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Meet the Composer

130 episodes - English - Latest episode: over 6 years ago - ★★★★★ - 219 ratings

Peabody Award-winning podcast that takes listeners into the minds of the composers making some of the most innovative and breathtakingly beautiful music today.

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Episodes

Paul Simon’s Curious Mind

July 10, 2017 16:00 - 53 minutes - 48.7 MB

Paul Simon has always been attracted to new kinds of sounds. From his early band Simon & Garfunkel in the 1960s through solo albums like Graceland and Rhythm of the Saints in the '80s and '90s, up through his recent albums So Beautiful or So What and Stranger to Stranger, Paul has made music that does what the very best art can do: it resonates with our experience, re-frames it, and introduces new timbres and ideas. Recently, Paul’s curious mind has brought him into the world of contemporar...

Paul Simon’s Curious Mind

July 10, 2017 16:00 - 52 minutes - 48.4 MB

Paul Simon has always been attracted to new kinds of sounds. From his early band Simon & Garfunkel in the 1960s through solo albums like Graceland and Rhythm of the Saints in the '80s and '90s, up through his recent albums So Beautiful or So What and Stranger to Stranger, Simon has made music that does what the very best art can do: it resonates with our experience, re-frames it, and introduces new timbres and ideas. Recently, Simon’s curious mind has brought him into the world of contempor...

Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith's 'Clouds Forming Over Mount Baker'

June 12, 2017 04:00 - 15 minutes - 14.6 MB

We began last week’s episode digging into the music of one particular electronic musician - the synthesist, producer and composer Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith. Today we’re thrilled to bring you a song that you won’t hear on any of Kaitlyn’s albums. Clouds Forming Over Mount Baker was commissioned by the University of Pennsylvania’s Arthur Ross Gallery to accompany a landscape photograph by Eliot Porter. It’s a fitting collaboration, as Smith grew up on Orcas Island, where Mt. Baker is a visible f...

Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith's 'Clouds Forming Over Mount Baker'

June 12, 2017 04:00 - 15 minutes - 14.3 MB

We began last week’s episode digging into the music of one particular electronic musician - the synthesist, producer and composer Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith. Today we’re thrilled to bring you a song that you won’t hear on any of Kaitlyn’s albums. Clouds Forming Over Mount Baker was commissioned by the University of Pennsylvania’s Arthur Ross Gallery to accompany a landscape photograph by Eliot Porter. It’s a fitting collaboration, as Kaitlyn grew up on Orcas Island, where Mt. Baker is a visible...

The Producer

June 05, 2017 04:00 - 1 hour - 55.5 MB

What happens when a composer writes music without pen and paper, using machines? How does that change the creative process? How does it morph the art itself?  Today on Meet the Composer, our producer Alex Overington — usually behind the studio glass — takes us on a road trip to unravel the creative process of those composers who write without a score. We meet the synthesists, the samplers, the electronic musicians, and dive deep into the tools they’ve adopted to define their craft.  Join u...

The Producer

June 05, 2017 04:00 - 1 hour - 55.8 MB

What happens when a composer writes music without pen and paper, using machines? How does that change the creative process? How does it morph the art itself?  Today on Meet the Composer, our producer Alex Overington — usually behind the studio glass — takes us on a road trip to unravel the creative process of those composers who write without a score. We meet the synthesists, the samplers, the electronic musicians, and dive deep into the tools they’ve adopted to define their craft.  Join u...

Bryce Dessner's 'Wires,' Performed by Ensemble Intercontemporain

May 22, 2017 04:00 - 21 minutes - 20 MB

For today’s Bonus Track, we’re thrilled to bring you the world-premiere recording of Bryce Dessner’s Wires, performed by Ensemble Intercontemporain! Last week, we dug into a particularly contentious moment in classical music’s history. This week, however, we’re looking at where we are NOW, a place of, well… niceness.   “I think right now is a really good time to be a composer,” says composer John Adams. “And I tell young composers that. They don't believe me, but they don't know how diffi...

