Customer Reviews

David Del Tredici: I Hear an Army, for soprano & string quartet; Night Conjure-Verse, for 2 voices and chamber ensemble; Syzygy, for soprano & orchestra; Scherzo for piano, 4 hands

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Classical music, its musicians and its composers, is clearly somewhere between a rock and a hard place. Its creators are all working as hard as they can to seem relevant, rightfully feeling that they only way to stay alive and out of the museum is to find a new audience. I remember years ago listening to Berio and others and wondering what might be next for composers of music that uses classical instruments, yet tries to sound modern. Berio and Del Tredici seem to have come up with the same solution, which is to sound discordant. It's that haunted, haunting sound that uses human voices and instrumentation to create a classical eeriness. God forbid a pleasant note, that belongs to pop. Pop music for the classicists is somewhat like neon paints on black velvet for the artist, those Mexican village paintings or Elvis Presley portraits. In other words, it is kitsch. Better cries, moans, and other signs of distress to gain artistic prestige. Better a sparrow's corpse covered in ants than a daffodil in full bloom. Del Tradici is fun to listen to, but these are familiar sounds. I've heard them all before in the Modernists' aisle at WalMart.