Alex Ross's Blog, page 23

For David Del Tredici

    Gaunt in gloom,
    The pale stars their torches,
    Enshrouded, wave.
    Ghostfires from heaven's far verges faint illume,
    Arches on soaring arches,
    Night's sindark nave...

                            James Joyce, "Night Piece"

Slonimsky meets Johnny Carson

I interviewed the sublime Slonimsky two years later, for my college radio show. He reminisced about the day in 1917 when someone told him some kind of revolution was happening in the streets of Petrograd. He went outside, walked around, saw nothing, and went back to practicing the piano.

Toscanini, Iturbi, and me

See also Henry Koster's Music for Millions (1944).

Nightafternight playlist

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Weather Systems II – Soundlines: On Language and the Land: works by Xenakis, Vivian Fung, George Lewis Soundlines, Lei Liang, Rzewski, Globokar, Roger Reynolds, Hennies; Steven Schick (Islandia; out Dec. 1)

Linda Catlin Smith, Wanderer, Duo for 2 Cellos, Dark Flower, Dreamer Murmuring, With Their Shadows Long, Unbroken, for Howard Skempton; Thin Edge New Music Collective, Smith (Redshift)

Rachmaninoff, Symphonic Dances (arr. Barnatan), Moments musicaux, Prelude in G-Sharp Minor, Vocalise; Inon Barnatan (Pentatone)

Debussy, Études, Pour le piano; Steven Osborne (Hyperion)

Guerrero, Missa Ecce sacerdos magnus, Magnificat secundi toni, various motets; Stephen Rice leading the Brabant Ensemble (Hyperion)

Patrizia Alessandrini, Leçons de ténèbres; Riot Ensemble (Huddersfield)

Michelle Lou, HoneyDripper; versions by Mattie Barbier and Weston Olencki (via Bandcamp)

Lucia Dlugoszewski, Abyss and Caress, Fire Fragile Flight, Each Time You Carry Me This Way, Openings of the (Eye) Ritual of Descent, Angels of the Inmost Heaven, Desperate Stairway Radical Other, Avanti; Klangforum Wien conducted by Ilan Volkov, Johannes Kalitzke, Tim Anderson (col legno)

Wagner in San Diego

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The San Diego Symphony, under Rafael Payare, plays the Ring without Words at the Rady Shell.

The East German oboe underground

Wild Reeds. The New Yorker, Nov. 20, 2023.

New hatefulness from Spotify

Last year I wrote that Spotify's royalty system is "as perfect an embodiment of the winner-takes-all neoliberal economy as has yet been devised." Perfection, it turns out, can always be improved, as Damon Krukowski reports: "Starting in 2024 (less than two months from now), [Spotify] will no longer pay any royalty on tracks that fall below a minimum 1,000 streams a year. These tracks will still earn royalties, in theory – but those royalties will not be paid to their rights holders. Instead, they will go into a pot to be divided among accounts that garner more plays. This is akin to a regressive tax – reducing payments to those who already receive less, in order to boost payments for those who already receive more, increasing the divide between haves and have-nots. It is, on the face of it, the ugliest of ugly capitalist cash grabs." Kevin Erickson of the Future of Music Coalition notes: “Among the people not hitting this threshold for big parts of their catalog: Pulitzer Prize and MacArthur prize winners and nominees. People at the pinnacle of artistic and critical acclaim in their respective niches are being told they have to get more fans to earn >$0.00.”

A Paul Dessau moment

A Sciarrino moment

A Friedrich Goldmann moment