Voice over

Reviewing Chameleon Arts Ensemble.
Boston Globe, May 19, 2015.

Ghost, writer

Reviewing Guerilla Opera and Per Bloland's Pedr Solis.
Boston Globe, May 17, 2015.

Marginal utility

Reviewing the Talea Ensemble in Georges Aperghis' Happy End.
Boston Globe, May 11, 2015.

The cinema firmament

Reviewing ALisa Weilerstein and Inon Barnatan.
Boston Globe, May 3, 2015.

A feeling that no one can ever reprise

Reviewing the Boston Symphony Chamber Players.
Boston Globe, April 27, 2015.

The very minute bids thee ope thine ear

Reviewing the International Contemporary Ensemble.
Boston Globe, April 20, 2015.

You can hear from far and near

Reviewing Boston Musica Viva.
Boston Globe, April 14, 2015.

So many people you can check up on

Reviewing LAN, Anne-F. Jacques, and Benjamin Nelson.
Boston Globe, April 7, 2015.

Hit parade

Reviewing Third Coast Percussion.
Boston Globe, March 23, 2015.

Déjà vu all over again

Reviewing the Boston Symphony Chamber Players and Emanuel Ax.
Boston Globe, March 17, 2015.

Hanging on the Telephone

Digital to Analog: Plug and Play. Connections, made and missed.
NewMusicBox, March 11, 2015.

When you've got worries, all the noise and the hurry

Reviewing O+A.
Boston Globe, March 8, 2015.

Scanning life through the picture window

Reviewing the Calder Quartet.
Boston Globe, February 23, 2015.

Wandle, wandle deine Bahnen; Nur betrachten deinen Schein

Reviewing Renée Fleming and Olga Kern.
Boston Globe, February 10, 2015.

Fly-By-Wire

Reviewing Paavali Jumppanen, Jeffrey Means, and Hans Tutschku.
Boston Globe, February 6, 2015.

Schematics

Digital to Analog: Poems and Histories. Andrew Pekler, Vicky Chow, and technologies evident and hidden.
NewMusicBox, February 4, 2015.

For Andrew Patner

Francis Poulenc's VIIème Improvisation en ut majeur (recorded with my phone on my out-of-tune piano):



Andrew approached culture the way Julia Child approached food: as an object of exacting yet unassuming erudition; as an avenue of elegant, unfailing generosity; and as a source of immoderate pleasure. Like everyone else who ever met him, I will miss him.

Karamu, fiesta, forever

Reviewing the Cantata Singers.
Boston Globe, February 2, 2015.

Sing a song, it'll make your day

Reviewing Anne Sofie von Otter and Angela Hewitt.
Boston Globe, January 26, 2015.

In the lane, snow is glistening

Reviewing Ian Bostridge's Schubert's Winter Journey: Anatomy of an Obsession.
Boston Globe, January 25, 2015.

All-Access

Reviewing the Green Mountain Project.
Boston Globe, January 14, 2015.

A Better Tomorrow

Reviewing the Boston Symphony Chamber Players.
Boston Globe, January 13, 2015.

The occasions' sound of mirth puts cap on the start of another yuletide song (8)

New Music Boxes: Wring Out the Old. A musical cryptic crossword for year's end.
NewMusicBox, December 23, 2014.

Sinners, reconciled

arr. Guerrieri: The Wexford Carol (PDF, 99Kb)



Happy holidays from everyone at Soho the Dog HQ! Here's a carol arrangement to cleanse your aural palate in between walls of indiscriminate seasonal noise. Honestly, this has been one of those years when I think Christmas might be better off as, say, a quadrennial affair, like the World Cup. You know how the World Cup comes along, and people with no previous interest in the sport are straightaway really into it, to an unprecedented degree? Imagine if you could pull that off with platitudinous Christmas sentiments. ("Peace on earth? Goodwill to all? I suddenly find these notions INTRIGUINGLY COMPELLING" *strokes chin as eyes widen and flash*) Comfort and/or joy to everyone out there.

