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[Taliesin by Alun Hoddinot]

Taliesin by Alun Hoddinot


National Orchestra of Wales
François-Xavier Roth, Brangwyn Hall,
Swansea Festival of Music and the Arts, 10.10.2009
BBC Broadcast

From the collection of Karl Miller



This was Hoddonot's last major opus, and was premiered posthumously at the 2009 Swansea festival, and latter broadcast by the BBC.  I've pulled a few descriptions of this work and the performance which I'll share below:

BBC 3 Description:

Afternoon on 3 closes with a concert featuring the first broadcast of "Taliesin", the final work composed by Alun Hoddinott, who for over half a century was at the heart of Welsh musical life. Penny is joined by Swansea Festival director Huw Tregelles Williams, to hear about the new piece, the composer and this remarkable concert from the 2009 festival, featuring the orchestra's Associate Guest Conductor Francois-Xavier Roth.


Preview by Karen Price

IT was the last piece that eminent Welsh composer Alun Hoddinott worked on. Now, a year after his death, Taliesin is to be given its world premiere in the concert hall where he discovered a love for classical music as a young boy.

BBC National Orchestra of Wales will perform the orchestral tone poem during the Swansea Festival of Music and the Arts, which opens next week.

The concert at Brangwyn Hall, which is where Hoddinott first heard a professional orchestra, will also celebrate the 75th anniversary of the venue.

Taliesin was commissioned by BBC Now to celebrate what would have been Hoddinott's 80th birthday this year but he passed away in March 2008.

The composer's family are due to attend the concert on October 10. Hoddinott helped festival chairman Huw Tregelles Williams pull together the whole programme, which also includes Berlioz's Overture: Roman Carnival and Saint-Saens' Symphony No 3 for organ.

"He was a huge admirer of the French repertoire," says Williams. "As someone who knew Alun very well, it's obviously going to be very moving to hear his last piece of work performed."

During a pre-concert talk, Hoddinott's first published piece, Opus 1 String Trio, will be played by three members of the orchestra.

"So both his first and last opuses will be heard during the same evening."

Williams is also delighted that they are able to mark the milestone birthday of the Brangwyn Hall, which is one of several venues throughout Swansea which will host festival events.

"As a schoolboy, I was taken to concerts during the Swansea Festival," he says.

"I remember the first performance in Wales of Benjamin Britten's War Requiem. The acoustics in the hall are still fantastic today."





Review by Peter Reynolds

FEW composers and orchestras have enjoyed a continuous relationship lasting for more than 60 years.
On Saturday night, at this year's Swansea Festival in the Brangwyn Hall, the BBC National Orchestra of Wales gave the final premiere by one of Wales' most important composers, Alun Hoddinott.

Taliesin (a BBC commission) was the last music completed by Alun Hoddinott, who died in March last year.

His music was first performed by the then BBC Welsh Orchestra in May 1949 when he was just 19 years old.
Inspired by the life of the sixth century Welsh bard Taliesin, it is a finely wrought, 25-minute work evoking not so much the distant Celtic world of the bard, as his significance as the essence of Welshness.

Falling into four distinct interlinked sections, it evokes the spirit of a symphony in all but name.

The music has the energy and invention of a man half Hoddinott's age, but it also has the effortless economy and total mastery reflecting a lifetime of composition.

Every bar is permeated with the personality of its composer: glittering bejewelled textures, sections of quicksilver speed and brooding sombre brass, all framed by a compelling ticking idea heard at the outset and returning at the work's strangely luminous resolution.

No orchestra is better imbued with Hoddinott's style than the BBC National Orchestra of Wales which, conducted with terrific intensity by their associate guest conductor, François Xavier Roth, gave a passionately committed performance of this important premiere.

The concert also included a sparkling account of Berlioz's overture, Roman Carnival, Debussy's Prélude à l'après-midi d'un faune and a thrilling account of Saint-Saëns' Organ Symphony with the conductor's father, Daniel Roth, as soloist.

A fascinating talk by Geraint Lewis, prior to the concert, also contained an early string trio piece by Hoddinott, the manuscript of which only recently came to light.

The event, promoted by both the BBC and Welsh Music Guild, demonstrated that, even at the age of 20, Alun Hoddinott was fully in control of his craft. The work had a fine performance under three principals from the BBC National Orchestra of Wales: Lesley Hatfield, Emma Sheppard and John Senter.

