Behind the Wallpaper was written for Julia Holter and Spektral Quartet in 2014–15, expanding on a four-song cycle of the same name from 2013. It was premiered on February 23, 2015 at Amsterdam Bar & Hall in St. Paul, MN, as part of the Liquid Music Series. The piece tells...
This document gives a brief history of classical music (Western art music) in Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina, with a focus on recent events and developments from the beginning of the siege (1992) to the present. Further focus is placed on the effects of Sarajevo's cultural pluralism on the city's largest...
Since Ottorino Respighi included the recording of a nightingale in his Pini di Roma (1924), composers have used prerecorded nature sounds, or field recordings, to help establish a specific sense of place. The purpose of this project is to examine how modern composers utilize field recordings to create natural-world settings,...
Since the standardization of the modern brass quintet in the middle of the twentieth century, extensive research has been dedicated to the history of the genre, ensembles which have promoted and advanced brass chamber music and the growing body of original brass quintet repertoire. Such scholarship has provided practical benefits...
Starting in the late 1950s, the advertising world rapidly became a fertile arena for experimentation in the realm of electronic music. Composers explored new forms, such as the sound logo; new technology, such as the Moog synthesizer; and new semiotic relationships between music, words, images and concepts, including attempts to...
Ever since Jean-Baptiste Lully welcomed the horn to the stage as an instrument capable of producing music suitable for indoors, a tradition of horn methodology and pedagogy has been developed and expanded over the centuries. Despite the volume and variety of pedagogical materials available to the horn student and pedagogue...
Chaya Czernowin’s opera 'Pnima…ins innere' is about the encounter between a young Israeli boy and his grandfather, a Holocaust survivor so traumatized by his past that he cannot speak. Fittingly, the opera does not contain any words: the four singers in the work instead sing phonemes and other non-verbal sounds....
Kaija Saariaho’s vocal music offers singers a rewarding challenge. Her works contain extended techniques and innovative performance practices, which allow her to create interesting and moving timbral effects. Her musical language has its foundation in her cultural identity, formed when she was a girl in the forests of Finland. The...