Composers
- Katherine Balch
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- Wang Lu
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- George Perle
- Tobias Picker
- Matthias Pintscher
- Bernard Rands
- Katharina Rosenberger
- Huang Ruo
- Joseph Schwantner
- Howard Shore
- Wayne Shorter
- Alvin Singleton
- Stanislaw Skrowaczewski
- Elijah Daniel Smith
- Kate Soper
- Gregory Spears
- Morton Subotnick
- Dobrinka Tabakova
- Karen Tanaka
- Ken Ueno
- Stewart Wallace
- Shelley Washington
- Kurt Weill
- Scott Wollschleger
- Katherine Young
- Ellen Taaffe Zwilich
Blog Archive
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(11 posts)
- Alvin Singleton's "Sweet Chariot" at the National Museum of African American History & Culture
- Joan La Barbara Performs "Music for Merce" in Minneapolis & Chicago
- Praise for Kate Soper's "Ipsa Dixit"
- Æolus Quartet Performs Keeril Makan's "Washed by Fire"
- Mario Diaz de Leon Premieres "Sacrament" with Talea Ensemble
- Ann Cleare's "eyam v (woven)" Premieres at RTÉ National Symphony Orchestra
- Music from Copand House: Pierre Jalbert, "Secret Alchemy"
- Kettle Corn New Music Presents Scott Wollschleger's "Brontal Symmetry"
- Third Coast Percussion Premieres Christopher Cerrone's "Goldbeater's Skin"
- Anthony Cheung in Residency at 113 Composers Collective
- Kate Soper's "Ipsa Dixit" Premieres at Dixon Place
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(5 posts)
- Andrew Norman's "Play", Revised & Ready for Action at the LA Phil
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- Contemporary Piano Video Library features Lei Liang's "Garden Eight"
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(6 posts)
- New Works by Kate Soper and Mario Diaz de Leon at the LA Phil
- Lerdahl and Carrick Performed by Sound Icon in Boston
- Yale Choral Artists Perform Hannah Lash's "Requiem"
- Ann Cleare's "Mire |...| Veins" at the Festival of New Trumpet Music
- Ted Hearne: Sounds from the Bench
- Erin Gee Featured at the Resonant Bodies Festival
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- Lei Liang: Deriving Worlds
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- New Releases of Morton Subotnick's Works for "Ghost Electronics"
- Timo Andres' "Comfort Food" in New York
- Anthony Cheung's "Dystemporal" Now Available from Wergo
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(8 posts)
- Hannah Lash at the New York Philharmonic Biennial
- Jennifer Koh's "Shared Madness"
- World Premiere of Mario Diaz de Leon's "O Ignis Spiritus" by the TAK Ensemble
- Hannah Lash's "Beowulf" Premiered by Guerilla Opera
- Josh Modney in the PSNY Greenroom
- Alex Mincek: "On The Outside, Looking Out"
- Awards Season for PSNY Composers
- Upcoming Performances of Wollschleger, Cerrone
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- Christopher Cerrone's "High Windows" on Q2 Music's "LPR Live" Podcast
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- Alex Mincek Portrait Concert at Miller Theatre
- Ted Hearne Premieres "Baby (an argument)" with Ensemble ACJW
- Kate Soper's OITOITOI Premiered by Ogni Suono Duo
- Marilyn Nonken Debuts Richard Carrick's "la touche sonore sous l'eau"
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(7 posts)
- Kate Soper Profiled on NewMusicBox
- Timo Andres at the Phillips Collection
- Sleeping Giant at Carnegie Hall and Le Poisson Rouge
- Josh Modney Performs at Spectrum NYC
- Lei Liang Performed by the Mivos Quartet
- Gregory Oakes Performs Ken Ueno at the 2016 New Music Gathering
- PSNY Remembers John Duffy (1926-2015)
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(7 posts)
- Ted Hearne's "Law of Mosaics" in Chicago; "The Source" CD Release
- "The Branch Will Not Break" at Present Music
- Two New Works by Timo Andres
- Soper, Lash, and Pintscher Performances on the East Coast
- Sound Icon Performs Ken Ueno's "Zetsu"
- Andrew Norman Premieres "Switch" at Utah Symphony
- PSNY Around America
- ▼October
(8 posts)
- New Works on PSNY: Wollschleger, Ueno and Cerrone
- New Works and Performances by Ann Cleare
- Hannah Lash Premieres Two Works with ACO and Ensemble Intercontemporain
- Keeril Makan's "Persona" Premieres at National Sawdust
- JACK Quartet and ACO Premiere New Alex Mincek Concerto
- Rufus Wainwright's "Prima Donna" on Deutsche Grammophon
- New Works by Timo Andres on PSNY
- Vijay Iyer Joins PSNY!
