"Kwon Younghee" <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

>Can anyone recomemend a recording of contemporary music composer? I
>would like listen to the music at first, but I have no idea about that.

Let's cover a spectrum shall we? I'm not endorsing any of these in
particular, merely trying to cover some of the "important" bases.

John Williams - Score for "Schindler's List"

John Williams belongs to the line of American film composers who learned
from German models, this score, made famous by the signature violin melody,
encapsulates his approach to crafting together a century old gestural
language of post-romantic music into a particular voice, whose purpose is
to underscore the film.

Penderecki - Violin Concerto #2 Mutter

Neo-romantic, as opposed to post-romantic. A studied consideration of
Brahms and Beethoven through the eyes of a composer best known for
avant-gardism in his youth.

Glass - Einstein on the Beach

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Adams - Slonimsky's Earbox, Currently available on his 10 disc
retrospective, which is a bit much Adams for almost anyone's taste.

Adams' musical program was to combine modernist gesture with minimalist
aesthetic. Slonimsky was a conductor, composer and propogandist for the
Modern in music. One of his works was a catalog of figures and scales,
and Adams uses this as a basis for the work in question.

Hyla - Innocents III on "Rhonda Rider, Violincello"

Hyla combines aggressive chromatic vocabulary with a jazz based rhtymic
vocabulary.

Turnage - Three Screaming Popes

Layered sound painting, lush at times, violent at others.

Carter - Clarinet Concerto, Sinfonia Conducted by Knussen

Two late period works for Carter. Carter's mature output has been focused
on finding harmonic combinations in a 12 note chromatic pitch vocabulary
based on unordered sets and using the full range of gestures available to
musicians, in a sense, he is Alkan to Ives' Liszt. Each sound combination
is supposed to stand on its own, and is related to what follows by reuse,
or nonuse, of certain pitches. The rhythmic vocabulary relies on layering
different tempi on top of each other, each one "natural" for the part.

Think of it as a city set to music. Everything is doing what is natural for
it, nothing is synchronised directly, and hence the result is a layering of
sounds, which combine and then decombine.

For myself, I will again argue that if it has been recorded in a good
performance, it is already at the trailing edge of what is "contemporary"
- the real contemporary exists only as a concept or as a progressive work
which composer, musician and audience are striving towards, but is not yet
coherent. Music is the historian of the arts, the first draft is like
journalism, filled with banalities that jostle together for attention - the
final precise drafts are in the past, simply because it takes us that long
to incorporate them. Music is of the present, but, it takes us time to
scale the mountain and even longer to realise that we can then look below
at whence we came.

Stirling Newberry
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http://www.mp3.com/ssn