Glass produced "works in different media at an extraordinarily rapid pace". Projects from that period include music for dance (Dance Pieces, Jerome Robbins, 1983, and In the Upper Room, Twyla Tharp, 1986), and music for theatre productions Endgame (1984), and Company (1983). Beckett vehemently disapproved of the production of Endgame at the American Repertory Theater (Cambridge, Massachusetts), which featured Joanne Akalaitis's direction and Glass's Prelude for timpani and double bass, but in the end, though, he authorized the music for Company, four short, intimate pieces for string quartet that were played in the intervals of the dramatization. This composition was initially regarded by the composer as a piece of Gebrauchsmusik (music for use) – "like salt and pepper (...) just something for the table”, as he noted. Eventually Company was published as Glass's String Quartet No.2 and in a version for string orchestra, being performed by ensembles ranging from student orchestras to renowned ones such as the Kronos Quartet and the Kremerata Baltica.
This interest in writing for the string quartet and the string orchestra led to a chamber and orchestral film score for (Paul Schrader, 1984–85), which Glass recently described as his "musical turning point" that developed his "technique of film scoring in a very special way".
Glass also dedicated himself to vocal works with two sets of songs, Three Songs for chorus (1984, settings of poems by Leonard Cohen, Octavio Paz and Raymond Levesque), and a song cycle initiated by CBS Masterworks Records: Songs from Liquid Days (1985), with texts by songwriters such as David Byrne, Paul Simon, in which the Kronos Quartet is featured (as it is in Mishima) in a prominent role. Glass also continued his series of operas with adaptations from literary texts such as The Juniper Tree (an opera collaboration with composer Robert Moran, 1984), Edgar Allan Poe's The Fall of the House of Usher (1987), and also worked with novelist Doris Lessing on the opera The Making Of The Representative For Planet 8 (1985–86, and performed by the Houston Grand Opera and English National Opera in 1988).
A series of orchestral works that were originally composed for the concert hall commenced with the 3-movement Violin Concerto No. 1 (1987). This work was commissioned by the American Composers Orchestra and written for and in close collaboration with the violinist Paul Zukofsky and the conductor Dennis Russel Davies, who since then encouraged the composer to write numerous orchestral pieces. The Concerto is dedicated to the memory of Glass's father: "His favorite form was the violin concerto, and so I grew up listening to the Mendelssohn, the Paganini, the Brahms concertos. (...) So when I decided to write a violin concerto, I wanted to write one that my father would have liked." Among its multiple recordings, in 1992, the Concerto was performed and recorded by Gidon Kremer and the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra. This turn to orchestral music was continued with a symphonic Trilogy of "portraits of nature", commissioned by the Cleveland Orchestra, the Rotterdam Philharmonic Orchestra, and the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra: The Light (1987), The Canyon (1988), and Itaipu (1989).
While composing for symphonic ensembles, Glass also composed again music for piano, the cycle of five movements, titled Metamorphosis (adapted from music for a theatrical adaptation of Franz Kafka's The Metamorphosis, and for the Errol Morris film The Thin Blue Line, 1988]). In the same year Glass met the poet Allen Ginsberg by chance in a book store in the East Village of New York City, and they immediately "decided on the spot to do something together, reached for one of Allen's books and chose Wichita Vortex Sutra", a piece for reciter and piano which in turn developed into a music theatre piece for singers and ensemble, Hydrogen Jukebox'' (1990).
Glass also turned to chamber music; he composed two String Quartets (No.4 and No.5, for the Kronos Quartet, 1989 and 1991), and chamber works which originated as incidental music for plays, such as Music from "The Screens" (1989/1990). This work originated in one of many theater music collaboration with the director Joanne Akalaitis, who originally asked the Gambian musician Foday Musa Suso "to do the score [for Jean Genet's "The Screens"] in collaboration with a western composer", who was finally found in Philip Glass, who had already collaborated with Suso in the film score to Powaqqatsi (Godfrey Reggio, 1986). Music from "The Screens" is on occasion, a touring piece for Glass and Suso, and individual pieces found its way to the repertoire of Glass and the cellist Wendy Sutter. Another collaboration was a collaborative recording project with Ravi Shankar, initiated by Peter Baumann (a member of the band Tangerine Dream), which resulted in the album Passages (1990).
In the late 1980s and early 1990s Glass's projects also included two highly prestigious opera commissions, based on the life of two explorers, Christopher Columbus (The Voyage [1990], commissioned by the Metropolitan Opera, with a libretto by David Henry Hwang), and Vasco da Gama (White Raven [1991], a collaboration Robert Wilson and composed for the opening of the Expo '98). Especially in The Voyage, the composer "explore[d] new territory", with its "newly arching lyricism", "Sibelian starkness and sweep", and "dark, brooding tone (...) a reflection of its increasingly chromatic (and dissonant) palette", as one commentator put it. Glass responded with two 3-movement symphonies ("Low" [1992]), and Symphony No.2 [1994]); his first in an ongoing series of symphonies is a combination of the composer's own musical material with themes featured in prominent tracks of the David Bowie/ Brian Eno Album Low (1977), whereas Symphony No.2 is described by Glass as a study in polytonality. He referred to the music of Honegger, Milhaud, and Villa-Lobos as possible models for his symphony. With the Concerto Grosso (1992), Symphony No. 3 (1995), a Concerto for Saxophone Quartet and Orchestra (1995) (all commissioned by conductor Dennis Russel Davies), and Echorus (1994/95), a more transparent, refined, and intimate chamber-orchestral style paralleled the excursions of his large-scale symphonic pieces. In the four movements of his Third Symphony, Glass treats a 19-piece string orchestra as an extended chamber ensemble. In the third movement, Glass re-uses the Chaconne as a formal device; one commentator characterized Glass's symphony as one of the composer's "most tautly unified works" The third Symphony was closely followed by a fourth, subtitled Heroes (1996), commissioned the American Composers Orchestra. Its six movements are symphonic reworkings of themes by Glass, David Bowie, and Brian Eno (from their Album "Heroes", 1977); as other works by the composer it is also a hybrid work and exists in two versions: one for the concert hall, and another, shorter one for a dance work, choreographed by Twyla Tharp. Another commission by Dennis Russell Davies was a second series for piano, the Etudes for Piano (dedicated to Davies as well as the production designer Achim Freyer); the complete first set of ten Etudes has been recorded and performed by Glass himself. Bruce Brubaker and Dennis Russell Davies have each recorded the orginal set of six. Most of the Etudes are composed in the post-minimalist and increasingly lyrical style of the times: "Within the framework of a concise form, Glass explorespossible sonorities ranging from typically Baroque passagework to Romantically tinged moods". Some of the pieces also appeared in different versions such as in the theatre music to Robert Wilson's Persephone (1994, commissioned by the Relache Ensemble) or Echorus (a version of Etude No.2 for two violins and string orchestra, written for Edna Mitchell and Yehudi Menuhin 1995).
Glass's prolific output in the 1990s continued to include operas with an opera triptych (1991–1996), which the composer described as an "homage" to writer and film director Jean Cocteau, based on his prose and cinematic work: Orphée (1949), La Belle et la Bête (1946), and the novel Les Enfants Terribles (1929, later made into a film by Cocteau and Jean-Pierre Melville, 1950). In the same way the triptych is also a musical homage to the work of a French group of composers associated with Cocteau, Les Six (and especially to his teacher Darius Milhaud), as well as to various 18th century composers such as Gluck and Bach whose music featured as an essential part of the films by Cocteau.
The inspiration of the first part of the trilogy, Orphée (composed in 1991, and premiered in 1993 at the American Repertory Theatre) can be conceptually and musically traced to Gluck's opera Orfeo ed Euridice (Orphée et Euridyce, 1762/1774), One theme of the opera, the death of Eurydice, has some similarity to the composer's personal life: the opera was composed after the unexpected death in 1991 of Glass's wife, artist Candy Jernigan: "(...) One can only suspect that Orpheus' grief must have resembled the composer's own", as K. Robert Schwartz suggested.
For the second opera, La Belle et la Bête (1994, scored for either the Philip Glass Ensemble or a more conventional chamber orchestra) Glass replaced the soundtrack (including Georges Auric's film music) of Cocteau's film, wrote "a new fully operatic score and synchronize[d] it with the film". The final part of the triptych returned again to a more traditional setting with the "Dance Opera" Les Enfants Terribles (1996), scored for voices, three pianos and dancers, with choreography by Susan Marshall. The scoring of the opera evokes Bach's Concerto for Four Harpsichords, but in another way also "the snow, which falls relentlessly throughout the opera (...) bearing witness to the unfolding events. Here time stands still. There is only music, and the movement of children through space" (Glass).
Besides writing for the concert hall, Glass continued his ongoing operatic series with adaptions from literary texts: The Marriages of Zones 3, 4 and 5 ([1997] story-libretto by Doris Lessing), In the Penal Colony (2000, after the novella by Franz Kafka), and the chamber opera The Sound of a Voice (2003, with David Henry Hwang), which features the Pipa, performed by Wu Man at its premiere. Glass also collaborated again with the co-author of Einstein on the Beach, Robert Wilson (Monsters of Grace, 1998), and created a biographic opera on the life of astronomer Galileo Galilei (2001).