The concert will be broadcast at a later date.





Review by Neil Reeve

Swansea Festival Of The Arts 2009(4) - Berlioz, Hoddinott, Debussy, Saint-Saëns: BBC National Orchestra of Wales/François-Xavier Roth, Brangwyn Hall, Swansea, 10.10.2009 (NR)


This concert was notable for the première of Taliesin, the last orchestral work completed by Alun Hoddinott, who died in March 2008. It was commissioned for what would have been his 80th birthday earlier this year, and it was fitting that it should have had its first performance in Swansea, the city in whose environs he spent both his formative and his final years - and in the Brangwyn Hall, where, as Geraint Lewis remarked in a pre-concert talk, Hoddinott would have heard live orchestral music for the first time. This early-evening taster event also featured members of the BBC National Orchestra of Wales playing Hoddinott's String Trio, opus 1, so we had both the opening and the closing of his career; the trio, composed when he was 19, around the same time as his celebrated Clarinet Concerto, was similarly spiky, confident, energetically and invitingly lilting. It certainly left me hoping that someone would soon embark on a serious revaluation of Hoddinott's writing for string ensembles of all kinds.

Taliesin itself, effectively a one-movement symphony, massively unfolded from a four-note motif, rising or inverted. There were intriguing varieties of harmony and pulse, and bouts of almost Holstian merriment among more shadowy episodes. It was also a very busy work, using the full range of orchestral resources, with the percussionists in particular having virtually to run from one instrument station to another in their efforts to keep up. As with several other symphonic pieces by Hoddinott, there was a sense of the musical material being constantly redistributed between different sections of the orchestra in a kind of dialectical or argumentative pattern – appropriate perhaps to the figure of Taliesin in his mythical incarnation as a spirit of mutability. But there was also something overly restless and frustrating about this continual fading in and out of shapes and colours, something which began after a while to sound formulaic, a technical ploy rather than the result of any inner momentum or real necessity. I would like to hear the piece again to see if I'm wrong.














.

Just listened to it.It is,definitely a chamber symphony for two main reasons:you can hear the sparse instrumental texture and secondly, there is an historical reason:The very first Romanian chamber symphony was written in 1955 by Enescu,after the Maestro, Vieru,Mendelsohn,Dan Constantinescu wrote works with this title.Andricu's work uploaded here has seemingly the same instrumentarium like Enescu's cs namely piano,strings,winds.If you could give me the unedited tape or the cover I can try to  see if there is any hint regarding the work's name.Anyhow,a long research on the net in romanian, didn't return with notable results.It's next to impossible to find here information about the own musical  national school.Andricu,like Jora,Cuclin,Dragoi,Paul constantinescu,Negrea a.o, had a very unlucky life-grown under the crushing shadow of Enescu,weary because the taxing communist ideology, and overlooked by the posterity.Andricu was a very free person-he organised in his tiny apartament private auditions of jazz-music banned in the fifties in Romania.He had a fake trial and condemned in 1959,his name being banned.Later on,with the thaw that came in the middle sixties,his works were again permited.

Thank you for all of the information, and for trying to find what you can in Romanian. It is sad that you cannot find much information about your own national school, but I have also had trouble finding out about some of the American composers I have posted. 

I am particularly interested in Andricu's support for Jazz-- I'm a big jazz fan myself. 


  I don't have access to the source-- so I don't have access to the unedited tape or a cover.

Thanks for posting this! To make sure that there is no confusion in my mind, is this the Symphony No. 3 (out of the 11 numbered symphonies by Andricu), completed in 1950, or the Chamber Symphony No. 3, completed in 1965?

The confusion is in my mind-- I didn't know there were two of them---  any ideas?

jowcol,

it might seem I am currently trying to comment all your uploads but Soviet music is probably the key field of my collection, so there is often at least some additional information which I can provide.

As for Abeliovich's symphonies, the one you uploaded is really the Third (I also got my copy from Karl). Here is the evidence: according to the German music encyclopedia MGG, No. 1 is in D Major, No. 2 in E Minor (and I have it anyway), No. 3 in B flat Minor and No. 4 in E Minor. As the Abeliovich symphony from Karl is in B flat Minor (I can hear that) it must be No. 3 indeed.