BONUS STOCKING STUFFER

"Hark! the Herald Angels Sing" (descant and harmonization by me, 2014) (PDF, 57 Kb)
The same thing in a lower key (PDF, 57 Kb)



A characteristically nutty descant I wrote for an otherwise beloved carol. I like my angels heralding in screaming bright G major, but that might be just a bit high for the end of a full lessons-and-carols service, and a half-century of Presbyterian hymnals have insisted on F, so take your pick.

In the flesh

Reviewing Schola Cantorum Boston.
Boston Globe, December 16, 2014.

You belong with

This Year's Model (or, That's What They Don't See). On In C, Taylor Swift, Heinrich Heine, Nazarene painters, Duke Ellington, and the canon.
NewMusicBox, December 12, 2014.

Universal adapter

Reviewing Charles Rosen, The Complete Columbia and Epic Album Collection.
Boston Globe, December 7, 2014.

Arrival gate

Boston: Passports and Layovers. Reviewing the Lorelei Ensemble and Roomful of Teeth.
NewMusicBox, December 5, 2014.

Something borrowed, something blue

Reviewing Odyssey Opera.
Boston Globe, November 24, 2014.

Squeeze theorem

Reviewing an evening with Michael Pisaro.
Boston Globe, November 13, 2014.

Organic fruit

Reviewing the Cantata Singers and Ensemble.
Boston Globe, November 11, 2014.

Reflecting telescope

Reviewing Richard Goode.
Boston Globe, November 4, 2014.

Back issues

I haven't updated this space for several months now, for a lot of reasons. I've been writing elsewhere. I've been trying to compose. I've been out of town. I've been....

Eh, who am I kidding? This is why I haven't been updating:

Which is not to say I haven't been working, though. So, in a bout of real-work avoidance, I've at least gone back and filled in a bunch of links from the interregnum—Boston Globe reviews, NewMusicBox articles, other appearances here and there. I've also compiled a master list of all the "Score" columns I've written for the Globe over the past couple years. (Links to that list and my NewMusicBox articles are now in the sidebar, too.) Critic-at-Large Moe (pictured above, on left) would like you to know that he, too, has not been idle.

Anyway, a drink. This one is named in honor of Henri Poincaré, since I was reading a biography of him, and full of grapefruit, because I love grapefruit.

3-Sphere

First, make some grapefruit-infused gin: add the peel (no pith) and juice of one grapefruit to 500ml of gin, let it steep for a week, then strain it through a coffee filter.

Then, combine:

2 oz. grapefruit-infused gin
1 oz. grapefruit juice
½ oz. Cocchi Americano
a couple dashes of grapefruit bitters

Stir with cracked ice and strain into the closest thing you have to a non-Euclidean glass.

XL Tall

Reviewing Dinosaur Annex.
Boston Globe, October 27, 2014.

Reverb and chorus

Boston: A Fight for Love and Glory—Pipeline! at 25. Reviewing Crazy Alice, Quintaine Americana, Kudgel, Birdsongs of the Mesozoic, and Bulkhead.
NewMusicBox, October 16, 2014.

Δισσος μυθος

Sounds Heard: Christian Wolff, Pianist: Pieces.
NewMusicBox, October 14, 2014.

Chic and unique with lots of kick like a cleat

Reviewing Mark Padmore and Jonathan Biss.
Boston Globe, October 14, 2014.

Diplomatic passage

An interview with David Grubbs.
Boston Globe, October 9, 2014.

Blink comparator

Reviewing Stefan Jackiw and Anna Polonsky.
Boston Globe, October 7, 2014.

Dress for success

Reviewing the Parker Quartet.
Boston Globe, October 2, 2014.

Makers' Mark

For Guerilla Opera, every production is a premiere.
Boston Globe, September 20, 2014.

Afterimage

Reviewing the Eroica Trio.
Boston Globe, September 16, 2014.

Alternating current

Reviewing Akiko Hatakeyama.
Boston Globe, September 11, 2014.

This powerful magnet, that left 'em stagnant

Sound and Fury. Reviewing Jan Swafford's Beethoven: Anguish and Triumph.
The American Scholar, Autumn 2014.

Look and feel

Style Points.
NewMusicBox, August 27, 2014.