Bryce Dessner's 'Wires,' Performed by Ensemble Intercontemporain

May 22, 2017 04:00 - 21 minutes - 20.2 MB

For today’s Bonus Track, we’re thrilled to bring you the world-premiere recording of Bryce Dessner’s Wires, performed by Ensemble Intercontemporain! Last week, we dug into a particularly contentious moment in classical music’s history. This week, however, we’re looking at where we are NOW, a place of, well… niceness.   “I think right now is a really good time to be a composer,” says composer John Adams. “And I tell young composers that. They don't believe me, but they don't know how diffi...

New Music Fight Club

May 15, 2017 04:00 - 44 minutes - 40.3 MB

It was composer pitted against composer: uptown vs. downtown, tonal vs. atonal, left brain vs right brain, and these musicians were NOT pulling any punches. Composers were antagonizing each other, questioning each other's validity, and bad-mouthing one another; it was like the second half of the 20th century was when Western Music went through middle school, and it was brutal! “If you weren't being a constructivist composer, if the music wasn't indeed about its own structure, and its own s...

New Music Fight Club

May 15, 2017 04:00 - 44 minutes - 40.6 MB

It was composer pitted against composer: uptown vs. downtown, tonal vs. atonal, left brain vs right brain, and these musicians were NOT pulling any punches. Composers were antagonizing each other, questioning each other's validity, and bad-mouthing one another; it was like the second half of the 20th century was when Western Music went through middle school, and it was brutal!    “If you weren't being a constructivist composer, if the music wasn't indeed about its own structure, and its ow...

Henry Threadgill’s Zooid, Live at the Village Vanguard

May 08, 2017 04:00 - 20 minutes - 18.8 MB

Henry Threadgill’s music and community can’t be separated; there is no boundary: challenge and failure and growth in music are the same as challenge and failure and growth in life. This Meet the Composer bonus track shares an exclusive performance by Henry Threadgill's Zooid ensemble of I Never, recorded live by Q2 Music at the Village Vanguard on Oct. 2, 2016. Throughout his career, Threadgill has led countless ensembles with diverse instrumentations and personalities. And in each of them,...

Henry Threadgill’s Zooid, Live at the Village Vanguard

May 08, 2017 04:00 - 20 minutes - 18.5 MB

Henry Threadgill’s music and community can’t be separated; there is no boundary: challenge and failure and growth in music are the same as challenge and failure and growth in life. This Meet the Composer bonus track shares an exclusive performance by Henry Threadgill's Zooid ensemble of I Never, recorded live by Q2 Music at the Village Vanguard on Oct. 2, 2016. Throughout his career, Threadgill has led countless ensembles with diverse instrumentations and personalities. And in each of them,...

Henry Threadgill: Dirt, and More Dirt

May 01, 2017 04:00 - 41 minutes - 38.1 MB

1967, Fort Riley, Kansas. Henry Threadgill is 23 years old. Knowing he’s going to be drafted into the military, he joins the Army Concert Band, hoping to focus on his passion: writing music. As he surrounds himself with new ideas, he works his influences into the music that he's arranging. Then one day, the band plays one of his arrangements of a patriotic song for an inauguration of big-wigs, and from the calm of a quietly confused crowd comes a cry from a cardinal in attendance: “Blasphemy...

Henry Threadgill: Dirt, and More Dirt

May 01, 2017 04:00 - 41 minutes - 38.4 MB

1967, Fort Riley, Kansas. Henry Threadgill is 23 years old. Knowing he’s going to be drafted into the military, he joins the Army Concert Band, hoping to focus on his passion: writing music. As he surrounds himself with new ideas, he works his influences into the music that he's arranging. Then one day, the band plays one of his arrangements of a patriotic song for an inauguration of big-wigs, and from the calm of a quietly confused crowd comes a cry from a cardinal in attendance: “Blasphemy...

