Turnage, Mark-Anthony (1960--)

Mark-Anthony Turnage is one of the leading British composers of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. His prolific output fuses stylistic elements, compositional techniques, and instrumentation from art music, jazz, and popular music, as well as, on occasion, more quotidian material such as football chants. The experience of working with jazz musicians such as Peter Erskine (a regular collaborator) has resulted in a long-standing commitment to improvisation in his music. Born in Essex, 1960, Turnage encountered a considerable range of art music through his family and, particularly, BBC Radio 3. Turnage had compositional lessons as a teenager with Oliver Knussen; like Knussen, Turnage later studied with John Lambert at the Royal College of Music and Gunther Schuller at Tanglewood. It was during his time at the Royal College that he familiarized himself with jazz and soul; Miles Davis became a particular influence.

Knussen, Oliver (1952--)

Oliver Knussen is a British composer and conductor. The son of a double bassist in the London Symphony Orchestra, Knussen came to prominence when he conducted the London Symphony Orchestra in the premiere of his (subsequently withdrawn) first symphony, at the age of fourteen. Knussen’s background, combined with the studies he undertook with John Lambert (1963–69) and Gunther Schuller (1970–73), left him with an extensive knowledge of the repertoire. His music represents a refined synthesis of a range of sources, many of which were located in the first half of the twentieth century, as in Symphony No. 2 (1971), which is set to poems by Trakl. Knussen’s early fame came at a cost; his works were often presented as fragments and oftentimes revised thereafter; other times, commissions were left unfulfilled. Nevertheless, in works such as Ophelia Dances Book 1 (1975) and the Symphony No. 3 (1979), both of which were eventually shorter than originally planned, Knussen’s growing technical facility and propensity for the detailed and complex layering of material demonstrated his increasing confidence. The metrical schemes found in the music of Carter, along with the pitch permutations inherited from Krenek and Stravinsky, play important roles in his technical armoury.

Of Icons and Iconography: Seeing Jimmie Blanton

This article explores how iconography can be a useful analytical tool, and in the process help to demystify the lives and music of so-called jazz icons. I will start by illustrating how a narrative around jazz bassist and <em>Ellingtonian</em> Jimmie Blanton (1918-1942) grew that posits him as an artistic hero in the pantheon of jazz history. Next I will highlight some problems that arise with such canonization and examine two case studies focused on Blanton, one based on statements historian Gunther Schuller made in regard to the bassist’s right hand posture, and a second one focusing on his tone in relation to his physical position within the Duke Ellington Orchestra. In both cases visual sources are used to gain a better understanding of Blanton’s performance technique, which in turn aids to nuance his iconic framing.<br />

Gunther Schuller and the Challenge of Sonny Rollins:

Scholarly opinion has for many years been divided over Gunther Schuller's landmark 1958 article, “Sonny Rollins and the Challenge of Thematic Improvisation.” Jazz theorists view the article's close analysis of Rollins's 1956 jazz saxophone improvisation “Blue 7” as one of their discipline's founding statements; historians and ethnomusicologists meanwhile tend to fault it for neglecting cultural context. In either instance the specific details of Schuller's analysis have been largely accepted as being internally consistent. The present study proposes that the analysis of jazz improvisation ought to engage more extensively with broader stylistic issues in addition to the specifics of isolated individual performances. Such a musically contextualized perspective reveals that Schuller's principal argument—that, in this particular improvisation, Rollins developed motivic elements of a composed theme—is false. “Blue 7” was in fact improvised in its entirety, and the melodic pattern that Schuller cited as a thematic motive was one of Rollins's habitual improvisational formulas, heard on many of the saxophonist's other 1950s recordings. This canonic recording, as well as the notion of Rollins as a “thematic” improviser, therefore needs to be reconsidered.

‘RESONANCE AND DISTANCE’: SIMON BAINBRIDGE IN CONVERSATION

This interview, based on a conversation with Simon Bainbridge at London's City Literary Institute in June 2011, presents something of a rounded portrait of the composer while covering a good deal of ground. We began our conversation with a discussion of a recent work for orchestra, Concerti Grossi, going into some detail in matters of scoring and structure. The discussion then broadened to cover such topics as the creative process, formative influences (for example, his parents' activity in the visual arts, Debussy's Jeux, John Lambert and Gunther Schuller), instrumentation and the relationship of music and text. This led on specifically to Bainbridge's settings of Primo Levi, in for example the cycle Ad Ora Incerta, and to a consideration of the composer's relationship with the audience.

Alec Wilder

The music of Alec Wilder (1907–1980) blends several American musical traditions, such as jazz and the American popular song, with classical European forms and techniques. Stylish and accessible, Wilder's musical oeuvre ranged from sonatas, suites, concertos, operas, ballets, and art songs to woodwind quintets, brass quintets, jazz suites, and hundreds of popular songs. Wilder enjoyed a close musical kinship with a wide variety of musicians, including classical conductors such as Erich Leinsdorf, Frederick Fennell, and Gunther Schuller; jazz musicians Marian McPartland, Stan Getz, and Zoot Sims; and popular singers including Frank Sinatra, Mabel Mercer, Peggy Lee, and Tony Bennett. In this biography and critical investigation of Wilder's music, Wilder's early work as a part-time student at the Eastman School of Music, his ascent through the ranks of the commercial recording industry in New York City in the 1930s and 1940s, his turn toward concert music from the 1950s onward, and his devotion late in his life to the study of American popular songs of the first half of the twentieth century are chronicled. The book discusses some of his best-known music, such as the revolutionary octets and songs such as I'll Be Around, While We're Young, and Blackberry Winter, and explains the unique blend of cultivated and vernacular traditions in his singular musical language.

Glenn Gould, Conductor: Critical Reception, Chronicle, and Commentary

In 1982, about two months before he died, Glenn Gould conducted a Toronto chamber orchestra to record Richard Wagner’s Siegfried Idyll. Reactions to the recording, eventually released in 1990, varied dramatically: while the Pulitzer Prize–winning critic and Gould scholar Tim Page considered it “a reading of melting and surpassing tenderness,” the composer-conductor Gunther Schuller, also a Pulitzer Prize winner, declared it “the most inept, amateurish, wrong-headed rendition of a major classic ever put to vinyl.” In light of that extreme divergence of opinion, this article examines the recording, Gould’s conducting, and the critical reception to both.