"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 minimalismminimalismminimalismminimalism minimalismminimalismminimalismminimalism minimalismminimalismminimalismminimalism minimalismminimalismminimalismminimalism minimalismminimalismminimalismminimalism minimalismminimalismminimalismminimalism 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 [log in to unmask] http://www.mp3.com/ssn