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.