Operas written since 1945: an impressive list

Vagne Thierry has created an impressive (and extensive) list of operas written since 1945. He includes the names of composers (with dates and nationalities), titles of their works, and links to their websites and to media (CDs and DVDs).

Just glancing through I learned that Beth Anderson wrote an opera about Queen Christina of Sweden (so now I don't have to), Giancarlo Aquilanti wrote an opera about Lot's women (so now I don't have to), and Hubert Bird wrote an opera about John Dee, the Astrologer to Queen Elizabeth I (so now I don't have to).

I see friends on the list: Gary Bachlund's fable operas are on the list, and a good number of Seymour Barab's operas are there (with links).

Mr. Thierry kindly sent me an email message letting me know about the list (my operas The Snow Queen, Sister Beatrice, and EMMA are listed). I imagine he sent messages to all the living composers on the list with an email address, and that other composers are looking through the list and enjoying it as much as I am. I could spend all day with this (it took an hour just to make it through from A to C), but I will have to wait until later to dip in again. There's a lot to be learned from this list.

Writing an opera is a HUGE amount of work, and is, in my case, a labor of love. That love is so often unrequited because works by "unknown" composers are so rarely produced these days. I would venture to guess that most of the operas on this list have had few performances, and that many have never been produced.

Thierry is doing a great service for the musical community. I'm hoping opera-minded people (i.e. people who like to produce and perform operas) might find material for future productions here.

Greeting the New Year With New Music

I'm greeting 2018 with a piece for two trumpets (which can also be played by two clarinets, two French horns, or two euphoniums).

Here it is played by computer-generated trumpets.

Listen to how different it sounds when played on computer-generated clarinets, French horns, and euphoniums.

You can find a PDF on this page of the IMSLP.

Concert in January: Vasilenko, Bowen, and Ravel

On the program:

Vasilenko Viola Sonata, Opus 46
Ravel Sonata Posthume
Bowen 2nd Sonata for Viola and Piano

No title necessary

About last night . . .

A song to celebrate.

Ben Miller's article about James Levine

Ben Miller's relationship with the Boston Symphony was a lot like my relationship with the Boston Symphony, although the music director during Miller's childhood (a generation after mine) was a far greater musician as well as a far greater monster. The parents of the kids in Ben Miller's cohort (we used to refer to ourselves as "orchestra brats") made sure to inform their children about Levine's pedophilia in order protect them.

This eloquent article is well worth reading.

[I'm so impressed with Ben Miller's writing that I'm sharing his webpage here.]

Sleeping Beauty Waltz

I really enjoy the way these young Californian musicians play my transcription of Tchaikovsky's Sleeping Beauty Waltz.

Talia Trio for Oboe, Viola, and Piano

My love for granddaughter Talia just grows and grows, and, as you can see, it bursts out in sharps and flats. I finished this piece today. I don't think that I have ever written anything this happy. Having Talia in my life brings happiness to a whole new level.

You can follow the link above, or you can listen to the first movement here, and the second movement here.

Roger Sessions "From My Diary"

I have enjoyed reading Roger Sessions's book The Musical Experience of Composer, Performer, Listener (the source of the "guest post" from a few days ago) a great deal. I used to be afraid of Sessions's music, but now that I have read his prose about music, I am no longer afraid.

In fact, I like Robert Helps's performance of these Sessions piano pieces so much that I'm sharing them here:

Fulcrum Point New Music Project Concert Wednesday, November 15 at 6:00

I am very excited to hear Stephen Burns and Kuang-Hao Huang play my Trumpet Sonata this Wednesday in Chicago. The concert is part of Fulcrum Point's "Hear and Be Heard" series, where people play new music and then members of the audience have an open discussion with the composers.

The other composer, who wrote her Notturno for Trumpet and Piano in 2016, is Lawren Brianna Ware.

The concert begins at 6:00, and takes place in Gottlieb Hall at the Merit School of Music, 38 South Peoria in Chicago, Illinois. Admission is free.

Roger Sessions, Guest Blogger

I picked up a copy of Roger Sessions's The Musical Experience of Composer, Performer, Listener at a library sale last month. It is a collection of six lectures that Mr. Sessions gave at the Juilliard School of Music in 1949. I thought that, being a small book, it would be something I could read on an airplane. I think that I'll just keep it with me all the time to read and re-read wherever I happen to be. Here's a sample from the second chapter, "The Musical Ear:"

As happens so often in speaking of music, the facts are much simpler than the words found to describe them. No one denies that music arouses emotions, no do most people deny that the values of music are both qualitatively and quantitatively connected with the emotions it arouses. Yet it is not easy to say just what this connection is. If we try to define the emotions aroused by specific pieces of music, we run into difficulties. I have referred elsewhere to cases in which the emotional purportedly expressed in a given work have been defined by different musicians in quite different terms. For instance, Beethoven's Seventh Symphony has been described by three composers, including Berlioz and Wagner, as "heroic" or "warlike," as "pastoral," or as the "apotheosis of the dance." This is a celebrated example, since two composers of genius and many musicians of lesser stature have been articulate about it. But you have only to read the various interpretive comments on almost any well-known work to find the same result.

