Get up! Get Up! You Sleepyhead

Published February 8, 2012 Uncategorized Leave a Comment
Tags: Bernard Rands, Gunther Schuller

… Then I spent the rest of my childhood years waking up in the middle of the night with a book half open on my chest, and I still do it. I read between two and four every night. I sleep and by the time I get to two o’clock now I have to read. I read for two hours and [after] I sleep for another two hours, then I get up and work two hours.

FJO: That’s extraordinary.

BR: It’s a crazy life. Augusta’s even worse. She gets up at three in the morning or four, when I’m still reading. I hope this is not too trivial for you.

- Bernard Rands interviewed by Frank J. Oteri for New Music Box

and

As if exploring that exhibit [a Constable and Turner show at Boston's Museum of Fine Arts] wasn’t overwhelming and exhausting enough, we plunged ahead to examine the museum’s famous collections of Oriental and Asia art, Persian fourteenth – to sixteenth-century paintings and manuscripts, and Egyptian tombs and statues. Our senses were reeling from all this magnificence; and I can’t explain how we had the energy and persistence to take it all in – all in one day. To confirm how truly crazy I was – and perhaps still am – my diary recounts that after that museum visit, I copied quite a bit of Stravinsky’s Symphony of Psalms into one of my notebooks – that is, before dining at O Sole Mio, one of our favorite Italian restaurants in Boston, then catching a show at the Casino Burlesque, and then heading out to the Totem Pool [a dance hall] – all in one day!

- from Gunther Schuller: A Life in Pursuit of Music and Beauty [Gunther's autobiography]

So, what time did you get up? and what did you accomplish today? Reading stuff like this, I feel very lazy indeed.

More about Gunther’s book soon. And, this will explain the post title.

About these ads

0 Responses to “Get up! Get Up! You Sleepyhead”

Feed for this Entry Trackback Address

Leave a Comment

James Primosch, composer

When honoring him with its Goddard Lieberson Fellowship, the American Academy of Arts and Letters noted that "A rare economy of means and a strain of religious mysticism distinguish the music of James Primosch... Through articulate, transparent textures, he creates a wide range of musical emotion." Andrew Porter stated in The New Yorker that Primosch "scores with a sure, light hand" and critics for the New York Times, the Chicago Sun-Times, the Philadelphia Inquirer, and the Dallas Morning News have characterized his music as "impressive", "striking", "grandly romantic", "stunning" and "very approachable".

Primosch’s compositional voice encompasses a broad range of expressive types. His music can be intensely lyrical, as in the song cycle Holy the Firm or dazzlingly angular as in Secret Geometry for piano and electronic sound. His affection for jazz is reflected in works like the Piano Quintet, while his work as a church musician informs the many pieces in his catalog based on sacred songs or religious texts.

His music has been performed by the Chicago Symphony, the Los Angeles Philharmonic, the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra, the Lydian, Cavani, Cassatt, Ying, and Miami string quartets, the 21st Century Consort, the New York New Music Ensemble, Network for New Music, Dawn Upshaw, Lisa Saffer, Janice Felty, and Lambert Orkis. Twelve of his compositions have been recorded for Albany, Azica, Bard, Bridge, CRI, Centaur, Innova, and New World labels, with new discs of vocal and choral works planned.

Current Projects:

Working with audio wizard George Blood on editing recordings of "Holy the Firm", "From a Book of Hours", "Four Sacred Songs", and "Dark the Star" for eventual CD release. The performers are Susan Narucki, William Sharp, and the 21st Century Consort, directed by Christopher Kendall.

Two composition projects:
- a cycle of songs for soprano and orchestra. Susan Stewart, whose poetry I have set in three previous pieces, has written new poems specifically for this project, to be called "A Sibyl".
- an oboe quartet for Peggy Pearson, commissioned by Winsor Music.

David Patrick Stearns on “Songs for Adam”

If there's anything out there like Primosch's Songs of Adam, I haven't heard it - though the music wears its singularity lightly, with no need to express itself radically. It has a confidence of expression that comes of Primosch's having written a steady stream of song cycles since the late 1990s. Composers are still drawing legitimate inspiration from poets of the increasingly distant past, such as Walt Whitman, but Primosch pushes both himself and thus his listeners onto new ground with Susan Stewart's verse, which are called songs in their printed version because they suggest music, especially in the first poem, in which Adam is stuttering his way into existence.

Both poet and composer share an ability to contemplate how basic elements of existence might feel for the first time, and the duo know how to capture that in their respectively cultivated vocabularies, with an emotional rightness that never becomes too analytical.

In fact, Primosch enters the Korngold zone when describing Adam's intoxication with the word. Though words are set dramatically and in ways that are well written for the voice, the best moments are in the masterly orchestration, which gives an extra percussive spark to moments of discovery and unflinchingly confronts the agony of Adam's expulsion from Eden.

The pale strings capture his disappointment in the real world in an overall dramatic arc that's almost epic, going from the unimaginable (the beauty of Eden) to the unthinkable (the world's first children, Abel and Cain, and the world's first fratricide).
-Philadelphia Inquirer, May 2, 2010

Secret Geometry – James Primosch's blog