In the early 2000s Glass started a series of five concerti with The Tirol Concerto for Piano and Orchestra (2000, premiered by Dennis Russell Davies as conductor and soloist), and the Concerto Fantasy for Two Timpanists and Orchestra (2000, for the tympanist Jonathan Haas), which is a popular, often-played concerto. The Concerto for Cello and Orchestra (2001) had its premiere performance in Beijing, featuring cellist Julian Lloyd Webber; it was composed in celebration of his fiftieth birthday. These concertos were followed by the concise and rigorously neo-baroque Concerto for Harpsichord and Orchestra (2002), demonstrating in its transparent, chamber orchestral textures Glass's classical technique, evocative in the "improvisatory chords" of its beginning a toccata of Froberger or Frescobaldi, and 18th century music. Two years later, the concerti series continued with Piano Concerto No. 2: After Lewis and Clark (2004), composed for the pianist Paul Barnes. The concerto celebrates the pioneers' trek across North America, the second movement features a duet for piano and Native American flute. With the chamber opera The Sound of a Voice, Glass Piano Concerto No.2 might be regarded as bridging Glass's traditional compositions and his more popular excursions to World Music, e.g. with Orion (also composed in 2004).
Two months after the premiere of this opera, in November 2005, Glass's Symphony No.8, commissioned by the Bruckner Orchester Linz, was premiered at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in New York City. After three symphonies for voices and orchestra, this piece was a return to purely orchestral and abstract composition; like previous works written for the conductor Dennis Russell Davies (the 1992 Concerto Grosso and the 1995 Symphony No.3), it features extended solo writing. Critic Allan Kozinn described the symphony's chromaticism as more extreme, more fluid, and its themes and textures as continually changing, morphing without repetition, and praised the symphony's "unpredictable orchestration", pointing out the "beautiful flute and harp variation in the melancholy second movement". Alex Ross, remarked that "against all odds, this work succeeds in adding something certifiably new to the overstuffed annals of the classical symphony. (...) The musical material is cut from familiar fabric, but it’s striking that the composer forgoes the expected bustling conclusion and instead delves into a mood of deepening twilight and unending night."
The Passion of Ramakrishna (2006), was composed for the Pacific Symphony Orchestra, the Pacific Chorale and the conductor Carl St. Clair. The 45 minutes choral work is based on the writings of Indian Spiritual leader Sri Ramakrishna, which seem "to have genuinely inspired and revived the composer out of his old formulas to write something fresh", as one critic remarked, whereas another noted that "The musical style breaks little new ground for Glass, except for the glorious Handelian ending (...) the "composer’s style ideally fits the devotional text".
A Cello Suite, composed for the cellist and his fiance, Wendy Sutter, "Songs and Poems for Solo Cello" (2005–2007), was equally lauded by critics. It was described by Lisa Hirsch as "a major work, (...) a major addition to the cello repertory" and "deeply Romantic in spirit, and at the same time deeply Baroque". Another critic, Anne Midgette of the Washington Post, noted that the suite "maintains an unusual degree of directness and warmth"; she also noted a kinship to a major work by Johann Sebastian Bach: "Digging into the lower registers of the instrument, it takes flight in handfuls of notes, now gentle, now impassioned, variously evoking the minor-mode keening of klezmer music and the interior meditations of Bach's cello suites". Whereas Glass himself pointed out that "in many ways it owes more to Schubert than to Bach".
In 2007 Glass also worked alongside Leonard Cohen on an adaptation of Cohen's poetry collection Book of Longing. The work, which premiered in June, 2007, in Toronto, Canada, is a piece for seven instruments and a vocal quartet, and contains recorded spoken word performances by Cohen and imagery from his collection.
Appomattox, an opera surrounding the events at the end of the American Civil War, was commissioned by the San Francisco Opera and premiered on October 5, 2007. As in Waiting for the Barbarians, Glass collaborated with the writer Christopher Hampton, and as the preceding opera and Symphony No.8, the piece was conducted by Glass's long time collaborator Dennis Russell Davies, who noted that "in his recent operas the bass line has taken on an increasing prominence,(...) (an) increasing use of melodic elements in the deep register, in the contrabass, the contrabassoon – he's increasingly using these sounds and these textures can be derived from using these instruments in different combinations. (...) He's definitely developed more skill as an orchestrator, in his ability to conceive melodies and harmonic structures for specific instrumental groups. (...) what he gives them to play is very organic and idiomatic."
Other works for the theatre: a score for Euripides' The Bacchae (2009, directed by JoAnne Akalaitis), and another operatic biography of a scientist/explorer and Glass's first opera in German, "Kepler" (2008–2009) premiered by the Bruckner Orchester Linz and Dennis Russell Davies in September 2009.
Glass also donated a short work, Brazil, to the video game Chime, which was released on February 3, 2010.
Recently Glass returned to the orchestra with three concert works: the Violin Concerto No. 2 in four movements for violinist Robert McDuffie, titled "The American Four Seasons" (2009) it premiered in December 2009 by the Toronto Symphony Orchestra, and subsequently performed by the London Philharmonic Orchestra in April 2010.
The Double Concerto for Violin and Cello and Orchestra (2010) was composed for soloists Maria Bachmann and Wendy Sutter and also for a ballet for the Nederlands Dans Theater.
Another project is an orchestral score to a multimedia presentation based on the novel Icarus at the Edge of Time by theoretical physicist Brian Greene, which premiered on June 6, 2010.
Projected works include more entries in the ongoing series of chamber works: Pendulum (2010, a one-movement piece for piano trio), a Suite for solo violin (2010) for violinist Tim Fain, a string quintet for the recently formed ensemble Glass Chamber Players ("a huge challenge because Schubert did it so beautifully", as Glass states), more instrumental sonatas and a projected second Suite of cello pieces for Wendy Sutter.
Philip Glass has collaborated with recording artists such as Paul Simon, Suzanne Vega, Mick Jagger, Leonard Cohen, David Byrne, Uakti, Natalie Merchant, and Aphex Twin (yielding an orchestration of Icct Hedral in 1995 on the Donkey Rhubarb EP). Glass's compositional influence extends to musicians such as Mike Oldfield (who included parts from Glass's North Star in Platinum), and bands such as Tangerine Dream and Talking Heads. Philip Glass and his sound designer Kurt Munkacsi produced the American post-punk/new wave band Polyrock (1978 to the mid-1980s).
In 1970 Glass and Klaus Kertess (owner of the Bykert Gallery) formed a record label named Chatham Square Productions (named after the location of the studio of a Philip Glass Ensemble member Dick Landry). Metamorphosis for Piano (1988) was featured in the reimagined Battlestar Galactica in the episode "Valley of Darkness", and in 2008, Rockstar Games released Grand Theft Auto IV featuring Glass's "Pruit Igoe" (from Koyaanisqatsi). "Pruit Igoe" and "Prophecies" (also from Koyaanisqatsi) were used both in a trailer for Watchmen and in the film itself. Watchmen also included two other Glass pieces in the score: "Something She Has To Do" (from The Hours) and "Protest (Act II Scene 3)" (from Satyagraha).
Glass has four children and one granddaughter. Juliet (b. 1968) and Zachary (b. 1971) are his children from his first marriage, to theater director JoAnne Akalaitis (married 1965, divorced 1980). Granddaughter Zuri (b.1989) is Zachary's daughter. His second marriage to Luba Burtyk was dissolved. Marlowe and Cameron are Glass's sons with his fourth wife, Holly Critchlow (from whom Glass is separated). His third wife, the artist Candy Jernigan, died of liver cancer in 1991, aged 39. Glass lives in New York and in Cape Breton, Nova Scotia. He has been romantically involved with cellist Wendy Sutter since 2005.
Glass is the first cousin once removed of Ira Glass, host of the nationally syndicated radio show This American Life. Philip once appeared as a guest on This American Life and his piece "Metamorphosis One" is often used on the show. Philip Glass's cousin is Ira Glass's father.
Category:1937 births Category:20th-century classical composers Category:21st-century classical composers Category:American composers Category:American film score composers Category:American Jews Category:American people of Lithuanian-Jewish descent Category:American musical theatre composers Category:American vegetarians Category:BAFTA winners (people) Category:Baltimore City College alumni Category:Contemporary classical music performers Category:Jewish American composers and songwriters Category:Jewish classical musicians Category:Nonesuch Records artists Category:Juilliard School of Music alumni Category:Living people Category:Members of the American Academy of Arts and Letters Category:Minimalist composers Category:Musicians from Maryland Category:Opera composers Category:People from Baltimore, Maryland Category:Postmodern composers Category:University of Chicago alumni Category:Peabody Institute alumni
This text is licensed under the Creative Commons CC-BY-SA License. This text was originally published on Wikipedia and was developed by the Wikipedia community.
The musicologist and conductor Nick Strimple, in discussing Lauridsen's sacred music, described him as "the only American composer in history who can be called a mystic, (whose) probing, serene work contains an elusive and indefinable ingredient which leaves the impression that all the questions have been answered ... From 1993 Lauridsen's music rapidly increased in international popularity, and by century's end he had eclipsed Randall Thompson as the most frequently performed American choral composer."
