Kile Smith

We enter the cold new year on Now is the Time, Sunday, January 6th at 10 pm on HD-2. David Snow’s A Baker’s Tale, originally with narrator but in this version for trumpeter Chris Gekker and piano, is from the CD Winter. From Elena Ruehr’s CD of string quartets, How She Danced, comes her third. Its third movement is also titled “How She Danced,” and the quartet is filled with multiple influences of darting energy.

Edward Ruchalski was inspired to write his lovely, lingering chamber work Winter Light during winter walks. It includes a movement called “By Snowlight.”

The subtitle of this five-CD set is “1100-1965,” and this is, in fact, a new release of the 1966 recordings, with 30 bonus tracks added. The original LPs accompanied the publication of a new edition of the printed music, and the project brought together the finest English sacred choral repertoire, from the conquest of the Normans to the conquest of Howells.

Who does this sound like?

That’s the first question we ask when we hear music new to us. It’s as true with Havergal Brian’s as with anyone else’s—probably more true, since his music is so rarely heard, and consequently so often new.

If we know anything about him, it’s that his first symphony, the “Gothic,” is called the largest ever written, with brass bands, choirs, harps, drums, and organ along with a gargantuan orchestra. Our knowledge of Havergal Brian usually ends there.

But he wrote 31 other symphonies, and much more music besides. On top of that, 27 of his symphonies and four of his five operas were composed in the last 25 years of his life, and he lived to be 96. On top of that, for most of his life not one note of his music was performed.

Why not?

We travel over different paths on Now is the Time, Sunday, November 18th at 10 pm. Sebastian Currier's Static, the 2007 Grawemeyer Award winner, illuminates the two meanings of the title, from stillness to electricity. Saxophonist and composer Mark Engebretson evokes fresh and engaging melodic inventions in SaxMax.

Daron Hagen walks us from grief to a bright land in the piano trio he calls Wayfaring Stranger.

Trinity Wall Street commissioned Robert Moran’s Trinity Requiem for the tenth anniversary of the 9/11 destruction of New York’s World Trade Center. Moran has written music for entire cities to perform—San Francisco, Graz, Bethlehem, Pa.—with cars, airplanes, multiple orchestras, choirs, and bands joining in raucous mélanges of celebration. You wonder what he would write for a city’s terror.

This time, he’d show them. The Paris Conservatoire accepted Ravel as a piano student at age 16, and even though he won a piano competition, more than anything he wanted to compose. But the Conservatory was a hard place. He never won the fugue prize, never won the composition prize, never won anything for writing music and they sent him packing. Twice. He studied with the great Gabriel Fauré, in school and out, but he just couldn’t make any headway with the ruling musical authorities.

The circus came to town, and the music director, walking through the streets, heard a violin beautifully played from a house he was passing by. He knocked on the door, and offered a job to the 13-year-old boy who was practicing. The boy, always independent (he had started his own dance orchestra two years earlier), decided to run away the next day and, yes, to join the circus. But his father got wind of it and the next morning marched him to the Marines, apprenticing him to the band there. The father could do that, because he played trombone in the United States Marine Band.

Carson Cooman writes music as naturally as anyone I’ve heard. The number of his works is already approaching 1,000 for this just barely 30 composer, and represents every form, even multiple symphonies and operas. In addition to composing he is an excellent organist who frequently performs new music, and between editing organ and hymn music he is Composer in Residence for The Memorial Church, Harvard University.

Matthew Weiner, the creator of the hugely popular TV series Mad Men - now in its fifth season - works very hard at going beneath the surface to capture the look of the 1960s, from company logo typefaces to office equipment tints to the shine in a pair of trousers. Mad Men composer David Carbonara labors just as much on the show's music to express that era; he’s a composer of acutely original pieces.

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