Bonus Track: John Adams' 'Coast,' Unplugged

March 21, 2017 04:00 - 13 minutes - 12.4 MB

Today's bonus track is an exclusive arrangement of a nutso, sci-fi-y electronic piece John Adams wrote in 1993. Originally part of a larger work, Hoodoo Zephyr, Coast was never intended to be performed live. However, the 20-person chamber ensemble Alarm Will Sound has often been tempted by electronic works. Violinist, composer, and Alarm Will Sound member Caleb Burhans, who cut his teeth arranging works by Aphex Twin for the group, adapted Adams' work. While Alarm Will Sound has performed th...

Bonus Track: John Adams' 'Coast,' Unplugged

March 21, 2017 04:00 - 13 minutes - 12.2 MB

Today's bonus track is an exclusive arrangement of a nutso, sci-fi-y electronic piece John Adams wrote in 1993. Originally part of a larger work, Hoodoo Zephyr, Coast was never intended to be performed live. However, the 20-person chamber ensemble Alarm Will Sound has often been tempted by electronic works. Violinist, composer, and Alarm Will Sound member Caleb Burhans, who cut his teeth arranging works by Aphex Twin for the group, adapted Adams' work. While Alarm Will Sound has performed th...

Splitting Adams: John Adams' Chamber Symphonies

March 20, 2017 04:00 - 36 minutes - 33.2 MB

What happens when the composer shows up to the first rehearsal of his brand-new piece? Would a living Beethoven sue for intellectual property? Are you the hit, or are you in the hole? For this episode, we collaborated with the 20-member chamber ensemble Alarm Will Sound and its conductor Alan Pierson – with whom we're partnering on the upcoming podcast album Splitting Adams (out April 21 on Cantaloupe Music) – to take a close look at the music of John Adams, specifically his two insanely dif...

Splitting Adams: John Adams' Chamber Symphonies

March 20, 2017 04:00 - 36 minutes - 33.4 MB

What happens when the composer shows up to the first rehearsal of his brand-new piece? Would a living Beethoven sue for intellectual property? Are you the hit, or are you in the hole? For this episode, we collaborated with the 20-member chamber ensemble Alarm Will Sound and its conductor Alan Pierson – with whom we're partnering on the upcoming podcast album Splitting Adams (out April 21 on Cantaloupe Music) –  to take a close look at the music of John Adams, specifically his two insanely di...

Bonus Track: Pauline Oliveros' 'Tuning Meditation'

March 16, 2017 04:00 - 25 minutes - 23 MB

Today's Bonus Track is an extended cut of Pauline Oliveros' "Tuning Meditation," recorded live at the Fuentidueña Chapel at the Met Cloisters on Jan. 20, 2017. Recorded in 3D-sounding binaural audio, it's an immersive experience in which we would love you to think about participating while listening. For optimal audio quality, please listen with headphones! --- About the podcast: Meet the Composer is a Peabody Award-winning podcast that takes listeners into the minds and creative processe...

Bonus Track: Pauline Oliveros' 'Tuning Meditation'

March 16, 2017 04:00 - 24 minutes - 22.8 MB

Today's Meet the Composer Bonus Track is an extended cut of Pauline Oliveros' Tuning Meditation, recorded live at the Fuentidueña Chapel at the Met Cloisters on Jan. 20, 2017. Recorded in 3D-sounding binaural audio, it's an immersive experience in which we would love you to think about participating while listening. For optimal audio quality, please listen with headphones!

The Performer: Part Two, Pauline

March 14, 2017 04:00 - 33 minutes - 30.5 MB

We continue our investigation of the odd, wrong-side-of-the-tv-set role of The Performer with a deep dive into the "Sonic Meditations" of pioneering American composer Pauline Oliveros. Pauline manages to smudge at the distinction between composer, performer and audience with these simple, text-based pieces, which somehow pack an emotional wallop far larger than their few lines might suggest.  --- About the podcast: Meet the Composer is a Peabody Award-winning podcast that takes listeners ...