Lauridsen's works have been recorded on over 100 CDs, three of which have received Grammy nominations. His principal publishers are Peermusic (New York/Hamburg) and Peer's affiliate, Faber Music (London).
A recipient of numerous grants, prizes and commissions, Lauridsen chaired the Composition department at the USC Thornton School of Music from 1990–2002, founded the School's Advanced Studies Program in Film Scoring, and is currently Distinguished Professor of Composition.
In 2006, Morten Lauridsen was named an "American Choral Master" by the National Endowment for the Arts. In 2007, he received the National Medal of Arts from the President of the United States in a White House ceremony, "for his composition of radiant choral works combining musical beauty, power and spiritual depth that have thrilled audiences worldwide."
In 2008, Morten Lauridsen was awarded an Honorary Doctorate from Rowan University in Glassboro, New Jersey during a concert in his name. Under instruction of Z. Randall Stroope, The Rowan University Concert Choir performed a number of Lauridsen's works, several of which were accompanied by the composer. University faculty Marian Stieber and Jon Garrison performed "A Winter Come", also accompanied by Lauridsen.
Category:1943 births Category:Living people Category:20th-century classical composers Category:21st-century classical composers Category:American composers Category:American people of Danish descent Category:United States National Medal of Arts recipients Category:University of Southern California alumni
This text is licensed under the Creative Commons CC-BY-SA License. This text was originally published on Wikipedia and was developed by the Wikipedia community.
| Name | Meredith Monk |
|---|---|
| Background | solo_singer |
| Birth name | Meredith Jane Monk |
| Born | November 20, 1942 |
| Origin | New York City |
| Years active | 1968 — |
Meredith Jane Monk (born November 20, 1942 in New York City) is an American composer, performer, director, vocalist, filmmaker, and choreographer. Since the 1960s, Monk has created multi-disciplinary works which dwell in the spaces between music, theatre, and dance, recording extensively for ECM Records.
Monk's performances have influenced many artists, including Bruce Nauman, whom she met in San Francisco in 1968. In 1978 Monk formed Meredith Monk and Vocal Ensemble (modelled after similar ensembles of musical colleagues, such as Steve Reich and Philip Glass), to explore new and wider vocal textures and forms, which often were contrasted with minimal instrumental textures. Monk began a long-standing relationship with the Walker Art Center of Minneapolis, which continues to showcase her work to this day. Pieces from this time include Dolmen Music (1979), which also was recorded for her first album released at Manfred Eicher's record label ECM in 1981.
In the 1980s, Monk wrote and directed two films, Ellis Island (1981), and Book of Days (1988), which developed from a single idea; "One day during summer of 1984, as I was sweeping the floor of my house in the country, the image of a young girl (in black and white) and a medieval street in the Jewish community (also in black and white) came to me." Monk tells this account in the liner notes of the ECM-recording. Apart from the film, different versions exist of this piece. Two are for the concert hall, and an album, produced by Meredith Monk and Manfred Eicher, is "a film for the ears."
In the early 1990s, Monk composed an opera called Atlas, which premiered in Houston Texas in 1991. She has also written pieces for instrumental ensembles and symphony orchestras. Her first symphonic works were Possible Sky (2003) and Stringsongs (2004), which was commissioned by the Kronos Quartet. In 2005, events all over the world were held in celebration of the 40th anniversary of her career, including a concert in Carnegie Hall featuring Björk, Terry Riley, DJ Spooky (who sampled Monk on his album Drums of Death), Ursula Oppens, Bruce Brubaker, John Zorn, and the new music ensembles Alarm Will Sound and Bang on a Can All-Stars, along with the Pacific Mozart Ensemble.
Monk has won numerous awards, including a MacArthur Fellowship. She was awarded honorary Doctor of Arts degrees from Bard College, the University of the Arts (Philadelphia), The Juilliard School, the San Francisco Art Institute and the Boston Conservatory. In 2007, she received the Demetrio Stratos International Award for musical experimentation.
Her music was used in films by the Coen Brothers (The Big Lebowski, 1998) and Jean-Luc Godard (Nouvelle Vague, 1990 and Notre musique, 2004).
In a recent interview, Monk said that her favourite music includes Brazilian music, especially Caetano Veloso's recordings, the music by Mildred Bailey ("the great jazz singer from the ‘30s and ‘40s"), and Bartók's cycle for piano Mikrokosmos.
Her partner was the Dutch-born choreographer Mieke van Hoek, who died in 2002.
--Liner notes of the album Book of Days, ECM New Series (1990)
"I work in between the cracks, where the voice starts dancing, where the body starts singing, where theater becomes cinema."
--Deborah Jowitt (ed.), Meredith Monk (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997)
"Björk did one of my songs, "Gotham Lullaby". I'd heard her sing that [...] on an MP3 file one of my [voice] students gave me, and I found it really interesting. Then we met six months ago, and liked each other very much. She's a lovely spirit."
--Interview by Tony Montague in The Globe and Mail, November 11, 2005
Category:1942 births Category:Living people Category:20th-century classical composers Category:21st-century classical composers Category:Jewish American classical composers Category:Lesbian musicians Category:LGBT composers Category:MacArthur Fellows Category:People from Lima Category:Postmodern composers Category:Women composers Category:Sarah Lawrence College alumni Category:ECM artists Category:Avant-garde singers
This text is licensed under the Creative Commons CC-BY-SA License. This text was originally published on Wikipedia and was developed by the Wikipedia community.
| Name | The Lord Thomson of Fleet |
|---|---|
| Caption | this is my great great great grandfather |
| Birth date | September 01, 1923 |
| Birth place | North Bay, Ontario, Canada |
| Death date | June 12, 2006 |
| Death place | Toronto, Ontario, Canada |
| Occupation | Chairman, Woodbridge Co. Ltd |
| Networth | $17.9 billion USD (Mar. 2006) |
| Spouse | Nora Marilyn Lavis Thomson |
| Website | thomson.com |
Kenneth Thomson was educated at Upper Canada College in Toronto and at St. John's College of the University of Cambridge in the UK (he received his degree in Economics and Law). During World War II, he served in the Royal Canadian Air Force. Following the war, he completed his education and entered the family business. In 1956, he married Nora Marilyn Lavis, with whom he had three children: David, Peter, and Lynne (now known as Taylor).
Rich as he was, he was also known for his down-to-earth demeanor: he bought his suits "off the rack", was once seen wearing shoes with holes in them, and one was just as likely to bump into him walking his dogs in the Rosedale area near his home as at any high society party. He was unfailingly courteous and patient with everyone he met, even total strangers. Ken regularly visited the Toronto Humane Society, where he comforted and walked the dogs.
He also succeeded his father as chair of what was then a media empire made up of extensive newspaper and television holdings. The Thomson media empire added the prestigious Globe and Mail in Toronto to The Times and Sunday Times in Britain and The Jerusalem Post in Israel. Under Lord Thomson of Fleet, the Thomson Corporation sold its North Sea oil holdings and sold The Times to Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation and the Jerusalem Post to Conrad Black's Hollinger Inc. The Globe and Mail was combined with BCE's cable and television assets (including CTV and The Sports Network) to form Bell Globemedia, controlled by BCE with Thomson as a minority shareholder. The company then sold all of its community newspapers to become a financial data services giant and one of the world's most powerful information services and academic publishing companies. Today, the company operates primarily in the United States from its headquarters in Stamford, Connecticut. In 2002, The Thomson Corporation was listed on the New York Stock Exchange as "TOC".
According to Forbes Magazine in 2005, the Thomson family is the richest in Canada, and Lord Thomson of Fleet was the fifteenth richest person in the world, with a personal net worth of US $17.9 billion. Between the time of that report and his death, he jumped six positions to ninth with assets of almost $22.6 billion.
Over the past fifty years, Thomson distinguished himself as one of North America's leading art collectors and has been a major benefactor to the Art Gallery of Ontario. In 2002 he paid the highest price ever for a Canadian painting when he purchased Canadian artist Paul Kane's . At a Sotheby's auction that year, Thomson purchased Peter Paul Rubens' painting "The Massacre of the Innocents" for £49.5 million (CAD $117 million).
In his final years Thomson lived in the Rosedale area died in 2006 in Toronto at his office of an apparent heart attack.
Thomson of Fleet, Kenneth Thomson, 2nd Baron Thomson of Fleet, Kenneth Thomson, 2nd Baron Thomson of Fleet, Kenneth Thomson, 2nd Baron Thomson of Fleet, Kenneth Thomson, 2nd Baron Thomson of Fleet, Kenneth Thomson, 2nd Baron Thomson of Fleet, Kenneth Thomson, 2nd Baron Thomson of Fleet, Kenneth Thomson, 2nd Baron Thomson of Fleet, Kenneth Thomson, 2nd Baron Thomson of Fleet, Kenneth Thomson, 2nd Baron Category:Canadian people of English descent Category:Canadian people of Scottish descent Category:Deaths from myocardial infarction Thomson of Fleet, Kenneth Thomson, 2nd Baron Category:People from North Bay, Ontario Category:People from Toronto Category:Thomson family Category:Upper Canada College alumni
This text is licensed under the Creative Commons CC-BY-SA License. This text was originally published on Wikipedia and was developed by the Wikipedia community.