Spin the dial

Sounds Heard: The Things We Did [This] Summer. Pulitzer Prize Fighter, BMOP, Lewis Spratlan, Mehmet Ali Sanlıkol, Neil Cicierega, and the Boston Symphony Chamber Players.
NewMusicBox, August 5, 2014.

Book of Judges

Tanglewood: Sessions and Lessons on Successful Composition. Further thoughts prompted by the 2014 FCM.
NewMusicBox, July 28, 2014.

Piece work

Reviewing the 2014 Tanglewood Festival of Contemporary Music.
Boston Globe, July 23, 2014.

Out of this world

Reviewing Thomas Hampson and Wolfram Rieger.
Boston Globe, July 18, 2014.

Pipe and Drum

Reviewing Aston Magna.
Boston Globe, July 13, 2014.

United nations

Boston: SICPP's Love and Geometry. Reviewing the Summer Institute for Contemporary Performance Practice.
NewMusicBox, June 26, 2014.

Hue and cry

Reviewing Nino Jvania and Stockhausen's Natürliche Dauern.
Boston Globe, June 18, 2014.

Flip the switch

Boston: Bromp Treb Busts the Matrix.
NewMusicBox, June 16, 2014.

Nice 'n' Easy

Reviewing Grand Harmonie's Il re pastore.
Boston Globe, June 16, 2014.

Positive to Great

The Radical Virtuoso. A profile of Paul Jacobs.
Yale Alumni Magazine, May/June 2014.

Eager to please, ready to fight

Reviewing the Borromeo Quartet and Lawrence Lesser.
Boston Globe, june 15, 2014.

Ghost in the Shell

Reviewing Ken Ueno's Gallo.
Boston Globe, June 2, 2014.

Voice leading

Boston: Caroline Shaw's Common Cause. Reviewing A Far Cry and Roomful of Teeth.
NewMusicBox, May 21, 2014.

Wheel and spoke

Sounds Heard: Meredith Monk, Piano Songs.
NewMusicBox, May 13, 2014.

Elementary

Reviewing Paavali Jumppanen.
Boston Globe, May 6, 2014.

Calling cards

Who invented "Heavy Metal"? On musical genre names.
Boston Globe, May 4, 2014.

Magnetic moment

Boston: Practice Sessions. Reviewing Keeril Makan's Letting Time Circle Through Us and Bernard Rands' Concerto for Piano and Orchestra.
NewMusicBox, April 15, 2014.

Boats against the current

New England's Prospect: Beyond the Sea. Reviewing Matthew Ritchie's Monstrance/Remonstrance.
NewMusicBox, April 8, 2014.

Return key

Reviewing Emmanuel Music and Russell Sherman.
Boston Globe, April 1, 2014.

Screen Gems

New England's Prospect: The Gift of Sound and Vision. Reviewing Ben Russell and Robert A. A. Lowe.
NewMusicBox, March 28, 2014.

Concentration

Reviewing the Arditti Quartet.
Boston Globe, March 25, 2014.

The Go-Between

Reviewing the Boston Symphony Orchestra, Yefim Bronfman, and Christoph von Dohnányi.
Boston Globe, March 17, 2014.

Tokens of esteem

Reviewing Marc-André Hamelin, Anthony Marwood, and Alexander Fiterstein.
Boston Globe, May 5, 2014.

Friends and relations

New England's Prospect: The Agnosticism of Boston's Equilibrium Concert Series. Reviewing Boston Modern Brass.
NewMusicBox, March 3, 2014.

Swing shift

Reviewing Quatour Ébène.
Boston Globe, March 3, 2014.

Hot House Flowers

Reviewing Leonidas Kavakos and Enrico Pace.
Boston Globe, February 25, 2014.

Unwrapped

New England's Prospect: Boston Symphony Chamber Players Celebrate 50 Years.
NewMusicBox, February 18, 2014.

Thicker than water

Drinks below! But first, some catch-up:

New England's Prospect: Three World Premieres. Reviewing the Boston Modern Orchestra Project.
NewMusicBox, January 28, 2014.

Reviewing Kirill Gerstein.
Boston Globe, February 3, 2014.

Score: Toshirō Mayuzumi, on screen and in the right-wing arena.
Boston Globe, February 9, 2014.

