In one of Classical Corner’s ongoing features, we look at young composers who haven’t fully made it onto the radar screen of general audiences, but who’ve got distinctive voices and something important to say — these are composers to watch out for. Since a surprising number were born in 1963 and are turning 45 this year, on the cusp of moving out of the “young” category, this seemed like an appropriate time to acknowledge these composers who deserve more widespread recognition.

Composers born in 1963 are young enough to have come of age musically when modernism, particularly serialism, was still the prevailing aesthetic. In the US and Britain, with post-modernism beginning to gain wider acceptance in academic music in the last decades of the century, minimalism and popular music were broadening the scope of aesthetic possibilities. In continental Europe there were some rumblings of change, but modernism has generally been more tenacious there. The critical issue for composers of this generation has been discovering a resolution of the relationship between modernism and post-modern musical developments, and one of the most fascinating things about this group is hearing the variety of responses individuals have come up with. For some of the composers, their aesthetic solutions to the wealth of options open to them could be pretty wild, so for several of the pieces here, be prepared to hold on to your hats!
 
 
Fausto Romitelli, 1963 (Gorizia, Italy) - 2004 (Milan)

“Ever since I was born, I have been immersed in digitalized images, synthetic sounds, artifacts. Artificial, distorted, filtered, this is the nature of man today.” With this quote, Fausto Romitelli astutely characterized his aesthetic vision; his music might be categorized as urban classical industrial grunge. While he used all the newest technologies available, the chaos his music expresses is a critique of the ways technology has wrought havoc on modern life. Many of his works are harrowing depictions of a post-industrial social dystopia the composer must have felt lay not too far distant in the future. Romitelli’s music is seldom “pretty” or easy to listen to, but it’s so compelling that it demands your attention; it’s something like watching an accident that you’re at least partially inclined to turn away from. His imagination was endlessly fertile, and his music is full of sonic surprises and brilliant turns of orchestration. It’s also emotionally direct and communicative; in spite of the complexity of his musical language, his music is not cerebral; it goes straight for the gut. Romitelli died at the age of 41, but he left a significant body of large-scale work, much of which has yet to be recorded. Pieces like Dead City Radio. Audiodrome (2003), Floating down too slow (2001), and An Index of metals (2003) mark him as composer of real originality and substance and make his early death an especially tragic loss to the music world.

Youtube has a video of a 2000 dance, Counter Phrases, choreographed by Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker and directed by Thierry de Mey, with music by ten different composers. Romitelli’s contribution, the section “Green, Yellow, and Blue,” is some of his least threatening music, but somehow, in combination with the pastoral imagery of the dance, the effect manages to be remarkably creepy.

 
Dead City Radio. Audiodrome
EnTrance
The Nameless City
 
 
John Pickard (Lancashire, England)

The British composer John Pickard has made a name for himself writing largely in traditional forms: string quartet, sonata, song cycle, symphony, concerto, tone poem. His principal teachers were the Welsh composer William Mathias and Louis Andriessen. His music doesn’t sound like either of theirs, but it’s possible to detect strains of both a descriptive pastoralism and a gesturally aggressive, edgy urbanity in his work, often within the same piece. Pickard’s harmonic language is relatively conservative and that may explain why he hasn’t received the same kind of attention in international new music circles as his tonally more adventurous near-contemporaries, George Benjamin (1960) and Thomas Adès (1971); his music may simply be considered too accessible to be taken fully seriously. That accessibility, though, has made his work popular with general concert audiences, and his orchestral pieces, in particular, are being played with increasing frequency. One of his best-known work is The Flight of Icarus (1990), a 20-minute tone poem based on Greek mythology; the San Francisco Chronicle called its first U.S. performance “a serious contender for the most exciting musical premiere of 2006.” Like much of Pickard’s work, it’s characterized by a profligacy of invention and colorful, shimmering orchestration. The sky is either directly or indirectly the subject of many of his programmatic works and inspires some of his most memorable, incandescent music.

String Quartet #3 - Con moto
Flight of Icarus
A Starlit Dome

John Pickard’s website
 
 
Isabel Mundry (Schlüchtern, Germany)

Modernism in music is out of favor in the US at the moment, but Europe is full of unapologetic modernists who are discovering ways of expanding the definition of the term beyond the rigid serialism that characterized it for many decades. Isabel Mundry is one of many composers who exemplify a kind of liberated modernism that defies the restraints of any particular compositional philosophy. Like many of the leading composers of her generation, she studied electronic music at IRCAM. She has spent much of her career as a free-lance composer, but currently teaches in Zürich. Her opera, Ein Atemzug — Die Odyssee (The Odyssey — A Breath), was widely praised after its premiere at the Deutsche Oper, Berlin, in 2005.

One of Mundry’s most intriguing works is Dufay-Bearbeitungen (Dufay Arrangements) (2003-2004) for chamber ensemble. Taking seven motets and chansons by the 15th century French composer as her basis, Mundry does more than arrange them. She uses Dufay’s pitches, but in her inventive and delicately quirky instrumentation, she brings them decisively into the 21st century. She also overlays them with a web of contemporary sonorities that allows them to seem simultaneously very ancient and very new. (Dufay-Bearbeitungen raises the question of whether it’s possible for a modernist to use post-modern concepts without thereby switching into the post-modernist camp; the piece might be understood as an un-ironic appropriation of post-modern polystylist means, but for thoroughly modernist ends.) Mundry has written that for her, the act of composition is always an exercise in learning to listen, and in these pieces, she makes it possible for the listener to hear Dufay with open ears.

Penelopes Atem
Dufay Bearbeitungen - “Pour ce que veoir je ne puis”
Traces des moments - Movement 3
 
 
Thomas Larcher (Innsbruck, Austria)

For much of his career, Thomas Larcher has been as much in demand as a pianist as for his compositions. He writes, “My roots lie in performance and in decades of imprinting through the music and formal ideas of the classics. My music is communicative: it challenges the attentive listener but is meant to be readily intelligible in concert.” His work does indeed sound like it’s informed by the broadest understanding of Western musical traditions. In particular, Larcher has developed a style that unselfconsciously acknowledges and brings together the most rigorous aspects of Darmstadt-style modernism with elements of the new simplicity and holy minimalism, as exemplified by Silvestrov and Pärt. His harmonic and gestural language can be modernist, but his pieces are constructed with enough repetition and transparency that it’s possible to grasp them on first hearing. An especially striking work is My Illness Is the Medicine I Need (2002), for soprano and piano trio. The texts are quotes by patients in psychiatric hospitals, taken from a photo-essay on the treatment of the mentally ill, in a Benetton “Colors” magazine. Larcher’s understated settings of the aphoristic, troubling texts are remarkable for their profound compassion and probing insight, achieved with the most austere musical means.

My illness is the medicine I need - I like it when people ask me the time. It’s almost a conversation
Cold Farmer - Mit groove
Cold Farmer - Ganz langsam

Larcher’s children’s piece, The sad yellow whale, receives a lovely performance by a very young pianist. The music, which sounds a lot like Arvo Pärt, puts on full display a wistful, elegiac side of Larcher’s creative personality that runs as an undercurrent through much of his work.

 
Stay tuned for more features on young composers to watch out for!