John Milton Cage Jr. (September 5, 1912 – August 12, 1992) was an American composer, philosopher, poet, music theorist, artist, printmaker, and amateur mycologist and mushroom collector. A pioneer of chance music, electronic music and non-standard use of musical instruments, Cage was one of the leading figures of the post-war avant-garde. Critics have lauded him as one of the most influential American composers of the 20th century. He was also instrumental in the development of modern dance, mostly through his association with choreographer Merce Cunningham, who was also Cage's romantic partner for most of their lives.
Cage is perhaps best known for his 1952 composition 4′33″, the three movements of which are performed without a single note being played. The content of the composition is meant to be perceived as the sounds of the environment that the listeners hear while it is performed, rather than merely as four minutes and thirty three seconds of silence, and the piece became one of the most controversial compositions of the twentieth century. Another famous creation of Cage's is the prepared piano (a piano with its sound altered by placing various objects in the strings), for which he wrote numerous dance-related works and a few concert pieces, the best known of which is Sonatas and Interludes (1946–48).
His teachers included Henry Cowell (1933) and Arnold Schoenberg (1933–35), both known for their radical innovations in music, but Cage's major influences lay in various Eastern cultures. Through his studies of Indian philosophy and Zen Buddhism in the late 1940s, Cage came to the idea of aleatoric or chance-controlled music, which he started composing in 1951. The I Ching, an ancient Chinese classic text on changing events, became Cage's standard composition tool for the rest of his life. In a 1957 lecture, Experimental Music, he described music as "a purposeless play" which is "an affirmation of life – not an attempt to bring order out of chaos nor to suggest improvements in creation, but simply a way of waking up to the very life we're living".
Cage's first experiences with music were from private piano teachers in the Greater Los Angeles area and several relatives, particularly his aunt Phoebe Harvey who introduced him to the piano music of the 19th century. He received first piano lessons when he was in the fourth grade at school, but although he liked music, he expressed more interest in sight reading than in developing virtuoso piano technique, and apparently was not thinking of composition. By 1928 Cage was convinced that he wanted to be a writer. That year he graduated from Los Angeles High School as a valedictorian and enrolled at Pomona College, Claremont. However, in 1930 he dropped out, believing that "college was of no use to a writer" by an incident described in the 1991 autobiographical statement:
I was shocked at college to see one hundred of my classmates in the library all reading copies of the same book. Instead of doing as they did, I went into the stacks and read the first book written by an author whose name began with Z. I received the highest grade in the class. That convinced me that the institution was not being run correctly. I left. He subsequently hitchhiked to Galveston and sailed to Le Havre, where he took a train to Paris. Cage stayed in Europe for some 18 months, trying his hand at various forms of art. First he studied Gothic and Greek architecture, but decided he was not interested enough in architecture to dedicate his life to it. Cage started travelling, visited various places in France, Germany and Spain, as well as Capri and, most importantly, Majorca, where he started composing. His first compositions were created using dense mathematical formulae, but Cage was displeased with the results and left the finished pieces behind when he left. Cage's association with theatre also started in Europe: during a walk in Seville he witnessed, in his own words, "the multiplicity of simultaneous visual and audible events all going together in one's experience and producing enjoyment."
1931–36: Apprenticeship
Cage returned to the United States in 1931.) and arts patron Galka Scheyer. in which Cowell suggested that Cage study with Arnold Schoenberg—Cage's musical ideas at the time included composition based on a 25-tone row, somewhat similar to Schoenberg's twelve-tone technique. Cowell mentioned, however, that before approaching Schoenberg, Cage should take some preliminary lessons, and recommended Adolph Weiss, a former Schoenberg pupil.Following Cowell's advice, Cage travelled to New York City in 1933 and started studying with Weiss as well as taking lessons from Cowell himself at The New School. Cage's routine during that period was apparently very tiring, with just four hours of sleep on most nights, and four hours of composition every day starting at 4 AM. Several months later, still in 1933, Cage became sufficiently good at composition to approach Schoenberg. He could not afford Schoenberg's price, however, and when he mentioned it, the older composer asked whether Cage would devote his life to music. After Cage replied that he would, Schoenberg offered to tutor him free of charge.
Cage studied with Schoenberg in California: first at USC and then at UCLA, as well as privately. particularly as an example of how to live one's life being a composer. Schoenberg's methods and their influence on Cage are well documented by Cage himself in various lectures and writings. Particularly well-known is the conversation mentioned in the 1958 lecture Indeterminacy:
After I had been studying with him for two years, Schoenberg said, "In order to write music, you must have a feeling for harmony." I explained to him that I had no feeling for harmony. He then said that I would always encounter an obstacle, that it would be as though I came to a wall through which I could not pass. I said, "In that case I will devote my life to beating my head against that wall."Cage studied with Schoenberg for two years, but although he admired his teacher, he decided to leave after Schoenberg told the assembled students that he was trying to make it impossible for them to write music. Much later, Cage recounted the incident: "[...] When he said that, I revolted, not against him, but against what he had said. I determined then and there, more than ever before, to write music."
1937–49: Modern dance and Eastern influences
The newly married couple first lived with Cage's parents in Pacific Palisades, then moved to Hollywood. During 1936–38 Cage changed numerous jobs, including one that started his lifelong association with modern dance: dance accompanist at UCLA. He produced music for choreographies and at one point taught a course on "Musical Accompaniments for Rhythmic Expression" at UCLA, with his aunt Phoebe. It was during that time that Cage first started experimenting with unorthodox instruments, such as household items, metal sheets, and so on. This was inspired by Oskar Fischinger, who told Cage that "everything in the world has a spirit that can be released through its sound." Although Cage did not share the idea of spirits, these words inspired him to begin exploring the sounds produced by hitting various non-musical objects.In 1938, with help from a fellow Cowell student Lou Harrison, Cage became a faculty member at Mills College, teaching the same program as at UCLA, and collaborating with choreographer Marian van Tuyl. Several famous dance groups were present, and Cage's interest in modern dance grew further.
Like his personal life, Cage's artistic life went through a crisis in mid-1940s. The composer was experiencing a growing disillusionment with the idea of music as means of communication: the public rarely accepted his work, and Cage himself, too, had trouble understanding the music of his colleagues. In early 1946 Cage agreed to tutor Gita Sarabhai, an Indian musician who came to the US to study Western music. In return, he asked her to teach him about Indian music and philosophy. Cage also attended, in late 1940s and early 1950s, D. T. Suzuki's lectures on Zen Buddhism, and read the works of Ananda K. Coomaraswamy.
1950s: Discovering chance
Sonatas and Interludes were received well by the public. After a 1949 performance at Carnegie Hall Cage received a grant from the Guggenheim Foundation, which enabled him to make a trip to Europe, where he met composers such as Olivier Messiaen and Pierre Boulez. More important, however, was Cage's chance encounter with Morton Feldman in New York City in early 1950. Both composers attended a New York Philharmonic Orchestra, where the orchestra performed Anton Webern's Symphony, op. 21, followed by a piece by Sergei Rachmaninoff. Cage felt so overwhelmed by Webern's piece that he left before the Rachmaninoff; and in the lobby, he met Feldman, who was leaving for the same reason. The two composers quickly became friends; some time later Cage, Feldman, and Cage's pupil Christian Wolff came to be referred to as "the New York school."In early 1951 Wolff presented Cage with a copy of the I Ching—a Chinese classic text which describes a symbol system used to identify order in chance events. The I Ching is commonly used for divination, but for Cage it became a tool to compose using chance. To compose a piece of music, Cage would come up with questions to ask the I Ching; the book would then be used in much the same way as it is used for divination. For Cage, this meant "imitating nature in its manner of operation": his lifelong interest in sound itself culminated in an approach that yielded works in which sounds were free from the composer's will:
When I hear what we call music, it seems to me that someone is talking. And talking about his feelings, or about his ideas of relationships. But when I hear traffic, the sound of traffic—here on Sixth Avenue, for instance—I don't have the feeling that anyone is talking. I have the feeling that sound is acting. And I love the activity of sound [...] I don't need sound to talk to me.Although Cage had used chance on a few earlier occasions, most notably in the third movement of Concerto for Prepared Piano and Chamber Orchestra (1950–51), the I Ching opened new possibilities in this field for him. The first results of the new approach were Imaginary Landscape No. 4 for 12 radio receivers, and Music of Changes for piano. The latter work was written for David Tudor, whom Cage met through Feldman—another friendship that lasted until Cage's death. Tudor premiered most of Cage's works until early 1960s, when he stopped performing and concentrated on composition. The I Ching became Cage's standard tool for composition: he used it in practically every work composed after 1951.