The information about Melodiya LPs with all Abeliovich symphonies as stated on Onno's site is clearly wrong as far as I am informed. Mike Herman's discography only lists a recording of the Second, and it really seems this is the only one which appeared on LP (I have it). Onno's site is sometimes incorrect regarding information about LP releases, as soon as there is no catalogue number I'd be very careful. It's the same with several symphonies by Skulte or Machavariani's Fourth: all of them have never appeared on LP though Onno's site quite states the contrary.

I'm pretty sure this must be a broadcast recording. In any case, it has never been available on CD and most probably not on LP either.

Thanks for all of the information.  I'm afraid I don't have any more to post today.      You'll see more in a day or two.

[Symphony #3 (Chamber Symphony) by Mihail Andricu]

Symphony #3 (Chamber Symphony) by Mihail Andricu


(Pianist unknown)
Ars Mundi Ensemble
Modest, Chichirdan, Conductor

I hope Jaky can tell us more about this work. 

Here is one sketch about him:


A chamber music pianist with an international career spanning 32 years, Mihail Andricu was born in Bucharest and studied at the city's Music Conservatoire where he subsequently became Professor of chamber music (1926 – 1948) and of composition (1948 – 1959).
He studied several years in Paris with Fauré and d'Indy, and at 25 he also became a graduate of the Law University in Bucharest.

A prolific composer, Andricu produced over 50 symphonic works – including ten symphonies – over 30 chamber music works as well as vocal, choral, ballet and incidental music.

He was awarded consecutively the Second and the First prize in the George Enescu competition for composers; the Enescu Prize of the Romanian Academy, international prizes as well as many distinguished state prizes after 1945.

He became a member of the Société française de musicologie in Paris and his writings on Debussy, jazz, and the role of folklore in Romanian classical music were published both in France and in Romania.


And this is an interesting snippet from a blog called Music and Politics, which covered how Andricu was covered in the "Rumanian Review" from 1946-56.
http://www.music.ucsb.edu/projects/musicandpolitics/archive/2009-2/crotty.html

In the Review's very first issue, composer Mihail Andricu offers a condensed survey of Romanian music activity. [8] Andricu's name recurs positively in all Review articles under consideration, with particular praise directed towards his symphonies. Composers' Union president Matei Socor might have found Andricu's music lacking in socialist intent (5/1949), but his symphonies attracted enough peer praise for the authorities to present him to the increasingly suspicious and Cold-War-informed West as an artist engaged in the respected "European" form. Andricu's symphonies, acceptable to the authorities in Bucharest because of the composer's musical nationalism, continued to link Romania to the West for propaganda purposes, and to the East through the Soviet belief in the symphonic form. Andricu's ambiguous collectivist-individualist streak worked for him until he fell foul of communist authorities in the late 1950s.

[Symphony (#3) by Lev Abeliovich]

Symphony (#3) by Lev Abeliovich


From the collection of Karl Miller

About the Recording:
Update:  Holger believes that this was a radio broadcast, and is unaware of any LP or CD release of this work.   I've revised this posting to match his comments to follow.

About the work:
It seems he studied under Miaskovsky-- if you like him, (which I do!) you may find a lot to enjoy here.  Long melodic lines and introspective.


Biographical Data

I didn't find too much about him, but here are a couple of snippets.

LEV ABELIOVICH
(1912-1985, BELARUS)
Born in Vilnius, Lithuania. He studied at the Warsaw Conservatory and then at the Minsk Conservatory where he studied under Vasily Zolataryov. After graduation from the latter institution, he took further composition courses with Nikolai Miaskovsky at the Moscow Conservatory. He composed orchestral, vocal and chamber works. His other Symphonies are Nos. 1 (1962), 3 in B flat minor (1967) and 4 (1969).

Lev Abeliovich (ah-bel-yo'-vitch) was born in 1912 in Lithuania. He studied piano at the Warsaw Conservatory and began composing in the mid-1930s. He fled Poland in 1939 to avoid the Nazi extermination camps, taking up residence in Belarus where he remained for most of his life until his death in 1985. Although Abeliovich composed extensively, and his vocal music ranks with the best of the 20th century Eastern European repertory, systematic Soviet anti-Semitism prevented him from receiving the critical acclaim and support he deserved. For example, major publications on music in the Soviet Union make no mention of him.

jowcol,

once again some comments before the link is actually available: I know Koha's Symphony No. 2 and think it's a fascinating piece. In particular, the first movement is so full of energy and pulsation, great stuff. Usually, Jaan Rääts is regarded as the major Estonian composer of his generation. I have to admit that I tend to disagree a little, since I like Jaan Koha and Heino Jürisalu better – both of them of about the same age as Rääts and with similar stylistic features.