Score: "Will You Walke the Woods So Wilde" and the ways of musical celebrity.
Boston Globe, February 16, 2014.

Reviewing the Boston Symphony Orchestra, playing West Side Story.
Boston Globe, February 16, 2014.

While you read, here's a little something—chewy and fruity in equal parts—to get you through this last stretch of winter and into spring.

Thorolf's Bowl

1 oz. aquavit
1 oz. Cynar
1 oz. lemon juice
½ oz. blood orange-rosemary cordial (see below)
dash of orange bitters

Shake all ingredients with ice and strain into something that'll look good sitting on your sacrificial altar.

For the blood orange-rosemary cordial:

1 cup blood orange juice
½ cup sugar
1 tablespoon rosemary
½ cup or so of blood orange peels (without the pith)

Combine in a pot and bring to a boil; simmer until reduced to about a cup of liquid. Strain out the rosemary and peels.

Death and Transfiguration

Score: Luciano Berio and heroic mythology. O King, the Sinfonia, and Claude Lévi-Strauss.
Boston Globe, January 25, 2014.

I also forgot to link to last week's effort:

Score: A real-life diva gave Tosca some of its flavor. A menu via Sarah Bernhardt and Auguste Escoffier.
Boston Globe, January 18, 2014.

Group theory

New England's Prospect: Fellow Travelers. Reviewing the Fifth Floor Collective.
NewMusicBox, January 24, 2014.

It ain't fiction, just a natural fact

Reviewing Jeremy Denk.
Boston Globe, January 14, 2014.

Two weeks into 2014, and this recital has already earned a spot on my year-end best list.

Wherefore, O wherefore

Score: Behind a Copland experiment, a ethnomusicological pioneer. On Joel Engel.
Boston Globe, January 12, 2014.

While you read, you can listen to me play (and occasionally stumble) through Engel's "A Nigun" (op. 19, no. 1):

Enduro

Score: the Atari 2600 and the Phrygian mode.
Boston Globe, January 5, 2014.

This might be my favorite one of these columns so far. Oh, and I forgot to link to one over the holidays:

Score: Paul Whiteman's Eighth Experiment in Modern Music.
Boston Globe, December 22, 2013.

One more? One more:

New England's Prospect: May All Your Christmases Be Weird.
NewMusicBox, December 23, 2013.

A yuletide respite, courtesy of Weirdo Records.

Call rival out, initially; swords cross in challenge! (9)

New Music Boxes: Another Year's Gone By.
An occasionally topical crossword for NewMusicBox, December 18, 2013.

Also, what with the holiday rush, I forgot to link to this month's Score columns:

Score: Walter Marchetti's precision troublemaking.
Boston Globe, December 14, 2013.

Score: Ceremon[ies] of Carols and the collecting impulse.
Boston Globe, December 7, 2013.

Score: the crafty respectability of John Knowles Paine.
Boston Globe, November 30, 2013.

Beat the clock

Reviewing Boston Musica Viva.
NewMusicBox, November 25, 2013.

Reviewing Discovery Ensemble.
Boston Globe, November 26, 2013.

Something's coming

Guerrieri: Zeal and Patience (2013) (PDF, 73 Kb)



Hey, Matthew, did you pencil in a new Advent introit for this year and then forget to write it until the last possible minute?

Of course nooooeeeeeh, maybe.

To be sure, we hadn't been doing the last one for a while, and even the really-for-Lent substitution was getting a little musty, so out with the old, &c. I figured I'd put it up here for anyone whose church-music planning is as behindhand as mine.

In my apostatical way, I've always thought that Advent is the church-calendar equivalent of a cult movie. Most people just want to cruise right past it into Christmas, but there is a hardy band that's all "seriously, this is some of Carl Weathers' best work" (or whatever the theological equivalent of Carl Weathers is) and watches everybody else jump to yuletide conclusions with a kind of benevolent pity. But honestly, with Christmas colonizing more and more of the calendar—even as I was assembling Hallowe'en supplies this year, most stores already had Christmas displays—Advent is taking on the aspect of some weird temporal origami: a kind of of Marvel-comics-like pocket dimension, a pleasantly disconnected parallel limbo to the normal time-space continuum of conspicuous consumption.