Despite the fame Sonatas and Interludes earned him, and the connections he cultivated with American and European composers and musicians, Cage was quite poor. Although he still had an apartment, at 326 Monroe Street (which he occupied since around 1946) his financial situation in 1951 worsened so much that, while working on Music of Changes, he prepared a set of instructions for Tudor as to how to complete the piece in the event of his death. Nevertheless, Cage managed to survive and maintained an active artistic life, giving lectures, performances, etc. In 1952–53 he completed another mammoth project—the Williams Mix, a piece of tape music, which Earle Brown helped to put together. Also in 1952, Cage wrote down the piece that became his most well-known and most controversial creation: 4′33″. The score instructs the performer not to play the instrument during the entire duration of the piece—four minutes, thirty-three seconds—and is meant to be perceived as consisting of the sounds of the environment that the listeners hear while it is performed. Cage conceived "a silent piece" years earlier, but was reluctant to write it down; and indeed, the premiere (given by Tudor on August 29, 1952 at Woodstock, New York) caused an uproar in the audience. The reaction to 4′33″ was just a part of the larger picture, however: on the whole, it was the adoption of chance procedures that had disastrous consequences for Cage's reputation. The press, which used to react favorably to earlier percussion and prepared piano music, ignored his new works, and many valuable friendships and connections were lost. Pierre Boulez, who used to promote Cage's work in Europe, was opposed to Cage's use of chance, and so were other composers who came to prominence during the 1950s, i.e. Karlheinz Stockhausen and Iannis Xenakis.
From 1953 onwards, Cage was busy composing music for modern dance, particularly Cunningham's dances (Cage's partner adopted chance too, out of fascination for the movement of the human body), as well as developing new methods of using chance, in a series of works he referred to as The Ten Thousand Things. In Summer 1954 he moved out from New York and settled in a cooperative community in Stony Point, New York. The composer's financial situation gradually improved: in late 1954 he and Tudor were able to embark on a European tour. From 1956 to 1961 Cage taught classes in experimental composition at The New School, and during 1956–58 he also worked as an art director of a typography. Among the works completed during the last years of the decade were Concert for Piano and Orchestra (1957–58), a seminal work in the history of graphic notation, and Variations I (1958).
1960s: Fame
Cage was affiliated with Wesleyan University and collaborated with members of its Music Department from the 1950s until his death in 1992. At the University, the philosopher, poet, and professor of classics Norman O. Brown befriended Cage, an association that proved fruitful to both. In 1960 the composer was appointed a Fellow on the faculty of the Center for Advanced Studies (now the Center for Humanities) in the Liberal Arts and Sciences at Wesleyan, where he started teaching classes in experimental music. One of the early fruits of Cage's association with the University was the publication, in October 1961, by the Wesleyan University Press of , a collection of Cage's lectures and writings on a wide variety of subjects, including some writings (e.g. the famous Lecture on Nothing) that were "composed", using a complex time length scheme, much like some of Cage's music was composed. Silence was the first book by Cage; he went on to publish five more. It was Silence, however, that remained his most widely read and influential book. But by mid-1960s Cage was receiving so many commissions and requests for appearances, that he was not able to fulfill them. This was accompanied by a busy touring schedule; Cage's compositional output from the decade is accordingly scanty. As set forth by Cage, happenings were theatrical events that abandoned the traditional concept of stage-audience and occur without a sense of definite duration; instead, they are left to chance. They have a minimal script, with no plot. In fact, a "happening" is so-named because it occurs in the present, attempting to arrest the concept of passing time. Cage believed that theater was the closest route to integrating art and (real) life. The term "Happenings" was coined by Allan Kaprow, one of his students, who was to define it as a genre in the late fifties. Cage met Kaprow while on a mushroom hunt with George Segal and invited him to join his class. In following these developments Cage was strongly influenced by Antonin Artaud’s seminal treatise The Theatre and Its Double, and the happenings of this period can be viewed as a forerunner to the ensuing Fluxus movement. In October 1960, Mary Bauermeister's Cologne studio hosted a joint concert by Cage and the video artist Nam June Paik, who in the course of his Etude for Piano cut off Cage's tie and then washed his co-performer’s hair with shampoo.In 1967, Cage's A Year from Monday was first published by Wesleyan University Press. Cage's parents died during the decade: his father in 1964, and his mother in 1969. Cage had their ashes scattered in Ramapo Mountains, near Stony Point, and asked for the same to be done to him after his death.
1969–87: New departures
at Shiraz Arts Festival 1971]] Cage's work from the sixties features some of his largest and most ambitious, not to mention socially utopian pieces, reflecting the mood of the era yet also his absorption of the writings of both Marshall McLuhan, on the effects of new media, and R. Buckminster Fuller, on the power of technology to promote social change. HPSCHD (1969), a gargantuan and long-running multimedia work made in collaboration with Lejaren Hiller, incorporated the mass superimposition of seven harpsichords playing chance-determined excerpts from the works of Cage, Hiller, and a potted history of canonical classics, with fifty-two tapes of computer-generated sounds, 6,400 slides of designs many supplied by NASA, and shown from sixty-four slide projectors, with forty motion-picture films. The piece was initially rendered in a five-hour performance at the University of Illinois in 1969, in which the audience arrived after the piece had begun and left before it ended, wandering freely around the auditorium in the time for which they were there.However, also in 1969, Cage produced the first fully notated work in years: Cheap Imitation for piano. The piece is a chance-controlled reworking of Erik Satie's Socrate, and, as both listeners and Cage himself noted, openly sympathetic to its source. Although Cage's affection for Satie's music was well-known, it was highly unusual for him to compose a personal work, one in which the composer is present. When asked about this apparent contradiction, Cage replied: "Obviously, Cheap Imitation lies outside of what may seem necessary in my work in general, and that's disturbing. I'm the first to be disturbed by it." Cage's fondness for the piece resulted in a recording—a rare occurrence, since Cage disliked making recordings of his music—made in 1976. Overall, Cheap Imitation marked a major change in Cage's music: he turned again to writing fully notated works for traditional instruments, and tried out several new approaches, such as improvisation, which he previously discouraged, but was able to use in works from the 1970s, such as Child of Tree (1975).
Cheap Imitation became the last work Cage performed in public himself. Arthritis had troubled Cage since 1960, and by early 1970s his hands were painfully swollen and rendered him unable to perform. Nevertheless, he still played Cheap Imitation during the 1970s, before finally having to give up performing. Preparing manuscripts also became difficult: before, published versions of pieces were done in Cage's calligraphic script; now, manuscripts for publication had to be completed by assistants. Matters were complicated further by David Tudor's departure from performing, which happened in early 1970s. Tudor decided to concentrate on composition instead, and so Cage, for the first time in two decades, had to start relying on commissions from other performers, and their respective abilities. Such performers included Grete Sultan, Paul Zukofsky, Margaret Leng Tan, and many others. Aside from music, Cage continued writing books of prose and poetry (mesostics). M (John Cage book) was first published by Wesleyan University Press in 1973. In January 1978 Cage was invited by Kathan Brown of Crown Point Press to engage in printmaking, and Cage would go on to produce series of prints every year until his death; these, together with some late watercolors, constitute the largest portion of his extant visual art. In 1979 Cage's Empty Words was first published by Wesleyan University Press.
1987–92: Final years and death
In 1987 Cage completed a piece called Two, for flute and piano, dedicated to performers Roberto Fabbriciani and Carlo Neri. The title referred to the number of performers needed; the music consisted of short notated fragments to be played at any tempo within the indicated time constraints. Cage went on to write some forty such pieces, usually employing a variant of the same technique; together, these works are known as Number Pieces. The process of composition, in many of the later Number Pieces, was simple selection of pitch range and pitches from that range, using chance procedures; One11 (i.e. the eleventh piece for a single performer), completed in early 1992, was Cage's first and only foray into film. Another new direction, also taken in 1987, was opera: Cage produced five operas, all sharing the same title Europera, in 1987–91.Already in the course of the eighties, Cage's health worsened progressively: he suffered not only from arthritis, but also from sciatica and arteriosclerosis. He suffered a stroke that left the movement of his left leg restricted, and, in 1985, broke an arm. During this time, Cage pursued a macrobiotic diet. Nevertheless, ever since arthritis started plaguing him, the composer was aware of his age, and, as biographer David Revill observed, "the fire which he began to incorporate in his visual work in 1985 is not only the fire he has set aside for so long—the fire of passion—but also fire as transitoriness and fragility." On August 11, 1992, while preparing evening tea for himself and Cunningham, Cage suffered another stroke. He was taken to the nearest hospital, where he died on the morning of August 12. According to his wishes, Cage's body was cremated, and the ashes scattered in the Ramapo Mountains, near Stony Point, New York, the same place where Cage scattered the ashes of his parents, years before. Merce Cunningham outlived his partner by 17 years, and died peacefully in his home, of natural causes, on July 26, 2009.
Music
Early works, rhythmic structure, and new approaches to harmony
Cage's first completed pieces are currently lost. According to the composer, the earliest works were very short pieces for piano, composed using complex mathematical procedures and lacking in "sensual appeal and expressive power." Cage then started producing pieces by improvising and writing down the results, until Richard Buhlig stressed to him the importance of structure. Most works from the early 1930s, such as Sonata for Clarinet (1933) and Composition for 3 Voices (1934), are highly chromatic and betray Cage's interest in counterpoint. Around the same time, the composer also developed a type of a tone row technique with 25-note rows. After studies with Schoenberg, who never taught dodecaphony to his students, Cage developed another tone row technique, in which the row was split into short motives, which would then be repeated and transposed according to a set of rules. This approach was first used in Two Pieces for Piano (c. 1935), and then, with modifications, in larger works such as Metamorphosis and Five Songs (both 1938).Soon after Cage started writing percussion music and music for modern dance, he started using a technique that placed the rhythmic structure of the piece into the foreground. In Imaginary Landscape No. 1 (1939) there are four large sections of 16, 17, 18, and 19 bars, and each section is divided into four subsections, the first three of which were all 5 bars long. First Construction (in Metal) (1939) expands on the concept: there are five sections of 4, 3, 2, 3, and 4 units respectively. Each unit contains 16 bars, and is divided the same way: 4 bars, 3 bars, 2 bars, etc. Finally, the musical content of the piece is based on sixteen motives. Such "nested proportions", as Cage called them, became a regular feature of his music throughout the 1940s. The technique was elevated to great complexity in later pieces such as Sonatas and Interludes for prepared piano (1946–48), in which many proportions used non-integer numbers (1¼, ¾, 1¼, ¾, 1½, and 1½ for Sonata I, for example), or A Flower, a song for voice and closed piano, in which two sets of proportions are used simultaneously.