I couldn't have described the first movement better myself.  Thanks for the added info.

[Symphony 2 (1968) by Jaan Koha]

Symphony 2  (1968) by Jaan Koha


I've posted this to the Estonian Downloads folder.
Symphony 2
  1. Allegro
2. Largo
3. Vivace
Estonian Radio and Television Symphony Orchestra
Neeme Jarvi, Conductor

22'
symphony orchestra: 3333, 4331, percussion (1+3), harp, strings


I don't know much (any?) about Koha, but this is one I'll need to listen to several more times.  The use of rhythm stands out, and I'd like to hear any more of his work.

I've taken the following background material from the From the Estonian Music Information Centre.  They say it's okay to reproduce if I give them the attribution.

First- he's known for:

•  dramatic neoclassicism
•  brisk pulsation(and how!)  linear polyphony, colourful sound imagery
•  orchestral and ensemble works, children's music

Here is the Bio:

December 17, 1929, Tartu – November 15, 1993, Tallinn
Member of the Estonian Composers' Union since 1955

Composer and pedagogue Jaan Koha started studying music with his father and continued with piano lessons at the Tartu Music School from 1942 to 1949. He studied composition at the Tallinn State Conservatoire with Mart Saar since 1949 and with Heino Eller since 1951, graduating from conservatoire in 1954.

In 1950–1954 and 1958–1966, he worked as a sound engineer at the Estonian Radio and in 1954–1958 as a music theory teacher at the Tartu Music School. He was a consultant at the Estonian Composers' Union in Tartu in 1957–58 and a secretary at the Estonian Composers' Union in 1966–1980. From 1979 to 1993 Koha was teaching music theory at the Tallinn Pedagogical University.

The most numerous part of his compositions is formed by songs and choral works. His compositions also include many works for stage, symphonic pieces and music for film, plays and radio drama. His works are mainly optimistical, figurative and rhythmical, including epical moods and cheerful images. His style of expression is sparing, thereat valuating the proper dosage of the means of expressions. Musical figures are colourful, themes are full of contrast, texture is clear and connection to Estonian folklore is noticeable.

Among all choral works one finds patriotic, lyrical, dramatic and humorous songs. Koha bears in mind the abilities and interests of children. He prefers texts of his contemporary poets. With his three symphonies, he is rightfully a considerable symphonist.

Jaan Koha has received prizes in composition competitions. His Piano Concerto No 1 was played successfully all over the Soviet Union, the song cycle Five Birds (dedicated to Tiit Kuusik) received acknowledgement as well. His works have been recorded at the Estonian Radio and published in Tallinn, Moscow and St. Petersburg. Koha was given the honorary title of Estonian SSR Honoured Worker in Arts (1970), the Estonian SSR Prize (1975) and the Estonian SSR Annual Music Prize (1974).
© EMIC 2010

jowcol,

Ajemyan / Adzhemian etc. was born in 1925 and died in 1987. He was a pupil of Yeghiazarian and composed six symphonies, none of which was released commercially. You are right his style is darker than one might expect in the context of Soviet music, however if you have a closer look at the Armenian composers scene in particular you'll note that this is not that unusual.

I have two of his works, i.e. the Third Symphony which you just uploaded (a very fine and dense piece indeed, btw it's from 1967) and his Pastoral Sinfonietta. Again, in case of the latter, the title is somewhat misleading: actually it is quite a complex and dark piece as well, not exactly what might come to our minds when thinking about the term "pastoral". I will upload it.

Much thanks!  I can't wait to give it a listen.    Also, you've found another spelling for me to search on...

[Georgi Arnaudov, Symphony No. 2 (1984)]

Georgi Arnaudov, Symphony No. 2 (1984)



Bulgarian Radio and TV Orchestra
Kazandzheiv(?), conductor
Radio broadcast, Date Unknown

From the Collection of Karl Miller


A very interesting work-- he has some of the more "spiritual" modernist/minimalist elements in his work , but this is definitely not an Avante-garde freakout.

