November 2020 Newsletter
'Time and Space', Classical Music Daily's November 2020 Newsletter, has just been published, along with an assortment of short news items
Classical Music Daily publishes a high resolution PDF monthly newletter, normally on the first day of each month. Time and Space, our November 2020 newsletter, has just been published. It has fourteen pages and fourteen illustrations. This 2.6Mb download can be accessed by following the link below.
To read our previous newsletters, please visit the newsletters page. To register to receive an email every month, when each newsletter has been published, please visit the updates page.
The short news items below have all been included in the newsletter, so you may prefer to read them there.
English pianist Eric Parkin died on 3 February 2020, aged ninety-five. This sad news was not widely known until the end of October 2020.
At the heart of Indian classical music are a set of melodic frameworks for improvisation and composition - ragas. Raga-inspired music of any genre is fluid, colourful and highly improvisational, requiring deep listening and respect between musicians. New York's Brooklyn Raga Massive (BRM), founded in 2015, is a collective aiming to leverage values of openness, generosity, humility and respect for tradition to cultivate genuine connections between artists and audiences of all backgrounds. Composer Terry Riley was impressed with BRM's album In C and wanted to compose a new piece to perform with them. Unfortunately it didn't work out, so BRM wrote the piece themselves, with encouragement from Riley, and it will appear on BRM's new album In D which will be released on 21 November 2020. Information: brooklynragamassive.org
Florian Ross (born 1972) is a jazz composer, pianist and musical explorer based in Köln, Germany who has just released his twentieth album since 1998 on Naxos - Florian Ross - Architexture - music for jazz quartet and wind ensemble. Since studying at London's Guildhall School of Music in 1995/6, Ross has become very fond of British composers and their music, and was always puzzled about how close their harmonic and melodic language was to European jazz. He listened to a lot of Britten, Warlock, Delius, Elgar ... and decided to incorporate their language into his music. Now, after many jazz small and big band recordings, he has been able to talk Naxos and Deutschlandfunk into making another crossover / third stream album after his first since 1999, the 'Suite for Soprano Sax & String Orchestra featuring David Liebman'. Information: florianross.de
On 30 October 2020 American composer George Lewis released on Carrier Records the 1984 recording of his Rainbow Family, one of the first live electronics works ever performed at IRCAM - the Institut de Recherche et de Coordination Acoustique/Musique in Paris. The tracks were recorded during three days of live performances that took place in May 1984 - the culmination of two years of research and creative work. The performances featured between one and four human improvisers - French double bass player Joëlle Léandre, American soprano saxophonist Steve Lacy, multi-instrumentalist Douglas Ewart and British guitarist Derek Bailey - working with three networked Apple II computers driving three of the then-new Yamaha DX-7 synthesizers. Information: carrierrecords.com
Also on 30 October 2020, Sound American released Something to Hunt, the first portrait album of the music of American composer and sound artist Ashley Fure (born 1982). Works on the album include Fure's Shiver Lung for ensemble and electronics, Something to Hunt for septet and Soma for sextet performed by the International Contemporary Ensemble. Also included is A Library on Lightning for trio, performed by trumpeter Nate Woodley, bassoonist Rebekah Heller and double bass player Brandon Lopez. Bound to the Bow for orchestra and electronics is also featured, recorded live by the Interlochen Arts Academy Orchestra at the 2016 New York Philharmonic Biennial. The release includes a limited edition hardcover book featuring first-hand accounts of Fure's work by Zachary Woolfe, César Alvarez, Dahlia Borsche, Taïca Replansky, Steve Smith and an interview with Nate Woodley. Information: ashleyfure.com
Primephonic is a Dutch-American company which has developed a dedicated high quality classical music streaming service, founded in 2017. It has three-and-a-half million tracks available from 170,000 musicians and 2,400 labels. Primephonic claims it offers higher audio quality, better classical search and recommendations, more background information and fairer payouts to artists than other streaming services. On 28 October 2020, Primephonic launched Ludwig, a ten-week course in classical music for beginners, providing a mix of 99% listening and 1% reading. The new course offers a weekly podcast narrating the history of classical music through ten key encounters with composers, bi-daily email lessons to help serious beginners to understand key events and trends in music history, hand-picked playlists featuring must-know genres and composers, and free access to the Primephonic app, offering unlimited access to Primephonic's catalogue in 24-bit FLAC quality. Information: primephonic.com
Posted 1 November 2020 by Keith Bramich