In late 1940s Cage started developing further methods of breaking away with traditional harmony. For instance, in String Quartet in Four Parts (1950) Cage first composed a number of gamuts: chords with fixed instrumentation. The piece progresses from one gamut to another. In each instance the gamut was selected only based on whether it contains the note necessary for the melody, and so the rest of the notes do not form any directional harmony.
Chance
involves obtaining a hexagram by random generation (such as tossing coins), then reading the chapter associated with that hexagram.]] Chart system was also used (along with nested proportions) for the large piano work Music of Changes (1951), only here material would be selected from the charts by using the I Ching. All of Cage's music since 1951 was composed using chance procedures, most commonly using the I Ching. For example, works from Music for Piano were based on paper imperfections: the imperfections themselves provided pitches, and the I Ching was used to determine the methods of sound production, or the rhythms, etc. A whole series of works was created by applying chance operations, i.e. the I Ching, to star charts: Atlas Eclipticalis (1961–62), and a series of etudes: Etudes Australes (1974–75), Freeman Etudes (1977–90), and Etudes Boreales (1978). Cage's etudes are all extremely difficult to perform, a characteristic dictated by Cage's social and political views: the difficulty would ensure that "a performance would show that the impossible is not impossible"—this being Cage's answer to the notion that solving the world's political and social problems is impossible. Cage described himself as an anarchist, and was influenced by Henry David Thoreau.Another series of works applied chance procedures to pre-existing music by other composers: Cheap Imitation (1969; based on Erik Satie), Some of "The Harmony of Maine" (1978; based on Belcher), and Hymns and Variations (1979). In these works, Cage would borrow the rhythmic structure of the originals and fill it with pitches determined through chance procedures, or just replace some of the originals' pitches. Yet another series of works, the so-called Number Pieces, all completed during the last five years of the composer's life, make use of time brackets: the score consists of short fragments with indications of when to start and to end them (e.g. from anywhere between 1′15″ and 1′45″, and to anywhere from 2′00″ to 2′30″).
Cage's method of using the I Ching was far from simple randomization, however. The procedures varied from composition to composition, and were usually complex. For example, in the case of Cheap Imitation, the exact questions asked to the I Ching were these: # Which of the seven modes, if we take as modes the seven scales beginning on white notes and remaining on white notes, which of those am I using? # Which of the twelve possible chromatic transpositions am I using? # For this phrase for which this transposition of this mode will apply, which note am I using of the seven to imitate the note that Satie wrote? In another example of late music by Cage, Etudes Australes, the compositional procedure involved placing a transparent strip on the star chart, identifying the pitches from the chart, transferring them to paper, then asking the I Ching which of these pitches were to remain single, and which should become parts of aggregates (chords), and the aggregates were selected from a table of some 550 possible aggregates, compiled beforehand.
Finally, some of Cage's works, particularly those completed during the 1960s, feature instructions to the performer, rather than fully notated music. The score of Variations I (1958) presents the performer with six transparent squares, one with points of various sizes, five with five intersecting lines. The performer combines the squares and uses lines and points as a coordinate system, in which the lines are axes of various characteristics of the sounds, such as lowest frequency, simplest overtone structure, etc. Some of Cage's graphic scores (e.g. Concert for Piano and Orchestra, Fontana Mix (both 1958)) present the performer with similar difficulties. Still other works from the same period consist just of text instructions. The score of 0'00" (1962; also known as 4'33" No. 2) consists of a single sentence: "In a situation provided with maximum amplification, perform a disciplined action." The first performance had Cage write that sentence. Musicircus (1967) simply invites the performers to assemble and play together. The first Musicircus featured multiple performers and groups in a large space who were all to commence and stop playing at two particular time periods, with instructions on when to play individually or in groups within these two periods. The result was a mass superimposition of many different musics on top of one another as determined by chance distribution, producing an event with a specifically theatric feel. Many Musicircuses have subsequently been held, and continue to occur even after Cage's death. This concept of circus was to remain important to Cage throughout his life and featured strongly in such pieces as Roaratorio, an Irish circus on Finnegans Wake (1979), a many-tiered rendering in sound of both his text Writing for the Second Time Through Finnegans Wake, and traditional musical and field recordings made around Ireland. The piece was based on James Joyce's famous novel, Finnegans Wake, which was one of Cage's favorite books, and one from which he derived texts for several more of his works.
Improvisation
Since chance procedures were used by Cage to eliminate the composer's and the performer's likes and dislikes from music, Cage disliked the concept of improvisation, which is inevitably linked to the performer's preferences. However, in a number of works beginning in the 1970s, he found ways to incorporate improvisation. In Child of Tree (1975) and Branches (1976) the performers are asked to use certain species of plants as instruments, for example the cactus. The structure of the pieces is determined through the chance of their choices, as is the musical output; the performers had no knowledge of the instruments. In Inlets (1977) the performers play large water-filled conch shells - by carefully tipping the shell several times, it is possible to achieve a bubble forming inside, which produced sound. Yet, as it is impossible to predict when this would happen, the performers had to continue tipping the shells - as a result the performance was dictated by pure chance.
Visual art, writings, and other activities
Although Cage started painting in his youth, he gave it up in order to concentrate on music instead. His first mature visual project, Not Wanting to Say Anything About Marcel, dates from 1969. The work comprises two lithographs and a group of what Cage called plexigrams: silk screen printing on plexiglas panels. The panels and the lithographs all consist of bits and pieces of words in different typefaces, all governed by chance operations.From 1978 to his death Cage worked at Crown Point Press, producing series of prints every year. The earliest project completed there was the etching Score Without Parts (1978), created from fully notated instructions, and based on various combinations of drawings by Henry David Thoreau. This was followed, the same year, by Seven Day Diary, which Cage drew with his eyes closed, but which conformed to a strict structure developed using chance operations. Finally, Thoreau's drawings informed the last works produced in 1978, Signals.
Between 1979 and 1982 Cage produced a number of large series of prints: Changes and Disappearances (1979–80), On the Surface (1980–82), and Déreau (1982). These were the last works in which he used engraving. In 1983 he started using various unconventional materials such as cotton batting, foam, etc., and then used stones and fire (Eninka, Variations, Ryoanji, etc.) to create his visual works. In 1988–1990 he produced watercolors at the Mountain Lake Workshop. The only film Cage produced was one of the Number Pieces, One11, commissioned by composer and film director Henning Lohner who worked with Cage to produce and direct the 90-minute monochrome film. It was completed only weeks before his death in 1992. One11 consists entirely of images of chance-determined play of electric light. It premiered in Cologne, Germany, on September 19, 1992, accompanied by the live performance of the orchestra piece 103.
Throughout his adult life, Cage was also active as lecturer and writer. Some of his lectures were included in several books he published, the first of which was (1961). Silence included not only simple lectures, but also texts executed in experimental layouts, and works such as Lecture on Nothing (1959), which were composed in rhythmic structures. Subsequent books also featured different types of content, from lectures on music to poetry—Cage's mesostics.
Cage was also an avid amateur mycologist: he co-founded the New York Mycological Society with four friends, Prominent critics of serialism, such as the Greek composer Iannis Xenakis, were similarly hostile towards Cage: for Xenakis, the adoption of chance in music was "an abuse of language and [...] an abrogation of a composer's function."
An article by teacher and critic Michael Steinberg, Tradition and Responsibility, criticized avant-garde music in general:
The rise of music that is totally without social commitment also increases the separation between composer and public, and represents still another form of departure from tradition. The cynicism with which this particular departure seems to have been made is perfectly symbolized in John Cage's account of a public lecture he had given: "Later, during the question period, I gave one of six previously prepared answers regardless of the question asked. This was a reflection of my engagement in Zen." While Mr. Cage's famous silent piece [i.e. 4′33″], or his Landscapes for a dozen radio receivers may be of little interest as music, they are of enormous importance historically as representing the complete abdication of the artist's power.Cage's aesthetic position was criticized by, among others, prominent writer and critic Douglas Kahn. In his 1999 book Noise, Water, Meat Kahn acknowledged the influence Cage had on culture, but noted that "one of the central effects of Cage's battery of silencing techniques was a silencing of the social."While much of Cage's work remains controversial, his influence on countless composers, artists, and writers is undeniable. After Cage introduced chance, Boulez, Stockhausen, and Xenakis remained critical, yet all adopted chance procedures in some of their works (although in a much more restricted manner); and Stockhausen's piano writing in his later Klavierstücke was influenced by Cage's Music of Changes and David Tudor. Other composers who adopted chance procedures in their works included Witold Lutosławski, Mauricio Kagel, and many others. Music in which some of the composition and/or performance is left to chance was labelled aleatoric music—a term popularized by Pierre Boulez. Helmut Lachenmann's work was influenced by Cage's work with extended techniques.
