Classic Ross Amico

Tag: Network for New Music

Rainy Day English & New Music on WWFM

With rain in the forecast, it promises to be a soggy afternoon, perhaps redolent of a day in the British Isles. Anglophile that I am, I’ll be reaching for the low-hanging fruit, on The Classical Network, and present an afternoon of English music.

We’ll hear Ralph Vaughan Williams’s Symphony No. 8, with its quirky instrumentation, the ballet “Pineapple Poll,” after melodies of Sir Arthur Sullivan, and the oratorio “Nebuchadnezzar” by Sir George Dyson. There will also be a piano concerto by Malcolm Williamson, a perpetual outsider, born in Australia, who became Master of the Queen’s Music.

First, on today’s Noontime Concert, it’s another program featuring musicians from Network for New Music . Presented under the unifying theme of “Masters of Minimalism,” we’ll hear Gerald Levinson’s “Bronze Music,” John Adams’ “Road Movies,” Hannah Lash’s “C,” and Evan Ziporyn’s “Air = Water.”

NNM’s mission is to perform new musical works of the highest quality by a diverse array of established and emerging composers; to strengthen the new music community in the Philadelphia region; and to build support for new music by engaging in artistic and institutional collaborations and educational activities.

Founded in 1984, Network for New Music has presented more than 650 works by living composers (of which over 150 they have commissioned) and recorded four CDs for the Albany and Innova labels. The ensemble has held an ongoing residency at Haverford College since 2007.

This Sunday at 3 p.m., NNM will present a special program, “The Poet’s Mind,” at Philadelphia’s Settlement Music School Mary Louise Curtis Branch, 416 Queen Street. Guest artists, soprano Ah Young Hong and mezzo-soprano Maren Montalbano, will join NNM musicians to perform György Kurtág’s “Kafka Fragments,” the world premiere of Philip Maneval’s “The Poet’s Songbook,” a new work by June Violet Aino, also inspired by Kafka, and music by Florence Price. For more information and a complete schedule, look online at networkfornewmusic.org.

I’m not sure, exactly, that air = water, but there will be plenty of water on the air waves, with Network for New Music and music from the British Isles, this afternoon from 12 to 4 p.m. EST, on WWFM – The Classical Network and wwfm.org.

January 14, 2020
Millennial Music & Mortality on WWFM

Boy, do I feel old. One day I wake up, and I realize I’ve been alive long enough for an entire generation of new composers to come of age.

On today’s Noontime Concert, it’s another program featuring musicians from Network for New Music. We’ll hear recent works, including a few premieres, by contemporary composers Rene Orth, Joshua Hey, Sky Macklay, Andrew Hsu, Gabriel Bolaños and Charles Peck, all presented under the unifying theme of “Millennial Music.”

NNM’s mission is to perform new musical works of the highest quality by a diverse array of established and emerging composers; to strengthen the new music community in the Philadelphia region; and to build support for new music by engaging in artistic and institutional collaborations and educational activities.

Founded in 1984, Network for New Music has presented more than 650 works by living composers (of which over 150 they have commissioned) and recorded four CDs for the Albany and Innova labels. The ensemble has held an ongoing residency at Haverford College since 2007.

NNM will present its season opener, “Streams of Sound,” at Philadelphia’s Settlement Music School Mary Louise Curtis Branch, 416 Queen Street, this Sunday at 3 p.m. For more information and a complete schedule, look online at networkfornewmusic.org.

As if a program of millennial music isn’t enough to make me feel acutely the passage of time, our featured work following today’s broadcast concert will be Franz Joseph Haydn’s oratorio “The Seasons.” Haydn’s late masterpiece underpins the cyclical nature of the year with colorful vignettes suggesting the circle of life (and death). I think I’ll just focus on the wit and the wine.

I hope you’ll join me as I stare into the face of my own mortality, from 12 to 4 p.m. EST, on WWFM – The Classical Network and wwfm.org.

“Sharpening the Scythe” (1897), by Ralph Hedley

November 19, 2019
Sounds of Light and Shade New Music Concerts

So what exactly do light and shade sound like? Network for New Music would have us know.

Join me for today’s Noontime Concert on The Classical Network as we listen to pieces by contemporary composers Ingrid Arauco, Anna Weesner, Morton Feldman, Joan Tower, Pierre Jalbert, and Augusta Read Thomas, most of them presented under the unifying theme of “The Sounds of Light and Shade.”

Network for New Music’s mission is to perform a great diversity of new musical works of the highest quality by both established and emerging composers; to strengthen the new music community in the Philadelphia region; and to build support for new music by engaging in artistic and institutional collaborations, as well as educational activities. Now in its 34th year, Network for New Music has commissioned 147 works from leading composers.

