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Back before The Six Week Gap, I had started a series of posts in this category exploring the work of Japanese composers. I think I only lost three of those posts, but those were all the posts in the Japanese Composers series, so I guess now we’re just going to start over. Yay! [bangs head on desk] Japan is a fascinating culture in just about all respects, but musically as well. It has its own music traditions that date back thousands of years, but since Japan’s opening to the West in the middle of the 19th century, the influence of WesternDown the rabbit hole….

Tuesday Tones! (The title of the music series over a bit of music score.)

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Well, if you remember back to before the Great Functionality Disaster that ate six weeks of content of mine, I was in the midst of a series of works composed by Japanese composers. And I’m going to get back to that, but for now, here’s an old favorite of mine. Why am I choosing this one? Because of a certain sonic effect in the third movement! Yes, it’s relevant to something I’ll be posting in the near future. Here is The Pines of Rome by Ottorino Respighi. (This is a very fine performance, by the way, but what appears to beDown the rabbit hole….

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As I continue working through this site’s new look and functionality on the back end, I suppose it’s time to figure out how posting music looks and works here. I haven’t listened to this in quite a while, but it’s always a delight to come back to: the ballet “Dance of the Hours” from Amilcare Ponchielli’s opera La Gioconda. The opera is one that to this day I’ve never heard, but it’s still a mainstay on the international repertoire, even though full stagings are infrequent because the opera’s complexity and scale makes it expensive to do. Ponchielli is almost entirely knownDown the rabbit hole….

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Jessie Montgomery’s atmospheric and cyclical work “Rounds” is up this week. The piece, for piano and strings, takes inspiration from poet TS Eliot: Rounds for solo piano and string orchestra is inspired by the imagery and themes from T.S. Eliot’s epic poem Four Quartets. Early in the first poem, Burnt Norton, we find these evocative lines : At the still point of the turning world. Neither flesh nor fleshless;Neither from nor towards; at the still point, there the dance is,But neither arrest nor movement. And do not call it fixity,Where past and future are gathered. Neither movement from nor towards,Neither ascent nor decline.Down the rabbit hole….

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Here’s something fascinating: an entire album comprising a ballet written by a prominent rapper! RZA is the leader of Wu-Tang Clan, a hip-hop collective that has been around for over thirty years now. That is, I admit openly, the extent of my knowledge of RZA. Hip-hop has never been a musical genre to which I have paid much attention, though not out of dislike in any way. I’ve found, pretty consistently, that when I am exposed to hip-hop in any extended way, I find myself intrigued by it and respecting it. So why haven’t I explored it? Well…time, mainly. IDown the rabbit hole….

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An incredibly hectic week is going on! The Wife had carpal tunnel surgery the other day, so I have to pick up the slack and actually do stuff around the house. Do you believe this crap? The horror!!! Also, at work I’m in the long-delayed, long-planned process of moving my work area from one part of The Store to another. This will be lovely when I’m done, but right now I’m in the “All my crap is where it’s going so now I have to move around piles of my crap while I try to organize it and put it where itDown the rabbit hole….

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I hope that worked, I’m always a bit nervous about embedding video playlists. Anyway: Carlos Simon is a composer who originally hails from Atlanta, GA. He completed doctoral work at the University of Michigan and has since enjoyed a varied career of composition and performance; according to his bio he is currently on the faculty at Georgetown University, and he served recently as Composer-in-Residence at what was the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. I don’t know what Dr. Simon’s current status is regarding that, since the Kennedy Center has been one of many Grounds Zero for ourDown the rabbit hole….

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It’s St. Patrick’s Day, which means I’m going to take a quick break from American Black composers. (Sadly, a brief attempt to locate Irish Black composers did not turn up much of anything at all. I did not dig super-deeply, though.) We’re going to dig back to the music of one Charles Villiers Stanford, an Anglo-Irish composer whose music has been overshadowed since his lifetime (1852-1924) by the likes of Edward Elgar and the British masters who followed. Stanford’s music is lyrical and Romantic, and it’s always pleasing. Not necessarily pleasant, as he brings a lot of good Romantic fire to hisDown the rabbit hole….

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Jonathan Bailey Holland is a composer originally from Flint, MI who is currently the Dean of the Bienen School of Music at Northwestern University. According to his bio, he has had music performed by ensembles all over the world, and he has taught at a number of universities as well as at many music festivals and arts schools. And like many of the other composers in this ongoing mini-series of mine, I never heard of him until now. I have thus far only heard the work presented below, so I can’t discuss Dr. Holland’s general approach, but this work isDown the rabbit hole….

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I couldn’t decide which of three pieces to feature today, so I said to myself, “Why limit myself to one?” That’s right, you get all three. Composer and flautist Valerie Coleman has had a deeply impressive career already. A native of Louisville, KY, Coleman was steeped in music from an early age, and her trajectory seems to have mainly pointed in one direction her entire life, as far as I can tell: up. She has been an accomplished performing flautist as well as a highly-regarded composer; her work Umoja–which began as a work for woodwind quintet but then was re-arranged by theDown the rabbit hole….