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- Opera News from PSNY Composers
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- New Works from Evan Ziporyn, Lei Liang, René Leibowitz, Christopher Cerrone, and Hannah Lash
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- A Keeril Makan Premiere, Conducted by Richard Carrick
- Tobias Picker on Tzadik Records
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Newsletter
The Music of Michael Hersch
The music of Michael Hersch, as Alex Ross has written in The New Yorker, is "harsh, relentless, and [...] gripping in its dogged progress." Writing in The New York Times, Corinna de Fonesca-Wollheim calls it "bleak," "dark," "somber," and "anguished." But as de Fonesca-Wollheim reminds us, to many of Hersch's collaborators and listeners, this music is also necessary. As Hersch's frequent collaborator, the violinist Patricia Kopatchinskaja has said: “The despair in the music makes it a necessary experience, to play and to listen to [...] There is nothing you can compare it to.”
In Hersch's 2015 Violin Concerto, commissioned by Kopatchinskaja and the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra, Hersch presents a raw nerve, something abject—and hence something powerful and potentially life-changing. As Kopatchinskaja notes, “I’m every time really overwhelmed, and I’m a bit scared to play his music, again and again… but I know it’s very necessary for our time.”
(Patricia Kopatchinskaja on the music of Michael Hersch)
Recently recorded by Kopatchinskaja and the International Contemporary Ensemble, and released on New Focus Recordings, Hersch’s Violin Concerto was named the Best Violin Concerto of 2018 by Sequenza21. It responds directly to the death of a close friend. As Aaron Grad writes, “the four movements of Hersch’s concerto align like a series of interconnected islands of sound around an essential but unknowable vanishing point.” The concerto begins with an epigraph constructed of two fragments of poems by Thomas Hardy, and ends:
Strange sounds of anger and sadness
That cut the heart’s core,
And shaken words bitter to madness;
And then no more.
This poetic epigraph anticipates Hersch’s instructions to the instrumentalists: they are to play “ferociously”, and when the violin enters, it is to play “brutally throughout.” Kopatchinskaja comments on Hersch’s writing for the violin: “...the Violin Concerto is an open wound, there is no other way to say it. I know no other work by a composer of my generation that is so convincing, that moves me so deeply, [...] that tolerates neither doubt nor objection. It is like a mountain one can't ignore. For me, Michael Hersch embodies the new generation after icons like György Kurtág or György Ligeti. With him, everything is crystal clear, there is no decoration, no superficial beauty, no compromises. Everything is exactly in place, has found its perfect form."
Hersch’s 2010 string quartet Images from a Closed Ward was described by The Philadelphia Inquirer as one that "[leaves] you in a figurative blindfold taken off momentarily to glimpse another previously unimaginable terrain." The piece traces its origins to an encounter Hersch had with etchings by the American artist Michael Mazur (1935–2009). Like his Violin Concerto, Images from a Closed Ward explores what Mazur called an “overwhelming sense of ‘sadness’ [...] a complicated, and therefore interesting human condition.” Hersch's music can be "unrelenting, nearly without hope ... But no artwork can be without hope since it is in the very nature of creative work to be optimistic, if only in as much as we continue to work through everything but our own death.”
Hersch explicitly explored illness and death in his 2012 monodrama, On the Threshold of Winter, which sets texts by the Romanian author Marin Sorescu's book The Bridge, written on his deathbed. It responds directly to the death of a close friend to cancer, and Hersch's own struggle with the disease. Premiered in 2014, On the Threshold of Winter "left the audience shellshocked and the soloist, the soprano Ah Young Hong, in tears." As Andrew Farach-Colton writes in his program note for the monodrama,
Ultimately, our consolation is found in Hersch's art itself: in the richness of his imagination, and the precision and concision of his musical language. But, most of all, it is in his humanity, which shines like a beacon through the score's darkest page.