The Performer: Part Two, Pauline

March 14, 2017 04:00 - 33 minutes - 30.3 MB

Meet the Composer continues its investigation of the odd, wrong-side-of-the-tv-set role of The Performer with a deep dive into the Sonic Meditations of pioneering American composer Pauline Oliveros. Oliveros manages to smudge at the distinction between composer, performer and audience with these simple, text-based pieces, which somehow pack an emotional wallop far larger than their few lines might suggest. Heard a piece of music that you loved? Discover it here! 0:49—Pauline Oliveros: Lea...

Bonus Track: JACK Quartet Performs Georg Friedrich Haas' String Quartet No. 9

March 07, 2017 05:00 - 51 minutes - 47.4 MB

We are thrilled to bring you a WORLD PREMIERE recording as our first bonus track of Season Three! Our previous episode, The Performer: Part One, featured, among other things, a fascinating conversation with the Austrian composer Georg Friedrich Haas. As we are a talk show about music, we are always dying to simply play some MUSIC, and so today we bring you our exclusive, world premiere recording of Haas’ 9th String Quartet. The whole thing! Featuring the fantastic JACK Quartet. The JACK Qu...

Bonus Track: JACK Quartet Performs Georg Friedrich Haas' String Quartet No. 9

March 07, 2017 05:00 - 51 minutes - 47.2 MB

Meet the Composer is thrilled to bring you a world-premiere recording as our first bonus track of Season Three! Our previous episode The Performer: Part One featured, among other things, a really fascinating conversation with the Austrian composer Georg Friedrich Haas (if you haven’t heard the episode yet, go check it out!). As we are a talk show about music, we are always dying to simply play some music, and so today we bring you our exclusive, first recording of Haas’ 9th String Quartet. ...

The Performer: Part One

March 06, 2017 05:00 - 46 minutes - 42.3 MB

We're kicking off Season Three of Meet the Composer with a look beyond the composer to the performer, that unusual intermediary between the artist and the audience. How do performers from different cultures, who speak different languages, come together to perform the same piece? What happens when an ensemble completely messes up... and the audience loves it? How does a piece change when it’s played nonstop for twelve hours? We explore these questions and more, taking a seat on stage as we f...

The Performer: Part One

March 06, 2017 05:00 - 46 minutes - 42.4 MB

We're kicking off Season Three with a look beyond the composer to the performer, that unusual intermediary between the artist and the audience. How do performers from different cultures, who speak different languages, come together to perform the same piece? What happens when an ensemble completely messes up... and the audience loves it? How does a piece change when it’s played nonstop for twelve hours? We explore these questions and more, taking a seat on stage as we find out what it’s lik...

From the Vaults, Part Five: Meet the Composer With Leonard Bernstein

March 03, 2017 05:00 - 13 minutes - 12.1 MB

Meet the Composer with Nadia Sirota – Q2 Music's podcast about the musical creative process – returns for its third season on Monday, March 6. Pre-game for the new season with a week of clips from the original WNYC radio program. Meet the Composer is available on iTunes or wherever you get your podcasts. We conclude the week-long ramp-up to our next and third season with an interview with the legendary, charismatic Leonard Bernstein. Though mostly known for his work as a composer (West Side...

From the Vaults, Part Five: Meet the Composer With Leonard Bernstein

March 03, 2017 05:00 - 13 minutes - 12.3 MB

We conclude the week-long ramp-up to our next and third season with an interview with the legendary, charismatic Leonard Bernstein. Though mostly known for his work as a composer (West Side Story) and conductor (New York Philharmonic), Leonard Bernstein was also a consummate evangelist for classical music. This conversation focuses on Bernstein's efforts as a music educator and the role that education played for host Tim Page in his music criticism. --- About the podcast: Meet the Compose...

