Music of the Last Ten Years Course Blog

Anna Thorvaldsdottir is Icelandic composer known for her use of slowly evolving textures to create “landscapes” of sound.  She’s worked with many wonderful ensembles such as the Berlin Philharmonic and the Spectral Quartet.  I would put her music somewhere between George Crumb and John Luther Adams.  Her scores have the intricacies and clarity of Crumb, and the slow evolving textures of Adams, but with her own unique spin.  Something I found interesting about her scores is that she provides the same paragraph in almost all of her performance notes.   When you see a long sustained pitch, think of it as a fragile flower that you need to carry in your hands and walk the distance on a thin rope without dropping it or falling.   It is a way of measuring time and noticing the tiny changes that happen as you walk further along the same thin rope.   Absolute tranquility with the necessary amount of concentration needed to perform the task. Her piece Ró, ...

The bass clarinet has occupied a number of roles since its inception in the mid-eighteenth century. It was originally meant to replace the bassoon in military bands, but was quickly adopted by many opera composers - most notably Wagner - after being featured in Giacomo Meyerbeer's Les Huguenots (1836). Since then it has also become a fixture of the symphony orchestra, having been used extensively by composers such as Richard Strauss, Igor Stravinsky, Maurice Ravel, and Dmitri Shostakovich. Despite its popularity, however, the bass clarinet had very little solo repertoire for most of its history. In fact, it wasn't until the mid-twentieth century when the bass clarinet started being treated seriously as a solo instrument; so recent is this development that we can trace the exact date of the very first bass clarinet solo recital, which was held on March 24, 1955 by Czech bass clarinetist Josef Horák (1931-2005). Since then, the bass clarinet has been championed by other virtuosi ...

What starts as a lo-fi recording of a woman scratchily speaking a Filipina myth in a language I do not speak — Tagalog? , I wonder — becomes a trance-like rhythmic background, an uncannily anxious percussive sound emerging underneath, giving way to almost-surreal, effected, out-of-tune piano. From here, we follow Micaela Tobin on a harrowing journey as she traces her stylistic training and her heritage from angelic operatic vocal technique to raw screaming noise. I am listening to BAKUNAWA , devourer of moons. More on her in a moment. Micaela Tobin Tobin is a singular artist. Our classmates may be familiar with her because of her association with The Industry and Yuval Sharon. She was Coyote in their acclaimed production of Sweet Land (comp. Du Yun & Raven Chacon) and performed in the experimental car-opera Hopscotch . But Tobin is also a noise musician and a screamer of elemental power. She comes by these contradictions honestly: she is both a trained opera singer and ...

     Cody Fry is a grammy nominated singer songwriter based in Nashville Tennessee. He has a rich musical heritage as his father, Gary Fry, is an Emmy winning composer, arranger, producer, conductor and music educator with an array of accomplishments ranging from his position as artistic consultant to the Dallas Symphony Orchestra to over 2500 nationally broadcast radio and television commercials for companies such as McDonalds, Sears, and United airlines. Having been surrounded by the sounds of a variety of orchestral compositions and arrangements, Cody's love for orchestral music was born in him at a young age. Despite his father's impressive accolades, Cody struggled to find success as a solo artist at first, mostly following in the footsteps of his father as a composer for campaign ads, commercials and brands such as Netflix and Google. In an attempt to further his solo career he auditioned for American Idol Season 14 in 2015 at the age of 24, but didn't make it ...

Ivan Nebesnyy - Ukrainian composer Ivan Nebesnyy (July 15, 1971, Ternopil) is a Ukrainian composer, music producer, and member of the National Union of Composers of Ukraine. He is a winner of the composer's competition "Gradus ad Parnassum" that is part of the International Youth Music Forum, Kyiv (1996, 1997). Nebesnyy is a laureate of the award named after Revutsky (2002); laureate of the award named after M. Verykivsky (2011); winner of the Kyiv Pectoral Theater Award (2011); laureate of the award named after B. Lyatoshynsky (2020). He graduated from Lviv National Music Academy named after M. Lysenko in the composition class of M. Skoryk (1995). 1993 -- internship at the ZudwestFunk Experimental Electronic Music Studio, Freiburg, Germany. 1997 –– received a scholarship from KulturKontakt Austria, thanks to which he participated in the Fifth International Academy of New Music, Schwaz, Austria, where he studied composition with B. Schaeffer and electronic music with M. K...

  When I started Kindergarten, I distinctly remember meeting a redheaded boy named Tyler. Little did either of us know, that this initial interaction would grow into a friendship that has continued for almost twenty years. I feel so blessed that I have gotten to see Tyler grow, from previewing and performing his pieces in middle and high school, to hearing his compositions performed at our Alma Mater, The Crane School of Music, it is truly an honor to be able to write about his talent.   Tyler Mazone is a deaf composer from Upstate New York currently working towards his Master’s in Composition at Michigan State University. Tyler states on his website that his “deafness made it a huge challenge” in order to “learn how to play music.” Luckily, he had many teachers along the way who encouraged him to continue performing and composing, which has led him to his mission of making music accessible and enjoyable for everyone.  His primary instrument is the clarinet, which is ...