Boomer Burghers and Postmaximalism
May 18, 8pm at Greenwich House is my next Boomer Bürgherlich work -- Clarinet Trio, "1918"
Reserve HERE
A successful romantic composer is humbly antisocial, maybe with a bit of picaresque misleading.
Take the Burghers outside of themselves for a spell before putting them comfortably back in their plush seats.
The minimalists accomplished a miracle. They convinced our boomer Burghers that they can venture out of the safe confines of rock music.
David Del Tredici took that further and convinced our Burghers that they can like something that makes connections to the past. DDT is *classical music*. And then David does this really amazing thing. He is able to set into motion some modernist things from his Roger Sessions youth. He can snare them and then dazzle maybe even insult them, but still leave them very happy. David Del Tredici's work is thoroughy picaresque.
Andrew Imbrie’s *Adam* could be embraced by the boomer Burghers. Riverside Symphony with NY Virtuoso singers gave it a promising launch a few years ago.
If a postmaximalist is a Princetonian who is not afraid of being embraced by the Burghers, I feel Imbrie qualifies.It is stunning. Disturbing that the New York Phil does not program it. The NY Times did not get behind it because the newspaper of record was mixed up with a crusade. And it was so cowardly for the San Francisco Symphony to turn its back on Andrew Embrie, after championing him for such a long time.
Sitting down to perform Mario Davidovsky's "Ladino Songs" at the Library of Congress, I think I spoke up and said that I feel this is bourgeois music.
Carter and Babbitt stepped back from the brink in their later works. I take credit for the diatonicism in Babbitt's Swan Song #1. I kept telling him to be more practical. He was very nervous before premiere of his piano concerto -- Levine at the big Carnegie. We were not thrilled by the performance I told Milton the orchestra would have to memorize it.
Arry pieces can contend for the Burgher space. Babbitt's Danci is very sweet, but still a bit too quirky for the Boomer Burghers. I think my arary pieces are quite Bürgherlich --
This Gillian Welch cover is a multiply partitioned array, and this setting of the song finishes my piano trio "Mille Regrez" that will be performed in Salzburg on July 5 of this year.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uoQwLkstBL0
Wuorinen was going in a good direction and he could have been a neo-boourgeois if he lived a couple more years. His Cygnus piece needs to be recorded as soon as possible.
This piece holds a conversation with Wuorinen's treatise on composition:
And Charles asked to hear my music before composing his guitar solo, "Hexadactyl".
Hexadactyl is a riff on the local and less local minor thirds in my Kern Variations --
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Wuorinen's Hexadactyl
Herrick's Oratorio is one of David Del Tredici's masterpieces --
William Anderson
I compose, play plucked instruments, run ensembles, produce concerts, and advocate for new music, I soaked up contemporary American music for 30 years, working directly with composers from all over the map. In the last 20 years I began composing works that draw on that experience, with a particular concern for finding a coherent way to make reconciling musics that were sealed off from one another. How to make embarrassingly simple and charming music work with the most complex musical modalities? Tipping in this direction has made me aware of the dangers of grasping too firmly onto any one notion.
I've come to Macherey's vision that our shadow (what we're *not*) is radiantly present in our work. So it's perfectly reasonable to *love everything*. We're imbricated. --
**The true necessity of the text manifests itself in the fact that not a word of it can be changed and nothing can be added, even though it appears at each moment as though a new topic could be chosen, an alternative narrative selected. But it is precisely this ceaseless shadowy presence of other possible phrases which could be pronounced, this ineradicable sense that things could have been other than they are, which enforces the constraining necessity of the text we actually have before us.**--Macherey