Contemporary Classics January 1, 2018 - Celebrating the Music of Composers Who Died This Year

Our theme music is by Kirsten Volness.  Tonight on Contemporary Classics we are honoring composers who passed away this year by celebrating their music. 

We are going to begin tonight’s show with the music of Icelandic composer Jóhann Jóhannsson who passed away suddenly in February of this year.  It appears it was due to an accidental overdose due to an interaction between prescription medications and cocaine.  He is probably most famous for his film scores to the Theory of Everything, Sicario and Arrival, but here we play a work from his last album Orphée entitled Flight from the City

The American composer and flutist Katherine Hoover  died on September 21, 2018.  She studied composition and flute at the Eastman School of Music graduating in 1959 and went into performing because of the poor treatment of women composers.  She only started composing again in the early 1970s.  Her music is described as "a romantic, often pictorial atonal style".   Tonight we feature her work "Winter Spirits".

Oliver Knussen came to my attention as one of the originators of the Contemporary Music Festival at Tanglewood in Lenox MA.  He passed away suddenly just before the festival this year in July.  Probably he is most famous as a conductor who specialized in contemporary composers.  As a composer, he is most known for his children's operas, “Where the Wild Things Are”.  He told an interviewer a few years ago “I was immersed in music from the beginning, and it never occurred to me that not everybody thought it was the most important thing in life.”    We are celebrating his work with his "Flourish with Fireworks"

Next we "Dance Fantasy" by Otomar Kvěch the Czech composer who died in this past March.  During much of his live he worked for Czechoslovak Radio as a music director and program manager as well as teaching at music conservatories and was still at the Czech radio station Vltava at the time of his death.  

Milko Kelemen is a Croatian composer who studied with Olivier Messiaen in Paris and spent most of his life in Zagreb, Yugoslavia and various cities in Germany.  He died in March in Stuttgart, Germany, where he spent the last part of his life.  We have a performance of his work “Concertino for Double Bass and String Orchestra”.

 Juan Hidalgo Cordorniu was born in the Canary Islands and studied composition with Nadia Boulanger in Paris.  He was a proponent of the Spanish neodadaist movement who were much like the FLUXUS movement in the United States.  We have a performance of his work “Fuga" from Trío en Si Bemol.

Lászlo Melis was a Hungarian composer and violinist who died in February of this past year.  He writes primarily in the minimalist style and his compositions are often characterized by a propulsive, bouncy quality.  We have a performance of his work “Etude For Three Mirrors" written in 1982 which really illustrates this propulsive, bouncy quality to his music.  

Takehisa Kosugi who died in October was an improvisatory composer who as part of the FLUXUS movement which emphasized the process of composition over the final product composed and performed a large number of pieces for dance choreographer, Merce Cunningham.  We have a performance of his work “Untitled Improvisation 3".

Next in our celebration of the music of composers who passed away this year, we have the music of the American avant-garde composer and guitarist Glenn Branca who died in May of this year.  He was known for his use of volume, alternative guitar tunings, repetition, droning, and the harmonic series. His music was often called Rock because of his use of guitar and percussion, but I think he fits right in with the music we are playing tonight.  Tonight we are featuring his work Quadratonic.

Renaud Gagneux – French composer  who died on 24 January 2018 was a French composer.  Studied piano composition with Henri Dutilleux, Karlheinz Stockhausen, André Jolivet and Olivier Messiaen.  We have a performance of his work “Bagatelle No. 1" from his Bagatelles for cello solo.

Colin Brumby was an Australian composer and conductor who died on 3 January 2018. From Brisbane Queensland most known as an opera conductor and composer. Tonight we are featuring his work "Four Exotic Dances"

 Earlier this year we had a whole show devoted to the works of George Walker who died on August 23, 2018.  To represent him on this show, we have one of his songs, Lament.

We are going to close this evenings celebration of composers who passed away this year with a performance of Glen Roven: The Santa Fe Songs.   Glen Roven who died on July 25, 2018 was a 2 time emmy winning composer, lyricist and conductor.  Roven was in a Santa Fe bookstore following the death of his partner of 30 years and came across a book of poetry which so affected him, he set them to music as the 8 Santa Fe Songs.