The list of influences is intriguing--  I'm not sure if I've seen Varese, Scriabin, Part, Webern and Feldmen in the same sentence before. 



Gheorghi Arnaoudov
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia


Gheorghi Arnaoudov
Gheorghi Arnaoudov [ɡɛˈorɡi ar̩ŋaˈudov] (Bulgarian: Георги Арнаудов) (born 1957) is a Bulgarian composer of stage, orchestral, chamber, film, vocal, and piano music. Representative of the 21st century classical music, with roots in minimalism.

Life
Gheorghi Arnaoudov graduated in composition with Alexander Tanev and contemporary music with Bojidar Spassov from the State Academy of Music Pancho Vladigerov. At the same time, he attended summer courses working with Brian Ferneyhough Ton de Leeuw. His artistic career started in the early 1980s. At the same time, he did research work in the fields of electronic music, music theory and musique concrète, as well as ancient far-Eastern and ancient Greek music. He has won many international and national awards, including the Grand Prix of the European Broadcasting Union (1985), the Golden Harp Prize from Jeunesses Musicales (1985), the Special Prize of the Union of Bulgarian Composers (1986), and the Carl Maria von Weber International Prize for Music (1989). He is the author of scientific and theoretical articles in music, as well as of reviews in musical and scientific periodicals, mainly in the spheres of the aesthetics of modernism and postmodernism, communications in the music, the contemporary arts, musical semiotics, and the theory of contemporary music. In 2000 Gega New released a CD with Arnaoudov's music called "Thyepoleo. Orphic Mysterial Rites".[1] The texts used by the composer are the original preserved Orphic hymns. For this project he consulted renown Thracologist Alexander Fol, who wrote the programme notes. In 2008 he presented To date Arnaoudov has produced numerous symphonies, oratorios, concertos and has won several international prizes. He currently teaches in the "Theatre" and "Music" departments of New Bulgarian University. In 2009 he was appointed associate professor in Composition and Harmony.

The antecedents of his music can be found in Russian Scriabin, the French mystic/modernist Messiaen, the Franco-American Varèse and, more recently, in the work of the Pole Penderecki and Estonian Arvo Pärt. The influence of composers like Webern and Morton Feldman can perhaps also be felt in the lack of any kind of conventional process or development. This is a music of stasis, a kind of intense minimalism that tells no conventional stories but rather meditates on an idea.

In a series of works of Gheorghi Arnaoudov (born 1957) composer's vision is directed towards attaining a new aesthetic of pure music (Adorno), aestheticizing renaissance sound purity. By using various techniques (including also techniques legitimizing the language of Musical Avant-garde) and their substance rethinking is achieved a new music-sensuous semantic field.[2]

[Symphony # 3 by Alexander Ajemyan]

Symphony # 3 by Alexander Ajemyan
(4 tracks)
Armenian Radio Symphony Orchestra
Rafael Mangasarian, Conductor
From the collection of Karl Miller

First, it seems that we have a separate Armenian folder for the downloads, but not the discussion about the downloads.  I'll put the announcement here.

I know next to nothing about the composer, even after searching under 4 spellings of his last name.  It is apparent his son is alive and composing in Armenia-- and even has contact information here.

http://www.composers21.com/compdocs/ajemyanv.htm

This is a fascinating symphony, a bit darker than I had expected, but very muscular.  I've had a hard time listening to much else the last day or two.   Imagine a hybrid of Pettersson and Katchaturian.  Not exactly restful, but very dramatic.  If any of you can find out more about the work and the composer (and, better yet, more recordings!) I'd be very interested.

[Janis Kalnins: Piano Concerto(1987)]

Janis Kalnins: Piano Concerto(1987)

Artūrs Ozoliņš(?) - soloist
Latvian Youth Orchestra
Edgars Kariks Conductor
Performance from 1990


From the collection of Karl Miller-- Additional details about recording courtesy of ttle and Fr8nks.


Caveats:
Born in Estonia,  Active in Latvia, but then moved to Canada.  I'm filing him as Latvian for now.

