tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-85149642009-06-22T19:44:10.465-04:00101 essential pieces of 20th Century concert music and perpetual variations on the musical lifeSteve Hickenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12939881701345686354noreply@blogger.comBlogger447125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8514964.post-36535315636906158222009-06-22T19:41:00.001-04:002009-06-22T19:44:10.475-04:00

Sony Classical (in conjunction with Carnegie Hall) has released the original recording of Terry Riley’s epochal In C (1964, open instrumentation) in a digitally remastered version on compact disc (Sony 88697 45368 2). Countless musicians and artists, myself included, of all stripes have talked and written about In C, most often focusing on its liberating power.A good deal of the talk about In C

Steve Hickenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12939881701345686354noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8514964.post-16342985986000273312009-05-26T19:59:00.000-04:002009-05-26T19:59:18.710-04:00

In response to this post by the always thought-provoking Daniel Wolf, I've begun a set of prose scores called twitterpieces. They will appear at my Twitter page, www.twitter.com/stevehicken. Everything you need to perform them will be included in the tweet. The first will appear shortly after this is posted.

Steve Hickenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12939881701345686354noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8514964.post-62859091434593238822009-05-19T18:02:00.000-04:002009-05-19T18:03:21.671-04:00

CD Review, Sequenza21.

Steve Hickenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12939881701345686354noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8514964.post-69160219977444034242009-05-18T17:39:00.001-04:002009-05-19T18:03:51.630-04:00

CD Review, Sequenza21.

Steve Hickenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12939881701345686354noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8514964.post-61427432769730532072009-04-29T19:44:00.000-04:002009-04-29T19:44:11.922-04:00

Review, Sequenza21.

Steve Hickenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12939881701345686354noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8514964.post-46226969645610864652009-04-20T19:15:00.000-04:002009-04-20T19:15:00.958-04:00

Congratulations to Steve Reich, winner of the 2009 Pulitzer Prize in Music. Mr. Reich won for his Double Sextet. His music was extremely important to my development as a composer, performer, writer, and listener. Music for Mallet Instruments, Voices and Organ, Drumming, and Come Out (among others) were in heavy heavy rotation on the turntable when I was an undergraduate, I return to these

Steve Hickenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12939881701345686354noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8514964.post-81627999877058244932009-04-03T10:05:00.002-04:002009-04-03T10:06:26.316-04:00

Theater review, Tallahassee (FL) Democrat, 3 April 2009

Steve Hickenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12939881701345686354noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8514964.post-80175987308083689222009-02-13T08:50:00.001-05:002009-02-13T08:50:08.456-05:00

LUTOSŁAWSKI: Sonata; STUCKY: Four Album Leaves, Three Little Variation Pieces for David; SALONEN: YTA II, Three Preludes, Dichotomie. Gloria Cheng, piano. Telarc 80712. 72 minutes.I'm a little late to the party on this, but I wanted to put in a good word for Gloria Cheng's disc of piano music by Witold Lutosławski, Steve Stucky, and Esa-Pekka Salonen.Lutosławski's Sonata is a very early work,

Steve Hickenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12939881701345686354noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8514964.post-37670505875169147672009-01-28T13:35:00.000-05:002009-01-28T13:35:23.818-05:00

Alex Ross, writing in the 2 February 2009 issue of The New Yorker:The image of the classical concert hall as a playground for the rich is planted deep in the cultural psyche. When Hollywood filmmakers set a scene at the symphony, twits in evening wear fill the frame, their jaws tight and their noses held high. The monocle returns to fashion for the first time since the death of Erich von Stroheim

Steve Hickenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12939881701345686354noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8514964.post-1273931671137663402009-01-26T07:25:00.000-05:002009-01-26T07:25:29.490-05:00

Concert review, Tallahassee (FL) Democrat, 26 January 2009.

Steve Hickenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12939881701345686354noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8514964.post-1267206277594806242009-01-21T13:34:00.001-05:002009-01-21T14:34:25.531-05:00

A. C. Douglas writes that he had a hopeful dream in which Aaron Copland's Fanfare for the Common Man (brass and percussion, 1942) preceded the palying of "Hail to the Chief" at President Obama's inauguration. (I like "Ruffles and Flourishes" so I was happy; the less said about John Williams' contribution to the proceedings, the better.)ACD mentions in passing that the Fanfare is the "best thing [

Steve Hickenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12939881701345686354noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8514964.post-34014709464286375582009-01-21T09:30:00.000-05:002009-01-21T09:30:53.828-05:00

Listen has been included on a list of the "Top 100 Musicology Blogs" at Distance Learning Net, which seems to be a clearinghouse for distance learning programs.I'm pleased to be included in such august company. I want to caution anybody visiting this blog while doing research, or for any other reason for that matter, not to take what is posted here as gospel. What's here is mostly my opinion, and

Steve Hickenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12939881701345686354noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8514964.post-36938074139332566432008-12-19T10:37:00.000-05:002008-12-19T10:37:35.060-05:00

Bonus TracksThere are lots of notes in Carter’s music. Lots of them. But for my development as a composer and listener, the passages (or entire movements) where Carter allows one note to carry the entire musical argument or at least the expressive content have been most telling.The seventh Etude of Eight Etudes and a Fantasy (woodwind quartet, 1950) is a study on one note. The expressive arc of

Steve Hickenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12939881701345686354noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8514964.post-66220480963062988832008-12-17T15:49:00.000-05:002008-12-17T15:49:20.932-05:00

1. Concerto for Orchestra (1969)By the last part of the 19th century, the make-up of the symphony orchestra was largely standardized. The core of the orchestra was a large body of strings. The woodwinds and brass were in pairs, sometimes three, and the percussion consisted of a timpanist and maybe one or two additional percussionists, depending on the piece being played.The music composed for the