From the Vaults, Part Four: Meet the Composer With Libby Larsen

March 02, 2017 05:00 - 10 minutes - 9.89 MB

Meet the Composer with Nadia Sirota – Q2 Music's podcast about the musical creative process – returns for its third season on Monday, March 6. Pre-game for the new season with a week of clips from the original WNYC radio program. Meet the Composer is available on iTunes or wherever you get your podcasts. A blast from the past featuring the composer Libby Larsen. Larsen explains how living in Minneapolis facilitated her success as a composer, and how federal regulations in Title IX provided ...

From the Vaults, Part Four: Meet the Composer With Libby Larsen

March 02, 2017 05:00 - 10 minutes - 10.1 MB

A blast from the past featuring the composer Libby Larsen. Larsen explains how living in Minneapolis facilitated her success as a composer, and how federal regulations in Title IX provided an uplift to women composers in the U.S. This week, we're revisiting interviews conducted in the 1980s by the influential music critic and educator Tim Page. His show, which aired from 1981 until 1992, was called Meet the Composer and featured some of the most towering musical figures of the previous centu...

From the Vaults, Part Three: Meet the Composer With Otto Luening

March 01, 2017 05:00 - 11 minutes - 10.1 MB

Meet the Composer with Nadia Sirota – Q2 Music's podcast about the musical creative process – returns for its third season on Monday, March 6. Pre-game for the new season with a week of clips from the original WNYC radio program. Meet the Composer is available on iTunes or wherever you get your podcasts. Today's blast from the past features the composers and electronic experimentalists Alvin Lucier and Otto Luening. Page introduces us to Lucier's seminal tape piece, I am sitting in a room, ...

From the Vaults, Part Three: Meet the Composer With Otto Luening

March 01, 2017 05:00 - 11 minutes - 10.3 MB

Otto Luening was a forefather of experimental electronic music and a life-long educator, flutist and composer. In this 1985 interview with host Tim Page, from the original WNYC program called Meet the Composer, Luening tells the story of his first electronic experiments and wonders why audiences had found new interest in some of his earliest works. We also take a look at Alvin Lucier, another tape music maverick, as we prepare for the start of our new season on Monday. --- About the podcas...

From the Vaults, Part Two: Meet the Composer With John Cage

February 28, 2017 05:00 - 12 minutes - 11.3 MB

Meet the Composer with Nadia Sirota – Q2 Music's podcast about the musical creative process – returns for its third season on Monday, March 6. Pre-game for the new season with a week of clips from the original WNYC radio program. Meet the Composer is available on iTunes or wherever you get your podcasts. We continue the week-long ramp-up to our next and third season with an interview with the widely influential patriarch of 20th-century experimental music John Cage. In this conversation wit...

From the Vaults, Part Two: Meet the Composer With John Cage

February 28, 2017 05:00 - 12 minutes - 11.5 MB

We continue the week-long ramp-up to our next and third season with an interview with the widely influential patriarch of 20th-century experimental music John Cage. In this conversation with host Tim Page, Cage explains how his strenuous connection with music precipitated his experiments with silence, ambient noise and spirituality. Page offers his own straightforward critique of Cage's discoveries and reiterates the need for objectivity and seclusion in music criticism.  --- About the pod...

From the Vaults, Part One: Meet the Composer With Tim Page

February 27, 2017 05:00 - 11 minutes - 10.8 MB

As we build up to the launch of our third season next Monday, we thought we'd look back at the original WNYC radio program Meet the Composer from the mid-'80s, hosted by the illustrious music critic Tim Page. We'll share excerpts of his interviews with some of the most exciting figures in contemporary music, but before that we wanted to check in with Tim himself, a man for whom music has been an enormous force in his life, in his career, and even for his psychological well-being. We ask him ...