I've hopefully gotten the correct picture-- at least I am pretty sure he's not the currently active Latvian Hockey player of the same name making a save as shown below:






From Musiccentre.ca site:

Janis Kalnins was born in Estonia in 1904, and was recognized as a piano prodigy from a very young age. After studying composition and conducting at the Latvian State Conservatory and privately in Berlin and Salzburg, he toured Europe as an orchestral and opera conductor. In the 1920s and 1930s, he worked as music director at both the Latvian National Theatre and the Latvian National Opera, a post formerly held by Richard Wagner and Bruno Walter. Kalnins came to Canada in 1948, and took a position as a church organist and choirmaster at St. Paul's United Church in Fredericton, New Brunswick, a post he held for over forty years. Kalnins was inducted into both the Vasa Order by the King of Sweden and the Three Star Order by the State of Latvia, and received a New Brunswick Award for Excellence in the Arts in 1984, among others. Kalnins died in Fredericton in 2000.

[Bruce Saylor: Peans to Hyacinthus (1980)]

Bruce Saylor: Peans to Hyacinthus (1980)

Houston Symphony Chamber Orchestra
C. William Harwood, Conductor
February 7, 1981
Radio Broadcast




From the collection of Karl Miller

Bruce Saylor
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Bruce Saylor (born April 24, 1946, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania) is an American composer.
•   
Biography
Saylor was born in the Germantown section of Philadelphia. In 1952, his family moved to Springfield Township, just outside the city, where he attended suburban public schools. Active as a musician in high school, he played, sang, and conducted. During this time, Saylor also functioned as the organist and choirmaster of a small Anglo-Catholic parish in the city. He attended the Juilliard School of Music from 1964 to 1969, where he studied composition with Hugo Weisgall and Roger Sessions. From 1969 to 1970, he studied with Goffredo Petrassi at the Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia in Rome under a Fulbright fellowship. He received his PhD in 1978 from the City University of New York Graduate Center, where he studied composition with Weisgall and George Perle, and theory with Felix Salzer.

Saylor won numerous prizes and scholarships during his years at Juilliard as both a student and a teaching fellow there. In 1970, he began teaching at Queens College. From 1976 to 1979, he taught at New York University, then was appointed a Mellon Foundation professor at Queens. He has won fellowships and awards from the National Society of Arts and Letters, the American Academy of Arts and Letters (Charles E. Ives Scholarship and Music Award), the Ingram Merrill Foundation and the Guggenheim Foundation. As of 2012, he is a professor at the Aaron Copland School of Music at Queens as well as at the City University of New York Graduate Center in Manhattan.

Works
Saylor's musical idiom evolved from highly dissonant neo-classicism, though dense chromaticism, to a more streamlined harmonic language. Though he has written intrumental works such as Turns and Mordents for flute and orchestra, Notturno for piano and orchestra, Archangel for large orchestra, Cantilena for strings, and much chamber music, Saylor's vocal music dominates his output. His two-act opera Orpheus Descending was premiered in 1994 at end of his stint as composer-in-residence at Lyric Opera of Chicago. J. D. McClatchy fashioned the libretto from the Tennessee Williams play. He has also written two one-act operas: My Kinsman, Major Molineux, after Nathaniel Hawthorne, and The Scrimshaw Violin, after the story of Jonathan Levi. The poetry of James Merrill has inspired Songs from Water Street, Five Old Favorites, incidental music for live readings of Voices From Sandover, and instrumental music as well. His vocal chamber music has most often been performed and recorded by his wife, the mezzo soprano Constance Beavon, who created Saylor's monodrama It Had Wings, a story by Allan Gurganus. Saylor has written ten substantial pieces for chorus and orchestra, among them The Idea of Us and The Book in Your Hearts (both to texts by J. D. McClatchy), The Star Song (Robert Herrick), Dreams (slave narratives and spirituals), and Proud Music of the Storm (Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson). He has written several elaborate scores for Nine Circles Chamber Theater, among them The Inferno of Dante and Falling Bodies. He has also been composer in residence at The Yard, an artists' colony for dancers and choreographers on Martha's Vineyard.

Additionally, Saylor has composed numerous works for religious or ceremonial occasions in a tonal idiom: O Freedom! for President Bill Clinton's Second Inaugural, Grand Central for the rededication of Grand Central Terminal, Fanfares and Echoes for the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, In Praise of Jerusalem (Psalm 122) for Pope John Paul II's visit to New York City, two Christmas recordings for soprano Jessye Norman, and concert arrangements of sacred music by Duke Ellington for Norman's Honor! festival for Carnegie Hall in 2009. Saylor has written dozens of anthems, hymn tunes, and service music for church and concert use.

