Welcome to my blog!

20 May Welcome to my blog!

This is a blog about music. Specifically, new music, but that will just be a general rule. I want to use this space to communicate some of my opinions and ideas about what I think about music culture, aesthetics, composers of different sorts, and probably healthy portions about me (it’s MY blog after all!). To get started, I thought I would post a video of a piece that has really blown my mind lately. It’s a piece by Alfred Schnittke, a Russian polystylist composer who spent most of his life behind the Iron Curtain. Schnittke is underrated. This is perhaps due to his post-modern tendencies, which for lesser composers can be a veil for lack of substance. That’s not the case in this piece. Take a listen to the fifth movement of his Concerto Grosso No. 1 (1977).  It is a great example of how Schnittke freely takes from disparate styles to create an unpredictably effective result. Schnittke: Concerto Grosso no.1 (1977), V. Rondo: Agitato By the way, the ensemble performing this is called A Far Cry. They’re from Boston and sound pretty awesome.