Mahler is now an essential composer for me, just as he is for music lovers all over the world.
Zorn is an essential composer for me, because he is living proof of the truism that everything – every sound, every style, even, more controversially, every culture – is available to composers today to use as musical material.
The latest installment in the Miller Theater's essential Composer Portraits series is devoted to Benedict Mason, an English composer who was born in 1955 and began his professional life as a filmmaker before turning to composition in the 1980's.
THOMAS ADÈS AND KIRILL GERSTEIN Mr. Adès, one of our essential composers and a fine pianist, is joined at Carnegie Hall by another excellent set of hands in works by Debussy, Stravinsky (Shostakovich's transcription of the "Symphony of Psalms," again!), Lutoslawski, Ravel and, yes, Mr. Adès.
The quartet was formed at the Eastman School of Music in order to pursue an expanded classical repertoire, both by performing works from pivotal twentieth-century composers in sharply designed programs and by collaborating with essential living composers.
of changes in the art, and act, of composition, Princeton's Graduate Program in Composition considers it essential for composers to be non-classicists, and to engage in all musics – high and low, American and European, Eastern and Western, live and electronic, free and strict, college and club.
The courage to discard is essential, but this composer is something of a pack rat.
Just as a chef can't experiment in the kitchen without familiarity with essential ingredients, a composer can't innovate without basic mastery of the craft.
Mr. Fleisher managed to communicate something essential about each composer without trying to mimic a period sound: the orchestra shaded, his own playing clear as water.
(Midgette) PAULINE OLIVEROS and IONE (Wednesday) The Mercantile Library, which boasts a second-floor reading room of an ideally intimate size for chamber music, has joined the essential Meet the Composer organization for the concert series "MTC at the Merc".
OMAR SOULEYMAN Omar Souleyman, from Syria, carried the propulsive, hand-clapping Middle Eastern wedding music called dabke worldwide by distilling it to its danceable beat and the accompaniment of his essential collaborator, the composer Rizan Sa'id, whose nasal-toned keyboard lines constantly answer and goad Mr. Souleyman's vocal refrains.
