Announcing Season Two of Meet the Composer
Season Two is just around the corner, but we need your help to make it happen. Learn about our next five featured composers and support Meet the Composer today on Kickstarter.
Apr 07, 2015•9 min
Meet the Composer
Peabody Award-winning podcast that takes listeners into the minds of the composers making some of the most innovative and breathtakingly beautiful music today.
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Episodes
Bonus Track: 'Intercepting a Shivery Light' by Marcos Balter
Building on a long-standing collaborative relationship, Marcos Balter wrote Intercepting a Shivery Light for the Anubis Quartet, a saxophone ensemble, in 2012. The piece's title is an anagram for Everything in its Right Place, a Radiohead song , which Marcos admits is an important song for him "and many members of [his] generation."...
Nov 12, 2014•18 min•Ep. 9
Marcos Balter: Failure Is an Option
For Marcos Balter , stellar composition requires the dedicated, daily practice of an athlete. He doesn't think it possible to unearth and hone brilliant musical ideas without slogging through a whole bunch of failures along the way, nor does he believe that the compositional demigods we revere so highly – Bach, Beethoven, Mozart – birthed only masterpieces. He worries too many creatives get tongue-tied attempting consistent genius, and that their work suffers for it. Marcos has learned to embrac...
Oct 30, 2014•1 hr 4 min•Ep. 5
Bonus Track: 'Its Motion Keeps' by Caroline Shaw
In 2012, the Grammy award-winning Brooklyn Youth Chorus commissioned the the future Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Caroline Shaw to write a new work for their upcoming Benjamin Britten centenary celebration concert at Carnegie Hall. The result, "Its Motion Keeps," is a swirling piece for SSA choir and viola that employs at once the familiar (repetitive, calming ostinati) with the strange (extended techniques, clashing dissonance).
Oct 14, 2014•14 min•Ep. 7
Caroline Shaw Lives Life Beautifully
Caroline Shaw began her love affair with music at the age of two, when her mom started teaching her violin. Throughout her childhood, Caroline had a lesson every Wednesday afternoon, and sang and played in school and at music camps, falling for chamber music by Mozart and Clara Schumann. Caroline always made things; when she was bowled over by a Brahms sonata, she'd try and figure out how to construct her own sonatas. As a young adult, she continued on a rigorous, violin-centric path, earning bo...
Sep 30, 2014•59 min•Ep. 4
Bonus Track: Excerpts from The Hunger by Donnacha Dennehy
In 1844, Asenath Nicholson, a school teacher, reformer and proprietor of an all-vegetarian boarding house in New York City, travelled to Ireland to "personally investigate the condition of the Irish poor." Upon her arrival, she saw the beginnings of the Great Famine, a seven-year period of mass starvation and disease in which it is estimated over one million people died and a million more emigrated from Ireland. Nicholson's writings and first-hand observations from the time are stitched together...
Sep 09, 2014•15 min•Ep. 5
Donnacha Dennehy: Composing With Frequency
Donnacha Dennehy is an Irish composer who thought he was going to study with spectral icon Gérard Grisey in Paris. When he showed up, however, it was apparent that Grisey had accepted him into his study under the mistaken notion that he was not, in fact, a gentleman but a lady. A bit put off by Grisey's visible disappointment with his gender, as well as the strikingly uninteresting uniformity in the style of his students work, Donnacha headed to Amsterdam, where he met Louis Andriessen, who chan...
Aug 26, 2014•53 min•Ep. 3
Andrew Norman: Better Living Through Architecture
Andrew Norman was a well-feted kid composer, a precocious pre-adolescent who wrote works with grand, filmic gestures for his middle school orchestra and had the local newspapers filling their style sections with profiles invoking Mozart. Then he went to college. All of a sudden, Norman's musical world exponentially widened; he was exposed to styles and practices so far outside of his previous experience that he stopped composing altogether. How could he write what he had been writing in a world ...
Jul 29, 2014•57 min•Ep. 2
Bonus Track: The Wind in High Places by John Luther Adams
Gordon Wright , the Alaskan composer, conductor, professor and environmentalist, was John Luther Adams's best friend. When he died suddenly in 2007, Adams wrote three pieces for solo violin titled Three High Places , vignettes representing moments Adams and Wright shared while camping. These pieces eventually led Adams to write his first string quartet, at age 59, called The Wind in High Places . In a process that Adams likens to "primitive man discovers fire," he approached the traditional musi...
Jul 07, 2014•24 min•Ep. 2
Bonus Track: Meet the Composer Launch Party and Concert
Q2 Music celebrated the launch of its inaugural podcast, Meet the Composer, on Tuesday, June 24 at 7 pm with a music party and live video webcast in The Greene Space at WQXR.
Jul 01, 2014•1 hr 22 min•Ep. 1
John Luther Adams: Bad Decisions and Finding Home
John Luther Adams made all of the wrong career decisions. He got kicked out of multiple high schools, went to the "wrong" college, never finished his master's degree, and ultimately moved as close as he could to the edge of society, to a cabin, in Alaska. Somehow, though, all of these unconventional moves crystallized his creative voice into something singular, instantly recognizable, and emotionally mature. Adams's music is fast and slow at the same time, unraveling in fractal patterns that mim...
Jun 24, 2014•53 min•Ep. 1
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