Steve Hickenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12939881701345686354noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8514964.post-42880764139063959132008-12-15T14:42:00.000-05:002008-12-15T14:42:54.427-05:00

2. Double Concerto for Harpsichord and Piano with Two Chamber Orchestras (1961)Between his 80th and 100th birthdays, Carter completed some 40 compositions, from occasional pieces for solo instruments to two of the biggest pieces of his career, the Symphonia: Sum Fluxae Pretium Spei (47 minutes) and the composer’s only opera to date, What Next? (1997, ca. 40 minutes). Between his 40th birthday in

Steve Hickenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12939881701345686354noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8514964.post-13620535960774680002008-12-13T13:55:00.001-05:002008-12-13T13:56:13.644-05:00

3. String Quartet No. 5 (1995)One of the hallmarks of postmodernism is art about art. There has always been meta-art, though more often than not the references to art-about-art were localized within a given work, but recent decades have seen the idea raised to a controlling principle in a great number of works in all artistic media.The string quartet, as both medium (the combination of two

Steve Hickenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12939881701345686354noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8514964.post-48502309237685166512008-12-11T10:51:00.000-05:002008-12-11T10:51:15.226-05:00

As you may have heard, today is composer Elliott Carter's 100th birthday. If his appearance on Charlie Rose last night is any indication, he will be around writing music for quite a while longer.My series on Carter's pieces that have meant the most to me over the years begins here, and will continue shortly.

Steve Hickenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12939881701345686354noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8514964.post-81555352694463027072008-12-10T09:10:00.003-05:002008-12-10T09:53:15.993-05:00

Today is the 100th anniversary of the birth of the great French composer Olivier Messiaen (he died in 1992). What stays with me about his music is its brilliant color and the sheer exuberance of it, bordering on ecstasy, and often crossing that border.One of the great privileges of my life as a musician was to lead a performance of the composer's Oiseaux exotiques (Exotic Birds) with the

Steve Hickenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12939881701345686354noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8514964.post-14488725060197201132008-12-09T21:35:00.000-05:002008-12-09T21:35:44.249-05:00

4. A Mirror on Which to Dwell (1975)Carter has always been a literary composer. He majored in literature as an undergraduate, and read and studied the works of the first wave of 20th century American Modernists (including, Eliot, Pound, Frost, Stevens, and Williams) as they appeared. He was friends with some of the poets of the second wave, Robert Lowell in particular.More directly, many of

Steve Hickenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12939881701345686354noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8514964.post-34873592753180133802008-12-09T13:30:00.000-05:002008-12-09T13:30:27.755-05:00

5. Clarinet Concerto (1996)Given two of Carter’s nearly career-long interests—in structural heterophony and in writing music that plays to the strengths and musical personalities of the performers—it isn’t surprising that solo (or duo) concertos make up a significant portion of his catalog. In the Piano Concerto (1965), for example, the soloist can be heard as representing expressive

Steve Hickenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12939881701345686354noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8514964.post-1539037909225670452008-12-07T11:26:00.003-05:002008-12-07T14:22:32.806-05:00

6. Boston Concerto (2002)Carter spent the 1960s and 70s developing his musical language (mostly) outside of mainstream musical institutions and without resorting to trends like serialism, minimalism, and neo-Romanticism. Since that time he has written a series of pieces that have seemed to flow almost without effort and with what many observers hear as a new lucidity and transparency of texture

Steve Hickenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12939881701345686354noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8514964.post-16962951211470807952008-12-05T13:01:00.001-05:002008-12-05T13:02:59.752-05:00

7. Symphonia: Sum Fluxae Pretium Spei (1996).The symphony is typically a four-movement orchestral work that stands as a musical whole. The ways it can be made whole are tremendously varied—there can be a key scheme that holds it together, there can be thematic relationships between the movements, etc. The vast majority of symphonies have a first movement that makes a rigorous musical argument in

Steve Hickenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12939881701345686354noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8514964.post-57836950621897882042008-12-04T10:05:00.001-05:002008-12-04T10:14:43.387-05:00

8. Enchanted Preludes (1988).“Above all, I hope to have shown that there is such a thing as a lightness of thoughtfulness, just as we all know that there is a lightness of frivolity. In fact thoughtful lightness can make frivolity seem dull and heavy” –Italo Calvino, Six Memos for the Next Millennium.Carter used the phrase “thoughtful lightness” as part of his title for Con Leggerezza Pensosa (

Steve Hickenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12939881701345686354noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8514964.post-62956969867906783252008-12-03T09:43:00.003-05:002008-12-03T09:48:49.721-05:00

9. Night Fantasies (1980)By the time Carter wrote Night Fantasies in 1980, the structural heterophony of the Sonata and Duo was an integral part of his musical personality. Night Fantasies was commissioned for four prominent pianists—Paul Jacobs, Gilbert Kalish, Ursula Oppens, and Charles Rosen—each of whom experience with the composer’s mature style, having played the solo part in either the

Steve Hickenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12939881701345686354noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8514964.post-31320678624204428362008-12-02T10:08:00.000-05:002008-12-02T10:08:33.161-05:00

Many readers of this blog know how important Elliott Carter’s music has been to me, and as we approach the composer’s 100th next week, I began thinking about which of his pieces have meant the most to me, and why. Naturally, that thinking has led to a list. So, beginning today and running through the 11th, the composer’s birthday, I’ll post an annotated list of the ten Carter pieces that have

Steve Hickenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12939881701345686354noreply@blogger.com1