"Some poets don't want music messing up their words," the composer Charles Wuorinen said during a panel discussion before the New York premiere of his cantata "It Happens Like This" at the Guggenheim Museum on Sunday evening.
Sex, longing and loss: Those are the words the composer Ricky Ian Gordon chose to describe the underlying themes of his music in an interview with the playwright Richard Nelson on Sunday evening at the Peter B. Lewis Theater in the Guggenheim Museum.
While a chorus is used in the second and third movements of Glass's Seventh Symphony, also known as A Toltec Symphony, the text contains no actual words; the composer states that it is instead formed "from loose syllables that add to the evocative context of the overall orchestral texture".
In Andriessen's own words: "Many composers view the act of composing as, somehow, above social conditioning.
I OBSESS over those three words, American Composers Orchestra," said Michael Geller, the executive director of the New York institution of that name.
Dutilleux believed in composition as a quasi-sacred occupation and permitted himself to utter (for him) harsh words about composers who spent more time in front of television cameras than in front of their manuscript paper.
Just before he does so, the Angel reappears to help him into heaven, and the scene ends with a tremendous chorale for chorus and orchestra, reaching blazing C major on the last word of the composer's own libretto: "joy".
His early signature piece, Shaker Loops, performed with brilliant and tremulous quake and shake by the LSO String Orchestra, dates from the late 1970s when the long, repetitive new style of minimalism was still a dirty word – as the composer reminded us in a short, non-repetitive talk from the stage.
Bad news for Electronic Arts today, with word that the composer of the University of Nevada at Las Vegas (UNLV) fight song is suing the publisher for copyright infringement.