Cage's rhythmic structure experiments and his interest in sound influenced an even greater number of composers, starting at first with his close American associates Morton Feldman and Christian Wolff (and other American composers, such as La Monte Young), and then spreading to Europe. For example, almost all composers of the English experimental school acknowledge his influence: Michael Parsons, Christopher Hobbs, John White, Gavin Bryars, who studied under Cage briefly, and even Howard Skempton, a composer seemingly very different from Cage, and one whose work has been described as "the emancipation of consonance." Cage's influence is also evident in the Far East: one of Japan's most prominent classical composers of the 20th century, Tōru Takemitsu, was influenced by his music.
Cage's influence was also acknowledged by rock bands, such as Sonic Youth (who performed some of the Number Pieces) and Stereolab (who named a song after Cage), composer and rock and jazz guitarist Frank Zappa, and various noise music artists and bands: indeed, one writer traced the origin of noise music to 4′33″. The development of electronic music was also influenced by Cage: in the mid-1970s Brian Eno's label Obscure Records released works by Cage. Prepared piano, which Cage popularized, is featured heavily on Aphex Twin's 2001 album Drukqs. Cage's work as musicologist helped popularize Erik Satie's music, and his friendship with Abstract expressionist artists such as Robert Rauschenberg helped introduce his ideas into visual art. Cage's ideas also found their way into sound design: for example, Academy Award-winning sound designer Gary Rydstrom cited Cage's work as a major influence.
==Archives==
The archive of the John Cage Trust is held at Bard College in upstate New York..
The John Cage Music Manuscript Collection held by the Music Division of The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts contains most of the composer's musical manuscripts, including sketches, worksheets, realizations, and unfinished works. The John Cage Papers are held in Special Collections and Archives department of Wesleyan University's Olin Library in Middletown, Connecticut. They contain manuscripts, interviews, fan mail, and ephemera. Other material, including clippings, gallery and exhibition catalogs, a collection of Cage's books and serials, posters, objects, exhibition and literary announcement postcards, and brochures from conferences and other organizations The John Cage Collection at Northwestern University in Illinois contains the composer's correspondence, ephemera, and the Notations collection.
Cultural references
The Tragically Hip recorded a song called "Tiger the Lion" for their Music @ Work album which refers to John Cage and some of his ideas. (see liner notes on album) Sonic Youth on their SYR4 album perform two realizations of Cage's piece Six and one of Four8. "John Cage Is Dead" is a track on Mickey Hart's Mystery Box album. Who Put John Cage on the Guestlist? is the name of an album by Norwegian electronic research group Hemmelig Tempo. "Jaune d'Oeuf en Cage" (Yolk in a Cage) is a track by David Fenech on his first album Grand Huit. It is a joke around the John Cage / Jaune Cage homophone in French. In the musical Rent, Cage's name is mentioned during the song "La Vie Bohème" among other artists. In December 2010, 18 years posthumously, Cage made his debut in the UK singles charts with "4' 33" (Cage Against the Machine Version)". The piece peaked at number 21 on the Christmas UK chart.
Footnotes
Notes
References
Books
Bernstein, David W., and Hatch, Christopher (ed.). 2001. Writings through John Cage's Music, Poetry, and Art. University of Chicago Press. ISBN 0226044076 Boulez, Pierre, and Cage, John. 1995. The Boulez-Cage Correspondence. Edited by Robert Samuels and Jean-Jacques Nattiez, translated by Robert Samuels. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0521485584 Brown, Kathan. 2001. John Cage Visual Art: To Sober and Quiet the Mind. Crown Point Press. ISBN 1891300164, ISBN 978-1891300165 Cage, John. 1973. Silence: Lectures and Writings, Wesleyan University Press Paperback (first edition 1961). ISBN 0-8195-6028-6 Fetterman, William. 1996. John Cage's Theatre Pieces: Notations and Performances. Routledge. ISBN 3718656434 Kostelanetz, Richard. 2003. Conversing with John Cage, Routledge. ISBN 0-415-93792-2 Nicholls, David (ed.). 2002. The Cambridge Companion to John Cage. Cambridge University Press, 2002. ISBN 0521789680 Nicholls, David. 2007. John Cage. University of Illinois Press. ISBN 0252032152 Patterson, David W. (ed.). John Cage: Music, Philosophy, and Intention, 1933–1950. Routledge, 2002. ISBN 0815329954 Perloff, Marjorie, and Junkerman, Charles. 1994. John Cage: Composed in America. University of Chicago Press, 1994. ISBN 0226660575 Pritchett, James. 1993. The Music of John Cage. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0521565448 Revill, David. 1993. The Roaring Silence: John Cage – a Life. Arcade Publishing. ISBN 1559702206, ISBN 978-1559702201
Encyclopedias
Taruskin, Richard. 2005. Oxford History of Western Music, The. Vol. 5. Oxford: Oxford UP, Inc. Indeterminacy pp. 55–101.
Dissertations and articles
Campana, Deborah. 1985. Form and Structure in the Music of John Cage. Dissertation, Northwestern University. Curreri, Enrico. 2008. W: A Case Study in John-Cage-Centered Music Therapy. MA Thesis, New York University. Emmerik, Paul van. 1996. Thema's en Variaties: Systematische Tendensen in de Compositietechnieken van John Cage. Dissertation, University of Amsterdam.Haskins, Rob. 2004. "An Anarchic Society of Sounds": The Number Pieces of John Cage. Ph.D., Musicology, Eastman School of Music, University of Rochester.
External links
General information and catalogues
A Project by John Cage called ORGAN2/ASLSP is the longest concert ever created. John Cage Database, includes a complete catalogue of Cage's music with details on individual compositions, as well as a discography, a bibliography and a list of forthcoming performances of Cage's work. A John Cage Compendium, website by Cage scholar Paul van Emmerik, in collaboration with performer Herbert Henck and András Wilheim. Includes exhaustive catalogues and bibliography, chronology of Cage's life, etc. Larry Solomon's John Cage Pages, a complete catalogue of Cage's music and a filmography, as well as other materials. Silence: Scholarly discussion of the music of John Cage James Pritchett: Writings, articles on Cage's music in HTML and PDF form by Cage scholar James Pritchett. Edition Peters: John Cage Biography and Works, Cage's principal publisher since 1961. Guide to the John Cage Mycology Collection Silence/Stories: related texts and poems by, among others, Lowell Cross, AP Crumlish, Karlheinz Essl, Raymond Federman, August Highland, George Koehler, Richard Kostelanetz, Ian S. Macdonald, Beat Streuli, Dan Waber, Sigi Waters and John Whiting
Link collections
John Cage Online
Specific topics
Beyst, Stefan. John Cage's Europeras: a light- and soundscape as musical manifesto, essay. Bunger, Richard. The Well-Prepared Piano, Colorado College Music Press, 1973. Kasper, Ulrike. "Sounds Visions, The Work of Jacques Pourcher, Perspectives on John Cage", essay on the exhibition "John Cage and Jacques Pourcher, Works on Paper", Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, USA. The Music of Chance, article from the UK Guardian newspaper, quotes from various people who knew Cage. ORGAN2/ASLSP: As Slow as Possible — John-Cage-Orgelprojekt Halberstadt, Web site about a current ongoing performance of one of the longest pieces of music ever written, lasting 639 years; see: As Slow As Possible. The online music review La Folia has an in-depth article about 1951 and Cage’s Music of Changes
Listening
In Conversation with Morton Feldman, 1966, Part 1 In Conversation with Morton Feldman, 1966, Part 2 In Conversation with Morton Feldman, 1966, Part 3 In Conversation with Morton Feldman, 1966, Part 4 In Conversation with Morton Feldman, 1966, Part 5
Media
John Cage at UbuWeb: historical, sound, film. John Cage's etchings at the Crown Point Press website Art of the States: John Cage, six works by the composer Indeterminacy, Cage's short stories taken from various publications and accessed in random order. FontanaMixer: computer program by Karlheinz Essl which generates a realtime version of John Cage's "Fontana Mix" (1958) Other Minds Archive: John Cage interviewed by Jonathan Cott, streaming audio Other Minds Archive: John Cage and David Tudor Concert at The San Francisco Museum of Art (January 16, 1965), streaming audio Suite for Toy Piano (1948) performed by Margaret Leng Tan at the Other Minds Music Festival in 1999 at the Cowell Theater in San Francisco. 1982 performance of Speech for 5 radios and reel (1955) on YouTube Water Walk on YouTube from Cage's appearance on the game show I've Got a Secret in January 1960. 4′33″ and Sonatas and Interludes for prepared piano performed by James Tenney at SASSAS sound, concert archive. Excerpts available on 'YouTube': 1, 2 John Cage, Aria performed by Elena Antonenko The Anarchy of Silence. John Cage and Experimental Art (2009) a lecture by Julia E. Robinson on occasion of Cage's exhibition at the MACBA, Barcelona Notes towards a re-reading of the “Roaratorio” the work of John Cage and his special relationship to radio at Ràdio Web MACBA The Rest isn't Silence... it doesn't exist! Analytical material and recordings going back to the first rehearsal and performance of Imaginary Landscape No 4 in 1951.
