Donald Nally – Conductor

“I’m Donald Nally and… I’m in Philadelphia with my group The Crossing which is a 24 voice contemporary choir (sings only music written in the last 15 years and much of it’s written for us).”

www.crossingchoir.com
Recorded September 2011

1 comment
Posted on October 16, 2011 by James Holt
categories: My Ears Are Open Podcast
tags: ,

Composers: Jennifer Jolley

By Chris McGovern courtesy of The Glass

This Jennifer, Jennifer Jolley, hails from Long Beach, CA. Originally having a specific interest in scoring films (Which explains both her love of film soundbites in some of her sound collages and her interest in writing opera), Jennifer later focused more on straight composing after her graduation from U.S.C. and further studies at Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music in Cincy OH, where she now lives with her librettist and her 2 cats Lindsay Lohan and Coco Chanel. Having been commissioned by many contemporary ensembles and having one of her works presented at MATA’s 2011 Make Music Winter Workshop (“Press Play”), Jennifer writes a blog about her career (Titled “Why Compose When You Can Blog”) and even has time to write several other blogs (Building a Better Opera, MusicX Musings; She also contributes to the official blog for Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music: Center For Computer Music), and she’s also an instructor at University of Cincinnati. I’m just glad there was time for her to take a break and talk to me.

CM: You seem to have different sides to your music; Some of it is minimalist or modern orchestral, and some of it is electronics, tapes or sound collage. Is this a way of saying that you would rather explore and flesh out these styles simultaneously than focus on just one way of composition?

JJ: Maybe I’m accidentally fleshing out my styles simultaneously! Ultimately I want to work with a style that conveys my concept the best. If I need to write minimalist music to get my point across, then I’m going to use it. If I need to use a vocoder, so be it. Over the past two years I’ve changed my approach in my pre-compositional process—I merely thought about harmonies, melodies, and timbre before working on a piece, and now I think about what I’m trying to say with my music and which style would work best. After I figure out my concept, I think about harmonies, melodies, and timbre. Right now I’m working on an opera that’s a retelling of both the Narcissus and Pygmalion myths, and holy cow, I might be writing a neo-classical opera. I’ve already completed a da capo aria, and it looks like I might include secco recitative. Honestly I’ve been a little self-conscious about the style so far (because it may be a little conservative), but I feel that the style fits the story and concept.
(EDITOR’S NOTE: Our discussion of Jennifer’s new opera is coming up shortly. ;))
Continue reading →

Comments Off
Posted on October 13, 2011 by Chris McGovern
categories: The Glass
tags: , ,

CD Review: Leah Kardos: Feather Hammer

Leah Kardos’s new work Feather Hammer is a great 40-minute perspective of where the Australian composer is at in her current state of mind. Written, performed, recorded and produced entirely by Kardos herself (with the exception of “Repeater”; CD masterer Matt Roles played the cracking bones on that track), the album is very much like a classical suite (sometimes sounding as if it could have been collaboratively recorded by Massive Attack and Arvo Part) on her first love, the piano, and its mini-movements read like pages of a diary that go from a good day filled with visions of hope to days less inspired and more stressful as a student.

The pieces don’t run into one another as they would in either a suite or some concept albums, but Kardos’s piano is such a consistent voice that it forces you to see the recording as a full-bodied work with the piano in the role of Kardos herself re-telling her story up to now. The varied sounds of the piano (straight piano vs. the flatter prepared-piano) give sort of an artistic timeline between a classical and an experimental sensibility, as if to say that the constructed has now been deconstructed.

The sound of the instruction on “DFACE” (the voice sampled from a YouTube piano tutorial) seems to invoke a statement on tedious studying, but the piece has such a colorful chord progression that I certainly would have wanted to pay attention to that instructor.

One of the most perplexing moments on the CD is “Houses”. Consisting of a very low-volume distant piano with random tapping noise in the foreground and what sounds like a ringtone towards the end, it is not only the shortest piece in the collection but the most atmospheric. Continue reading →

Comments Off
Posted on October 1, 2011 by Chris McGovern
categories: The Glass
tags: ,

Composers: Thomas Deneuville


Photo courtesy of Alex Dupeux

By Chris McGovern courtesy of The Glass

Having been both a fan of compositional music and a longtime member of the Twitter and online community in general, I came to know a gentleman by the name of Thomas Deneuville. He goes by the name “tonalfreak” on Twitter, possibly to inform us of the fact that he is a strong practitioner of keeping the melodic element in the world of contemporary music, and this he does very well. Having been invited to come see one of his premieres in NY (This one being of his cantata titled Waiting For Thoreau, programmed in a recital along with some of his other works), I was very humbled to see a quite laid-back presentation of compositions arranged for both classical instruments and those that are more typical of rock like electric guitar and a drum kit. At the end of his Summer Miniatures suite he even has a transcription of Radiohead’s “Paranoid Android”.

CM: Thomas, you taught yourself guitar as a rock musician, and you went from that to studying classical violin a few years later. Was that an easy transition?

TD: It was actually a relief. I remember struggling with theory for a couple of years on my own while I was teaching myself guitar. Going to a music school brought me to another level. I immediately fell in love with solfege and literally ate the violin methods that were put in front of me, tackling second and third positions after a year. On the other hand it was also my first contact with the French music education system that still owed a lot (in spirit) to the 19th century. The same system pushed me to leave France years later.
Continue reading →

Comments Off
Posted on September 26, 2011 by Chris McGovern
categories: The Glass
tags: , , , , ,