Into the blue again

More concerts seen and considered:

Anniversary Waltzes: Kronos Quartet and Community MusicWorks in Providence.
NewMusicBox, November 18, 2013.

Reviewing Joshua Bell.
Boston Globe, November 19, 2013.

(Also, from last week: a NewMusicBox review of the new Alvin Lucier orchestra-works CD.)

I have two more articles to get out the door today, so of course I woke up and instead did this:

My skill at time management: same as it ever was.

Do You Remember?

Score: Musical memorials to JFK, explicit and implicit.
Boston Globe, November 17, 2013.

Cut-for-space fun fact: In 1965, the Beach Boys played a show at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst—their first college performance on the east coast—headlining a fundraiser for a "JFK Room" at the school, "a room which would be filled with 'books written for Americans by Americans.'"

(Click to enlarge. Source.) I am not sure the JFK Room was ever actually built.

Done Changed

arr. Guerrieri: The Angels Changed My Name (2013) (PDF, 213 Kb)



Sometimes, you (and, by you, I mean I) want to color in an otherwise nice spiritual arrangement with every crayon in the chromatic box. In spite of myself, I think this one is not bad. I actually wrote it back in September, but gave it the benefit of two months of edits via rehearsal and, this past Sunday, performance (by this faithful crew). Which went well! Except for the recording, which is why there is a computer-realized placeholder until a) I get a good recording, or b) I tweak the realization so it's less clunky. (Unsurprisingly, neither is likely in the near-term.)

This tune has, itself, after a fashion, changed its name a fair amount. I used the version in J. B. T. Marsh's The Story of the Jubilee Singers (1880), which I think is the earliest version in print. (Marsh's book is a really interesting document of the push-pull of trying to write about the African-American experience for white 19th-century readers—the story is told pretty much exclusively through the eyes of white observers, but then Marsh includes biographical sketches of each of the Jubilee Singers, which is by far the most fascinating part of the book.) Probably working from Marsh's version, Samuel Coleridge-Taylor included an arrangement of "The Angels Changed My Name" in his Twenty-Four Negro Melodies, published in 1905; when Coleridge-Taylor sent a copy to his former teacher, Irish composer Charles Villiers Stanford, Stanford replied that the tune was, in his estimation, almost certainly Irish in origin. In 1939, Harry T. Burleigh reworked the tune into the hymn tune "McKee," altering the contour to fit the words "In Christ There Is No East or West," by English writer William Arthur Dunkerley. For his part, Dunkerley, too, enjoyed changing his name—he also wrote journalism under the name Julian Ross, and poetry and fiction under the name John Oxenham—a surname Dunkerley's daughter Elsie, a successful writer of children's books, also adopted.

A look that time can't erase

The New York Festival of Song celebrates Ned Rorem's 90th.
NewMusicBox, November 11, 2013.

We're putting the band back together

A double dose from yesterday's paper:

Previewing Gruppen at the Worcester Polytechnic Institute.
Boston Globe, November 10, 2013.

The performance itself was marvelous, incidentally.

Score: Mozart and Salieri, yet again.
Boston Globe, November 10, 2013.

One little word shall fell him

Score: The pilgrim's progress of "Ein feste Burg."
Boston Globe, November 2, 2013.

The Fast and the Curious

Score: Jonathan Swift and the annoyance of music.
Boston Globe, October 27, 2013.

A talk with Krzysztof Penderecki.
Boston Globe, October 29, 2013.

Formula One

Reviewing Yuja Wang.
Boston Globe, October 20, 2013.

Politics by other means

Score: Marie Fel in the midst of the Querelle.
Boston Globe, October 19, 2013.

He was old, he was young

Reviewing Corey Cerovsek and Paavali Jumppanen.
Boston Globe, October 15, 2013

Carry high the Blue and Gold

Attention, upper Midwesterners: I am pleased and flattered to be part of this year's Chippewa Valley Book Festival, which will find me at the L. E. Phillips Memorial Public Library in Eau Claire, Wisconsin, this coming Monday, October 14 at 7:00 PM. I will be talking, of course, about the only book I have managed to write, which means some far-flung Beethovenian tangents. Fun for all ages! Unless the subject of the Minnesota Orchestra Association comes up, in which case the fun will rapidly turn NC-17 (language).