From the Vaults, Part One: Meet the Composer With Tim Page

February 27, 2017 05:00 - 11 minutes - 10.7 MB

Meet the Composer with Nadia Sirota – Q2 Music's podcast about the musical creative process – returns for its third season on Monday, March 6. Pre-game for the new season with a week of clips from the original WNYC radio program. Meet the Composer is available on iTunes or wherever you get your podcasts. As we build up to the launch of our third season next Monday, March 6, we thought we'd look back at the original WNYC radio program Meet the Composer from the mid-'80s, hosted by the illust...

Watch 360-Degree Video: Meet the Composer at the Met Cloisters

January 10, 2017 05:00

On Friday, Jan. 20 at 3 pm, Meet the Composer and host Nadia Sirota welcomed audiences to the Met Cloisters for an afternoon of radio- and music-making. Over one hundred people gathered to sing Pauline Oliveros's Tuning Meditation in the illustrious Fuentidueña Chapel. Watch a 360-degree video of performance below.  On that afternoon, we followed Oliveros's performance instructions: “Inhale deeply; exhale on the note of your choice; listen to the sounds around you, and match your next note ...

Kickstart Season Three of Meet the Composer

May 10, 2016 16:00 - 3 minutes - 3.34 MB

Help us make a third season of the Peabody Award-winning podcast about the creative musical process, with host Nadia Sirota. Learn more about our ambitions for next season and help make Season Three a reality by backing our Kickstarter campaign today at www.q2music.org/kickstarter.

Kickstart Season Three of Meet the Composer

May 10, 2016 16:00 - 3 minutes - 3.16 MB

Hi, I’m Nadia Sirota, host of Meet the Composer (MTC). MTC is a podcast that confronts the artists and art that move us, using radio storytelling to tease out what makes these pieces and people tick. We aim to share the music we love with anyone who is down to listen. Music can be tricky to talk about, so when words fail, Meet the Composer uses all of the tools in our arsenal – sound design, phrasing, underscoring, and sonic embroidery – to share what we love about music with our audience. M...

Download: 'Viola Concerto: Part II' by Nico Muhly

December 28, 2015 05:00 - 10 minutes - 9.24 MB

I'm so excited to share today's Meet the Composer bonus track with you. Last October, I traveled to Detroit to perform the US premiere of Nico Muhly's viola concerto with the Detroit Symphony Orchestra under Maestro Leonard Slatkin. The orchestra has graciously agreed to let us use the second movement of the viola concerto for our show for three months, so this is our first ever LIMITED-TIME bonus track.  Nico wrote the concerto in 2014, and in a lot of ways it's the fruit of 10 years of ou...

Download: 'Viola Concerto: Part II' by Nico Muhly

December 28, 2015 05:00 - 9 minutes - 9.06 MB

I'm so excited to share today's Meet the Composer bonus track with you. Last October, I traveled to Detroit to perform the US premiere of Nico Muhly's viola concerto with the Detroit Symphony Orchestra under Maestro Leonard Slatkin. The orchestra has graciously agreed to let us use the second movement of the viola concerto for our show for three months, so this is our first ever LIMITED-TIME bonus track.  Nico wrote the concerto in 2014, and in a lot of ways it's the fruit of 10 years of ou...

Nico Muhly: Community Theater

December 11, 2015 05:00 - 1 hour - 57.4 MB

First, a disclaimer. I wanna make something clear right off the bat here: I'm completely in the tank for Nico Muhly. We went to college together and he has been one of my best friends and most frequent collaborators ever since. But! He is deeply gifted creator, and honestly I'd feel insane not featuring him just because we're close. Okay. Nico is a composer with a very specific point of view – a rabid communicator whose personality factors massively in his work. Nico works extremely well w...

Nico Muhly: III. "u"

December 11, 2015 05:00 - 24 minutes

Nico's community is a massive factor in his life. He is very much "in touch," sending emails from the profane to the profound to literally hundreds of people a day. Nico values his friends dearly. Nico recently published a very candid blog entry wherein he discussed his mental state. Last year, Nico realized, all of a sudden, that the medication he had been taking for ten years was numbing him to a number of very important moments in his life. He changed doctors and changed prescriptions, an...

