PSNY Works at Summer Festivals

by Ted Gordon on July 21, 2015, 11:56 a.m.

Ah, summer: when classical musicians and fans retreat to the country to enjoy music in the great outdoors. This year, across the country, festival orchestras are mixing time-honored performances of the classical repertoire with exciting new compositions from America's living composers, keeping their tradition vibrant and accessible to a new generation. 

Chicago's Grant Park Music Festival brings music to all parts of the city, and on July 21st and 23rd they're presenting Douglas J. Cuomo's Kyrie both at the South Shore Cultural Center and the Columbus Park Refectory. Two arias from Cuomo's Doubt—The Boy's Nature and The Doubt Sermon— will aslo be premiered at the Jay Pritzker Pavilian at Millenium Park on July 22nd. 

Back on the East Coast, the Tanglewood Festival of Contemporary Music book-ends its 2015 season with two works by George Perle— Critical Moments and Critical Moments II. Commissioned for the New York New Music Ensemble and Eighth Blackbird, respectively, these two short chamber works epitomize Perle's distinctively American take on Modernism. 

In the rocky mountains of Colorado, the Aspen Music Festival presents Anthony Cheung's SynchroniCities on August 15th. A wide-ranging meditation on the commonalities between sound and setting, this "sonic travelogue" beautifully illustrates the power of music to unite aesthetic experiences between vastly different locations. With that in mind, those lucky enough to have already visited Aspen this year will have seen George Perle's Critical Moments II, along with Pierre Jalbert's Secret Alchemy, performed on a July 6th cocnert. 

 Finally, on the West Coast, Santa Cruz audiences will hear the world premiere of a new orchestral work by Hannah Lash, entitled Eating Flowers at this year's Cabrillo Festival, under the baton of Marin Alsop. This new orchestral work expresses Lash's "digestion" of the beautiful flowers of Late Romantic orchestral masterworks, metabolizing them into something unique and fitting for the 21st century. 

PSNY Celebrates George Perle's Centenary

by Ted Gordon on May 15, 2015, 5:15 p.m.

Composer, theorist, musicologist, and educator, George Perle was born 100 years ago this May. One of the most notable composers who utilized serial compositional techniques in the twentieth century, Perle left his own distinctive mark developing what some have called "twelve-tone tonality". While still assuring the circulation of all possible chromatic tones, Perle set up internal hierarchies that established unique tonal centers within each work; in this way, Perle came quite close to achieving an ideal of the Serialist movement: to make each piece of music autonomous, breathing with its own internal logic, a glimpse at a possible utopic future. 

Perle took a leading role in establishing scholarship on European modernism in America. With Igor Stravinsky, he co-founded the Alban Berg society in 1968, undertaking crucial research on Berg's works such as Lulu and the Lyric Suite. Like fellow PSNY composer René Leibowitz, Perle took on the burden of promoting European modernist techniques in an environment that wasn't always receptive; to the daunting face of mathematical serialism, Perle added a distinctively approachable American edge. 

We're honored to offer two works by Perle for immediate download: his Woodwind Quintet No. 3, composed in 1967, and his Sonata a Quattro, commissioned and premiered by New York's Da Capo Chamber Players in 1982. Check out a recording of the Sonata a Quattro, on an album shared with another American modernist master, Elliott Carter. 

On May 21, The New York Public Library hosts the Da Capo Chamber Players, along with the Sylvan Winds, cellist Fred Sherry and pianists Michael Brown and Michael Boriskin for a George Perle Centennial Celebration concert. The event includes performances of several works, including Sonata a Quattro, as well as a display of Perle's manuscripts from the library's collection.