I recently went to a fellow UMiami student, Corey Klein’s Masters Recital. \u00a0The recital featured more contemporary works for horn than one would expect (three by living composers), and two were of particular interest to me as they were written by young composers. \u00a0The third contemporary work was by UM composition department head Dennis Kam. \u00a0As a student at UM I’ll refrain from reviewing both Corey’s performance and Kam’s work thoroughly for some silly sense of journalistic integrity. \u00a0I will say this about Corey’s performance, his sound is very mellow and lush, and moving through the range & tessitura of the instrument seems effortless for him. \u00a0If you were to think of the word brass as an\u00a0onomatopoeia, there was very little ‘brassiness’ to the playing.<\/p>\n
Distance in The Eyes of Stars – <\/strong>Natalie Moller<\/p>\n The first piece by a young composer on the program was by Natalie Moller. \u00a0 I am not sure if she was at the recital because she was not acknowledged after her piece was performed. \u00a0 The piece begins with glistening clusters that seem to be condensed chords constructed out of upper partials or 7th, 9th, 11th… extensions. \u00a0The horn enters with muted glisses and some chromatic inflections that sound a bit like a lamentation. \u00a0As the music accelerated, the piano became percussive until arriving at some large cluster blows at the\u00a0bottom\u00a0of the range of the piano. \u00a0These attacks reminded me of Mahler’s Hammer Strikes of Fate<\/em>.<\/p>\n After these crushing blows, a macabre dirge begins as the horn trills above the march like material. \u00a0As the piece begins to conclude, the piece returns to a heroic character that was\u00a0glimpsed\u00a0at earlier in the piece. \u00a0Finally the work climbs in range on the horn to the end.<\/p>\n My Beloved<\/strong>\u00a0– Riho Esko Maimets<\/p>\n The second work by a young composer was from Estonian, Riho Esko Maimets. \u00a0The topic of the piece, while not specifically programmatic was heavily tilted towards a religious context. \u00a0The piece is based partly on a poem by an eighth century Sufi mystic, Rabi’a al-Basri. \u00a0The text is here:<\/p>\n The piece starts out with a simple line in the piano that is directly evocative of chant. \u00a0As a listener, I believe I heard the outlining of the pitches of both the Kyrie<\/em> and the Credo<\/em>\u00a0from the Christmas Day Mass. \u00a0There are three reasons that I could be hearing this:<\/p>\n Once the monody ran its course and other voices were added in, Maimets did a good job of maintaining the “Renaissance” sound he had created by focusing heavily on drones and perfect intervals. \u00a0Maimets’ timing was also very good, because just as a listener were to tire of the chant effect, he expanded on the idea of the chant line and changed the texture by adding in walking thirds, “modernizing” the sound. \u00a0Writing chant in a specifically religious piece is a cheap trick (one I have exploited for sure), but it is also effective. \u00a0If a composer wants to evoke reverence and awe, slap in some simple renaissance-like lines \u00e1 la \u00a0Arvo P\u00e4rt and the audience will respond accordingly.<\/p>\n The introduction to this piece was quite long and Maimet withheld the horn from the entirety of it. \u00a0The horn’s entrance is a single stark pitch that stands out from the piano’s harmony. \u00a0The horn then develops into a flowing melody that is supported by wind chime tinkling at the top of the piano. \u00a0Some of the interesting ways that Maimets created harmonic tension was by moving from a monotonal system to a polytonal set of chords and then back again.<\/p>\n One of the more dramatic moments of the piece was when a large aria sequence developed out of chordal trills in the piano and a fantastic horn line, which soared to the\u00a0denouement\u00a0of the piece. \u00a0The conclusion features the music slowing back down and returns to the chiming texture in the piano but this time with the horn blowing wind through the pipes of the instrument.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I recently went to a fellow UMiami student, Corey Klein’s Masters Recital. The recital featured more contemporary works for horn than one would expect (three by living composers), and two were of particular interest to me as they were written by young composers. The third contemporary work was by UM composition department head Dennis Kam. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":20001,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[41],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1260","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-review","odd"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/opensourcemusic.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1260","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/opensourcemusic.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/opensourcemusic.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/opensourcemusic.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/20001"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/opensourcemusic.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1260"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/opensourcemusic.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1260\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1262,"href":"https:\/\/opensourcemusic.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1260\/revisions\/1262"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/opensourcemusic.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1260"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/opensourcemusic.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1260"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/opensourcemusic.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1260"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}\nMy peace, O my brothers and sisters, is my<\/em><\/address>\nsolitude,<\/address>\nAnd my Beloved is with me always,<\/address>\nFor His love I can find no substitute,<\/address>\nAnd His love is the test for me among mortal<\/address>\nbeings,<\/address>\nWhenever His Beauty I may contemplate,<\/address>\nHe is my “mihrab”, towards Him is my “qiblah”<\/address>\nIf I die of love, before completing satisfaction,<\/address>\nAlas, for my anxiety in the world, alas for my<\/address>\ndistress,<\/address>\nO Healer (of souls) the heard feeds upon its<\/address>\ndesire,<\/address>\nThe striving after union with Thee has healed my<\/address>\nsoul,<\/address>\nO my Joy and my Life abidingly,<\/address>\nYou were the source of my life and from Thee<\/address>\nalso came my ecstasy.<\/address>\nI have separated myself from all created beings,<\/address>\nMy hope is for union with Thee, for that is the\u00a0<\/address>\ngoal of my desire.<\/address>\n<\/blockquote>\n
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