Nico Muhly: Playlist

December 11, 2015 05:00

Movement I: Trial By Fire 0:00—Nico Muhly: Skip Town | Listen | Buy 0:44—Nico Muhly: Balance Problems | Listen | Buy 4:13—Nico Muhly: Mothertongue | Listen | Buy 4:27—Nico Muhly: Etude1A | Listen | Buy 6:06—Nico Muhly: A Hudson Cycle | Listen | Buy 7:41—William Byrd: O magnum mysterium | Listen | Buy 9:47—Igor Stravinsky: Mass | Listen | Buy 12:24—Nico Muhly: Motion | Listen | Buy 14:00—Nico Muhly: score from Margaret | Listen 16:22—Bjork: Oceania | Listen | Buy 18:37—Nico Muhly: Clear Musi...

Nico Muhly: Community Theater

December 11, 2015 05:00 - 1 hour - 57.2 MB

First, a disclaimer. I wanna make something clear right off the bat here: I'm completely in the tank for Nico Muhly. We went to college together and he has been one of my best friends and most frequent collaborators ever since. But! He is deeply gifted creator, and honestly I'd feel insane not featuring him just because we're close. Okay. Nico is a composer with a very specific point of view – a rabid communicator whose personality factors massively in his work. Nico works extremely well w...

Nico Muhly: II. Working Together

December 11, 2015 05:00 - 14 minutes

Nico has worked with film directors, librettists, clarinet players and choreographers, and has written arrangements for an impressive roster of bands and songwriters. His love of communication in all forms, warts and all, lends itself beautifully to collaborative projects, and his operas, ballets and song arrangements are brilliant testaments to this.

Nico Muhly: I. Trial By Fire

December 11, 2015 05:00 - 22 minutes

Nico grew up in Providence, but spent odd corridors of his youth abroad, acquiring languages quickly and setting the tone for his current, punishing travel schedule. He was a child chorister who became deeply obsessed with the American minimalists in high school. He attended Columbia and Juilliard concurrently and studied as many things as he could, while working creative part-time jobs. Nico is very, very funny, which fact, coupled with his insatiable appetite for any and all interesting in...

Download: Anna Thorvaldsdottir's 'Scape' Performed by Pianist Cory Smythe

November 24, 2015 05:00 - 11 minutes - 11 MB

This week’s Meet the Composer Bonus Track is a world premiere recording of Anna Thorvaldsdottir’s piano work Scape. Scape, like many of Anna’s works, uses extended techniques to create unique, otherworldly textures. For this piece, Anna demands quite a bit of playing INSIDE the instrument, as well as a few somewhat unconventional preparations to the instrument itself. Prepared piano basically means a piano with stuff in it, screws, thimbles, tin foil, pieces of paper, the type of thing that’...

Download: Anna Thorvaldsdottir's 'Scape' Performed by Pianist Cory Smythe

November 24, 2015 05:00 - 11 minutes - 10.8 MB

This week’s Meet the Composer Bonus Track is a world premiere recording of Anna Thorvaldsdottir’s piano work Scape. Scape, like many of Anna’s works, uses extended techniques to create unique, otherworldly textures. For this piece, Anna demands quite a bit of playing INSIDE the instrument, as well as a few somewhat unconventional preparations to the instrument itself. Prepared piano basically means a piano with stuff in it, screws, thimbles, tin foil, pieces of paper, the type of thing that...

Anna Thorvaldsdottir: Composing Is Second Nature

November 09, 2015 05:00 - 55 minutes - 51.1 MB

Anna Thorvaldsdottir is an Icelandic composer whose work conjures entire environments of sound, surrounding the listener in a dark and forbidding landscape. Anna thinks sonically; her music comes from a deeply non-verbal place, and she has developed a brilliant workflow which allows these ideas to remain mostly whole and unmolested through her creative process. Anna often favors massive ensembles, writing delicate and detailed parts for every player, but even when she is writing for smaller ...

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