The organization’s next program, “Millennial Music,” will be presented twice: this Sunday at 3 p.m. at the University of Pennsylvania’s Rose Hall, 3340 Walnut Street in Philadelphia, and Monday at 7:30 p.m. at Stockton University’s Campus Center Theatre, 101 Vera King Farris Drive, in Galloway, NJ. For more information and a complete schedule, look online at networkfornewmusic.org.

Featured prominently on today’s broadcast, as well as on the upcoming concerts, will be Clipper Erickson, piano. Erickson is arguably the world’s foremost champion of the music of R. Nathaniel Dett.

Dett was born in what is now Niagara Falls, Ontario. The grandson of a former slave who found freedom on the Underground Railroad, he became an important figure in the American music of his time. Yet if he is remembered at all, it is probably for his piano suite, “In the Bottoms,” or perhaps only its concluding dance, “Juba,” which was championed by Percy Grainger and others.

Erickson was the first to record Dett’s complete piano works. We’ll sample some of them following today’s concert, from a 2-CD set, “My Cup Runneth Over,” issued on Navona Records, PARMA Recordings.

Then it’s music in celebration of the Great Emancipator, on this, Abraham Lincoln’s birthday. Stick around for Robert Russell Bennett’s “Abraham Lincoln: A Likeness in Symphony Form,” Jennifer Higdon’s “Dooryard Bloom,” Roy Harris’ Symphony No. 6 “Gettysburg,” and of course Aaron Copland’s “Lincoln Portrait,” in a live concert recording featuring Marian Anderson as narrator and the Philadelphia Orchestra conducted by the composer.

Our 16th president will take precedence, this Tuesday afternoon from 12 to 4 p.m. EST, on WWFM – The Classical Network and wwfm.org.

PHOTOS: Lincoln light and shade

February 12, 2019
Babbitt and Ballet on The Classical Network

Where else but on The Classical Network will you hear Milton Babbitt and Léo Delibes within a single afternoon?

Today’s noontime concert will bring you Babbitt’s “All Set” for jazz ensemble, alongside works by Wolfgang Rihm, David Rakowski, Curt Cacioppo, Ingrid Arauco, and Robert Capanna, all performed by the Philadelphia-based Network for New Music.

Babbitt, a longtime faculty member at Princeton University, was born in Philadelphia in 1916. A pioneer of integral serial and electronic music, he became one of the most controversial of composers when an editor at High Fidelity magazine changed the title on an article he had submitted from “The Composer as Specialist” to the more inflammatory “Who Cares If You Listen?” Babbitt was incensed (the article was also aggressively edited), and his critics invoked the title whenever they sought an easy cudgel for the remainder of his career. Though not always easily understood, Babbitt was obviously brilliant and inspirational to generations of rising composers. He received numerous honors, including a Pulitzer Prize citation in 1982. Network for New Music did not shy away from celebrating Babbitt’s centenary during its 2015-2016 season.

The next program of Network for New Music, now in its 32nd season, will be presented on two concerts, on Sunday at 3 p.m., at the Settlement Music School in Philadelphia, and on March 5 at 3 p.m., at Delaware County Community College’s Large Auditorium, located in the campus’ Academic Building. “Poetry through Music” will include works inspired by Friedrich Hölderlin’s novel “Hyperion,” either directly or by way of a new poem by Susan Stewart, with musical contributions by Georg Friedrich Haas, Gerald Levinson, Andrew Rudin, Eliza Brown, Benjamin Krause, Robert Capanna, and Ke-Chia Chen.

Following the noon concert we’ll do a one-eighty and listen to one of the most ingratiatingly melodic ballets in the repertoire, a complete recording of Léo Delibes’ “Coppélia,” on this, Delibes’ birthday. Sure, “Coppélia” is overflowing with earworms that will ruin the rest of your day (and boy, do I hate the term earworm), but in actuality it is a terrible adaptation of one of the most effective of E.T.A. Hoffmann’s weird tales of mechanism and madness, a story called “The Sandman.” I prefer good old fashioned paper to reading online, but here’s a link, if you think it won’t take something away from it for you to read it on your computer.

http://germanstories.vcu.edu/hoffmann/sand_e.html

The anodyne libretto, by Charles-Louis-Étienne Nuitter, completely Disneyfies the subject matter, but Nuttier must have been on to something. 100 of his 500 libretti were produced, taken up by composers such as Offenbach, Lalo, and Lecocq. His opera translations from German and Italian into French were praised by Wagner and Verdi. He also worked as an archivist, though at the end of the day, it was the law that really paid the bills.

I hope you’ll join me this afternoon for new music and mindless enjoyment, from 12 to 4 p.m. EST, on WWFM – The Classical Network and at wwfm.org.

It will be Babbitt and ballet today on The Classical Network

February 21, 2017

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