Category:1912 births Category:1992 deaths Category:20th-century classical composers Category:American anarchists Category:American composers Category:American writers Category:Anarchist poets Category:Harvard University people Category:Anarchist musicians Category:Experimental composers Category:Fluxus Category:Guggenheim Fellows Category:LGBT musicians from the United States Category:LGBT composers Category:Opera composers Category:People from Los Angeles, California Category:Western mystics Category:Black Mountain College faculty Category:Wesleyan University faculty Category:Contemporary classical music performers Category:American Zen Buddhists Category:American experimental musicians Category:Avant-garde pianists Category:Cornish College of the Arts faculty
This text is licensed under the Creative Commons CC-BY-SA License. This text was originally published on Wikipedia and was developed by the Wikipedia community.
| Name | Henry Threadgill |
|---|---|
| Background | non_vocal_instrumentalist |
| Birth name | Henry Luther Threadgill |
| Born | February 15, 1944 |
| Origin | Chicago, Illinois, USA |
| Instrument | Alto saxophone, Flute |
| Genre | JazzAvant-garde jazz |
| Occupation | MusicianBandleaderComposerSideman |
| Years active | 1960s–present |
| Notable instruments | Alto Saxophone |
Henry Threadgill (born February 15, 1944, in Chicago, Illinois) is an American composer, saxophonist and flautist. Threadgill came to prominence in the 1970s leading ensembles with unusual instrumentation and often incorporating a range of non-jazz genres. ''Henry Threadgill, aside from being a remarkable alto saxophone player, is one of the most imaginative of jazz composers today. Not long ago Peter Watrous of the New York Times described Threadgill as “perhaps the most important jazz composer of his generation.” Recent concerts in Chicago have led the local critics to speak of him as a revolutionary figure, altering the manner in which jazz itself is going. Said Howard Reich, jazz critic of the Chicago Tribune, “It would be difficult to overestimate Henry Threagill’s role in perpetually altering the meaning of jazz..…He has changed our underlying assumptions of what jazz can and should be.”' - An excerpt from a chapter on Henry Threadgill from And They All Sang (published 2005) by late Pulitzer winning author and disc jockey Studs Terkel – a book about “forty of the greatest and most deeply human musical figures of our time.”
He was one of the original members of the legendary AACM (Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians) in his hometown of Chicago and worked under the guidance of Muhal Richard Abrams before leaving to tour with a gospel band. In 1967, he enlisted in the U.S. Army, playing with a rock band in Vietnam in 1967 and 1968. He was discharged in 1969.
Upon his return to Chicago he rejoined fellow AACM members Fred Hopkins and Steve McCall, forming a trio which would eventually become the group Air, one of the most celebrated and critically acclaimed avant-garde jazz groups of the 1970s and 1980s. In the meantime, Threadgill had moved to New York City to begin pursuing his own musical visions, which explored musical genres in innovative ways thanks to his daringly unique group collaborations. His first group, X-75, was a nonet consisting of four reed players, four bass players and a vocalist.
The group's unorthodox instrumentation included two drummers, bass, cello, trumpet and trombone, in addition to Threadgill's alto and flute. Among the players who filled these roles were drummers akLaff, John Betsch, Reggie Nicholson and Newman Baker; bassist Fred Hopkins; cellist Deidre Murray; trumpeters Rasul Siddik and Ted Daniels; cornetist Olu Dara; and trombonists Ray Anderson, Bill Lowe and Craig Harris.
During the 1990s, Threadgill pushed the musical boundaries even further with his ensemble Very Very Circus. In addition to Threadgill, the group's core consisted of two tubas, two electric guitars, a trombone or french horn, and drums. With this group he explored more complex and highly structured forms of composition, augmenting the group with everything from latin percussion to French horn to violin to accordion and an array of exotic instruments and vocalists.
Threadgill composed and recorded with other unusual instrumentations, such as a flute quartet (Flute Force Four, a one-time project from 1990); and combinations of four cellos and four acoustic guitars (on Makin' A Move).
By this time Threadgill's place amongst the upper echelon of the avant-garde was secured, so prolific in fact that he was signed by Columbia Records for three albums (a rarity for musicians of his kind). Since the dissolution of Very Very Circus, Threadgill has continued in his iconoclastic ways with ensembles such as Make A Move, Zooid and Make A Move included guitarists Brandon Ross and James Emery and drummer J.T. Lewis. Zooid, a sextet with tuba (Jose Davila), acoustic guitar (Liberty Ellman), cello (Christopher Hoffman), drums (Elliot Kavee) and acoustic bass (Stomu Takeishi) has been the primary vehicle for Threadgill's most current compositions throughout the 2000s.
With Chico Freeman
With Roscoe Mitchell
With Frank Walton
With Material
With Sly & Robbie
With Bahia Black
With Leroy Jenkins
With Kip Hanrahan
With Billy Bang
With Sola
With Abiodun Oyewole
With Flute Force Four
With Douglas Ewart
With Jean-Paul Bourelly
With Ejigayehu "Gigi" Shibabaw
With Lucky Peterson
with Dafnis Prieto
Category:Avant-garde jazz musicians Category:Jazz alto saxophonists Category:American saxophonists Category:American jazz flautists Category:1944 births Category:Living people Category:People from Chicago, Illinois Category:Musicians from Chicago, Illinois Category:American composers Category:African American musicians Category:African American classical composers Category:American military personnel of the Vietnam War Category:Pi Recordings artists Category:Columbia Records artists
This text is licensed under the Creative Commons CC-BY-SA License. This text was originally published on Wikipedia and was developed by the Wikipedia community.
In 1876, Chadwick accepted a faculty position within the music program at Olivet College and was a valued instructor as well as administrator. While at Olivet, Chadwick founded the Music Teachers National Association. The first evidence of his interest in composing appeared during this time, from a performance of his Canon in E-flat dated 6 November 1876.
Realizing that his musical career in the U.S. would be limited without further studies in Europe, Chadwick headed to Germany like many other composers of his generation. He studied in Leipzig at the Royal Conservatory of Music under Carl Reinecke (1824–1910) and Salomon Jadassohn (1830–1902). Chadwick's most significant compositions as a student there include two string quartets (no. 1 1877-8, no. 2 premiered 1879) and the concert overture Rip Van Winkle. They helped confirm his position as a promising young American composer among his German contemporaries, from whom he received favorable critiques.
After his two-year stay in Leipzig, Chadwick traveled around Europe with a group of artists who called themselves the "Duveneck Boys". They were led by the young and charismatic Frank Duveneck, who was well-known for his portrait works in the style of Velázquez. The group was based in Munich, then major culture center second to Paris. Chadwick also stayed in France with the group, where he was taken with the French lifestyle and influenced by the emerging Impressionist movement.
Chadwick resumed his compositional studies with Josef Rheinberger (1839–1901) at the Hochschule für Musik in Munich. Rheinberger was known as a skilled musical craftsman who incorporated polyphony with creativity and clarity. Thus Chadwick benefited from Rheinberger's extensive knowledge of the classics, both instrumental and choral.
In 1897, Chadwick was appointed Director of New England Conservatory. Known in the Boston arts circle as talented, personable, and energetic, he was crucial in transforming NEC into a respectable school of music. Chadwick implemented features that resembled those of the German conservatories of his experience. He established a variety of performing ensembles, and students were required to take more music theory and history classes. He had some influence in the establishment of Phi Mu Alpha Sinfonia music fraternity, which was established at the conservatory in the fall of 1898. He also invited members of the Boston Symphony Orchestra as private teachers to the students, along with being an inspiring teacher himself. His students described him as "demanding, though fair-minded and witty".
His important early overtures are Rip Van Winkle, Melpomene, and Thalia. Set around Washington Irving's tale of the same name, Rip Van Winkle was his first orchestral work that established his claim to fame in Europe and America. Melpomene is a rich and lush work reminiscent of Wagner, and the comedy overture Thalia is imitative of Mendelssohn's light and lively style. The Quintet for Piano and Strings is a lyrical work that show a melodic gift despite some awkward moments.
He wrote a number of patriotic songs during World War I, including These to the Front, The Fighting Men, and perhaps his best known, Land of Our Hearts, first performed in the Norfolk Festival in June 1918, featuring a fluid syllabic setting of a poem by John Hall Ingram.
Category:1854 births Category:1931 deaths Category:Romantic composers Category:20th-century classical composers Category:American composers Category:People from Lowell, Massachusetts Category:New England Conservatory faculty
This text is licensed under the Creative Commons CC-BY-SA License. This text was originally published on Wikipedia and was developed by the Wikipedia community.
![Max Brand Synthesizer (1968) [11], also known as “Moogtonium” [12], is a custom made Mixtur-Trautonium version of Moog modular](http://web.archive.org./web/20110522182639im_/http://cdn.wn.com/pd/d4/e8/1a232c2c5cf865e3310f807daed1_thumb.jpg "Max Brand Synthesizer (1968) [11], also known as “Moogtonium” [12], is a custom made Mixtur-Trautonium version of Moog modular")