The Eau Claire Bears! I do hope to make a pilgrimage to Carson Park, in honored memory of Andy Pafko.

Doric, Ionic, Corinthian

Score: Mauricio Kagel's elegant sabotage.
Boston Globe, October 12, 2013.

I know I've been terrible about linking to my various writings in this space, but this "Score" column is something that's been going on for a few months now: the Globe lets me do a calendrical riff on something each week: a concert, an anniversary, a piece of repertoire. The list so far:

October 5: Jehan Alain and the Battle of Saumur
September 28: Carlo Gozzi and The Love for Three Oranges
September 21: The Legendary Pink Dots and the theology of psychedelia
September 14: Henry Brant's 100th
August 31: Frederic Fradkin and the Boston Symphony Orchestra's one and only strike
August 24: Duck That! and other musical birdcalls
August 17: Alfred Hitchcock's Waltzes from Vienna
August 10: Joseph Schuster and other mistaken identities
July 27: The precarious political life of Cardinal Francesco Barbarini
July 13: John Jacob Astor, piano salesman
July 6: The Lyricon and its adherents
June 29: Francis Hopkinson, revolutionary and composer
June 22: The Pythian Games and the birth of music competitions
June 16: Early music connecting Boston and Bloomsday
June 8: John Cage's Variations III
June 1: The Bach family, for multiple hands
May 27: Erich Wolfgang Korngold's Hollywood moment
May 23: K. 550 and a Bollywood pioneer

Oh, how the ghost of you clings

Reviewing Radius Ensemble.
Boston Globe, October 7, 2013.

Werk ohne Opuszahl 1

As you might have noticed, this space has been quiet for some time now. That is because we have been preparing Soho the Dog HQ for the arrival of our newest critic-at-large. We are pleased to welcome Helena Beatrice Kim Guerrieri, 8 pounds, 1 ounce. Her in-depth opinions on all things musical will be posted here as she sees fit to make them known. I can tell you that, in the womb, she was particularly fond of drums and bel canto tenor squillo. The future seems loud.

One of the more surreal and absurd things about expecting a child in 21st-century America—believe me, the competition is fierce—is that seemingly every pregnancy guide in the known universe insists on tracking weekly gestational development in terms of fruits and vegetables. Your fetus is the size of a blueberry! Your fetus is the size of a pear! Your fetus is the size of a casaba melon! Apart from making one's impending progeny sound like the product of some dystopian science-fiction hydroponics experiment, that isn't even accurate from a materials-science standpoint: I began to long for a pregnancy guide with at least enough integrity to say that our fetus was the size of, say, a haggis. At any rate, as we were running this gauntlet of comparative produce, I marked off the weeks by making a commemorative drink engineered around each week's fruit. This one was by far the best. It is surely only a coincidence that it is also by far the strongest. It is rather like parenthood itself: cool and sweet at first, but within minutes, you will be wondering just what it is you have gotten yourself into.

Helena B

2 oz high-proof rye whiskey
2 oz lemon juice
1½ oz peach liqueur (I like Mathilde)
1 oz black rum
1 oz pineapple juice

Shake all ingredients with a good handful of crushed ice, then turn, ice and all, into a big tall glass. Fill the rest of the way with seltzer.

Sync all devices

Reviewing the Boston Chamber Music Society.
Boston Globe, May 14, 2013.

Hopefully it's fixed by the time you click the link, but, if not, yes, Schubert's String Quintet is D. 956, not K. 956. At least I didn't give it a Hoboken number.

Every bright description of the promised land

Reviewing the Cantata Singers and Ensemble.
Boston Globe, May 13, 2013.

How It's Made

Reviewing Evgeny Kissin.
Boston Globe, April 23, 2013.

We've taken to you so strong

Reviewing the Boston Modern Orchestra Project.
Boston Globe, April 15, 2013.

The very model

Reviewing Stile Antico.
Boston Globe, April 8, 2013.