Does this mean that the "message" or "emotional content" of music is an illusion, and that actually a given piece of music conveys one thing to one man, another thing to another, and that our illusion of specific emotional content derives entirely from the quite adventitious associations which we are able to bring to it? I do not believe this for a moment and I thoroughly dislike the terms, indeed the whole jargon, in general use. On the contrary, I believe that music "expresses" something very definite, and that it expresses it in the most precise way. In embodying movement, in the most subtle and most delicate manner possible, it communicates the attitudes inherent in, and implied by, that movement; its speed, its energy, its élan or impulse, its tenseness or relaxation, its agitation or its tranquility, its decisiveness or its hesitation. It communicates in a marvelously vivid and exact way the dynamics and the abstract qualities of emotion, but any specific emotional content the composer wishes to give to it must be furnished, as it were, from without, by means of an associative program. Music not only "expresses" movement, but embodies, defines, and qualifies it. Each musical phrase is a unique gesture and through the cumulative effect of such gestures we gain a clear sense of a quality of feeling behind them. But unless the composer directs our associations along definite lines, as composers of all times, to be sure, have frequently done, it will be the individual imagination of the listener, and not the music itself, which defines the emotion. What the music does is to animate the emotion; the music, in other words, develops and moves on a level that is essentially below the level of conscious emotion. Its realm is that of emotional energy rather than that of emotion in the specific sense.

Sweeter than the sweetest music

Concert in Valencia, Spain

I'm very excited to report that three pieces of mine: High Speed Rail, Three Reflections for Flute and Strings, and Dances from the Harlot's House, will be performed in Spain on November 19th by an orchestra connected with the Conservatorio Profesional de Música de Valencia conducted by Josep Ribes. All the pieces on the program were written by women. The conductor asked me to send a 3-minute video recording of me talking about women and music to a group of young musicians, and I thought I'd share some of the text here:

When I was a child during the 1960s I was part of a very music family in Boston. Every piece of music I encountered was written by a man. Sometime during the 1970s a friend of my family started playing concerts that featured the music of Mrs. H.H. Beach. Amy Beach, we now know, was a very important composer in Boston during the early 20th century. She began her musical life as a pianist, and started writing music at an early age. After she married, her upper-class husband would not allow her to “work” as a concert pianist, but he was fine with her continuing to compose. Many of her works were published, and one was even performed by the Boston Symphony, but as her music went out of print, she was forgotten as a composer.

During the early part of the 20th century it was acceptable for a woman to be a great teacher, a great pianist (particularly an accompanist), or a great singer, but only a handful of women were accepted into professional orchestras. This began to change in the 1950s, and finally in 2017 we see equal numbers of men and women in professional orchestras.

Professional orchestras in America rarely program music by women. It is not because of lack of repertoire, it is due to lack of knowledge. Because I am curious, and because I am always looking for new music to play, I learn about new women composers from the 19th century and the 20th century all the time.

We are making progress: college composition programs in the 21st century admit as many women as they do men. And more and more people realize that when it comes to music, it is the voice of the individual that matters, not her gender. I would imagine that if you were to play pieces of lesser-known music written by both men and by women to people without revealing the gender of the composer, most people would be unable to guess the gender.

The quality of a piece of music is not reflected by how well known it is, just like the quality of a performance is not reflected by how well known the performer is. Fortunately programs like this one make it clear that even if you haven’t heard of a composer, her music can be enjoyable to hear and to play.

I hope you musicians have enjoyed working on these pieces, and I hope that your audience enjoys listening to them.

Celebrity Viola Library Copy

The copy of the Vasilenko Viola Sonata that I got, by way of interlibrary loan, from the Curtis Library (one of only three copies available through the WorldCat) was too fragile for me to photocopy in good conscience, so I sent it back right away. This edition also has a few errors in it (corrected in pencil) that are not in the earlier (and better) Russian edition (shown on my last post) that I am using (by way of a photocopy).



The piece hasn't been in print since 1931. I'm hoping that a violist who owns a less-fragile copy might scan it and submit it to the IMSLP. I have already sent an alert inquiry to a librarian I know at Curtis. We'll see what happens. Since the president of Curtis, Roberto Diaz, is a violist (who might, like most violists, not know the piece), he might be on board with the idea of digitizing and sharing the music before the paper deteriorates completely. The fingerings and bowings in the viola part are also instructive, if not historic.

Before sending the music back to Curtis, I took this photo. You can see that some very famous violists took this piece out of the library.

Louis Bailly, the violist of the Flonzaley Quartet before he began teaching at Curtis in 1925, was the first to take out the music. Leonard Mogill was next. He doesn't have a biography on line, but is known to all violists for his scale and double-stop books. He was an important teacher and a member of the Philadelphia Orchestra for 46 years. Toby Appel, who currently teaches at Curtis, took the music out in 1969 when he was a student there. It looks like the music had been sitting on the shelf since 1977 before I requested it on Interlibrary Loan.

Red Star Points to the Rescue!

I have been agonizing for months over this passage (and a few others like it) in the Serge Vasilenko Viola Sonata. There is a great deal of vertical information to take in (the spread of the notes, and the fingerings written above and below them) so I needed a bright and shiny reminder telling me clearly where to shift position. These points of red star stickers put in strategic places offer me peace of mind, satisfying my need to know exactly "when" something needs to happen. Unlike colored pencil marks, which are dull and permanent, these are temporary, so if I decide to change where I want to shift, I can just take the stickers off.