[Quintetto Energicio, by Andrew Rudin]

Quintetto Energicio, by Andrew Rudin


Marshall Taylor, Alto Saxophone
Bill Zacagni, Baritone Saxophone
Anthony Orlando, Percussion
Donald Liuzzi, Percussion
Andrea Clearfield, Piano

NOTE: WRONG LINK POSTED--- I'LL FIX IN A COUPLE OF DAYS--

Live performance, Date/Venue unknown

From the collection of Karl Miller

This selection may seem to be a little more "out there" than some of my recent postings, and the Bio below may mention a couple factors (Rochberg, Electronic Music, Nonesuch Record label.... )  which, without listening,  could mark it as a candidate of deletion from a well known hard drive.  But after listening, this is more of a work of "chamber jazz", and is rhythmically engaging,  so I decided to post this.  Let me know if you all feel this one goes over the edge-- it may help better inform my decisions in the future.

I pulled the following Bio from his web site.

Rudin's reputation was established in the 1960's through his association with Robert Moog and a pioneering series of synthesized compositions, most notably his Nonesuch album, Tragoedia. Throughout the 1970's many of his compositions were theatrical in nature, involving collaborations with ballet and modern dance, film, television, and incidental music for the stage. His one-act opera, The Innocent was produced in Philadelphia in 1972 by Tito Capobianco. A number of these works blended electronically synthesized sound with traditional instruments and voices. Particularly of note among these works is the inclusion of his music in the soundtrack of the film Fellini: Satyricon. Among the dance groups and choreographers with whom he has worked are Dance Theatre Workshop, Jeff Duncan, Murray Louis, The Pennsylvania Ballet, London Contemporary Dance Theatre, Louis Falco, and four collaborations with Alwin Nikolais. The 1980's saw the completion of his full-evening opera Three Sisters, on a libretto by William Ashbrook from the play by Chekhov, as well as many works for traditional instruments, both orchestral and chamber music. After his graduation from The University of Pennsylvania, where he studied primarily with George Rochberg, he joined the faculty of The Philadelphia Musical Academy, remaining there for the next thirty-seven years, as it eventually became part of the present University of the Arts. During this time he taught music history, theory, and composition, directed the new music ensemble, and headed the electronic music studio. He taught in the graduate division of the Juilliard School from 1981-1984. Since his retirement in 200l he has worked as a broadcaster for WWFM, The Classical Network from Mercer County Community College, and served on the board of directors for Philadelphia's Orchestra 2001. He continues to compose extensively. His professional affiliation is BMI. He lives in Allentown, NJ.

[Variations for Orchestra(1964), by Jackson Hill]

Variations for Orchestra(1964), by Jackson Hill


Variations for Orchestra
National Gallery Orchestra
Richard Bales, Conductor
Radio Broadcast, Date unknown.   
( I welcome ANY input from you scholars out there...)

From the collection of Karl Miller

A lyrical and colorful work.  I'd be interested in hearing anything else by him.

Bio information from the Bucknell University site:


JACKSON HILL, born in Birmingham, Alabama in 1941, was a Morehead Scholar at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill (Ph.D. in musicology in 1970). A composer from the age of 14, he studied composition with Iain Hamilton at Duke University (1964-66) and Roger Hannay (1967-68). He has served as a choral assistant at Exeter College, Oxford, and as a Visiting Fellow at Clare Hall, Cambridge University.  He studied Buddhist chant as a Fulbright Fellow in Japan in the 1970s, and Japanese traditional music has been a strong influence in his work.  He has received numerous awards and prizes for his music, which includes choral, solo, and chamber music, and as well as a chamber opera and three symphonies.  Hill's music has been widely performed in Europe, Asia and the Americas, including performances at the Tanglewood, Ravinia, Chautauqua, and Edinburgh festivals.  Recent commissions have come from Lichfield Cathedral, Chanticleer, and The King's Singers.  His composition Voices of Autumn was part of Chanticleer's Grammy nomination in 2003.  He has taught at Duke University (1966-1968) and since 1968 at Bucknell University, where he has served as Associate Dean, Presidential Professor, and Chair of the Department of Music.