Ellen Taafe Zwillich. I haven’t written one of these “New Music I Like” posts for quite a while. Rest assured, gentle reader, it’s not because I have given up entirely on recently composed music – it’s just that finding the really good stuff can be a needle-in-haystack proposition.
Today, I bring glad tidings of an American composer named Ellen Taaffe Zwillich. She is widely celebrated – the first woman to win a Pulitzer Prize – but I’d never heard of her until I saw her name mentioned a little while ago on a weird and sometimes wonderful blog called Classical Music is Boring. (See here.)
Today, I bring glad tidings of an American composer named Ellen Taaffe Zwillich. She is widely celebrated – the first woman to win a Pulitzer Prize – but I’d never heard of her until I saw her name mentioned a little while ago on a weird and sometimes wonderful blog called Classical Music is Boring. (See here.)
For better or worse, Zwillich is often described as a “neo-romantic.” And her neo-romanticism comes with twist: until the late 1980s, she was by all accounts an atonal modernist. “Style-shifters” are intriguing and often controversial artists. They may be viewed with suspicion, as confused, weak or opportunistic, or labeled with other deficiencies. The Classical Music is Boring post charges Zwillich (along with a few others) with “disillusionment.”
Personally, I think that such speculations about composers’ convictions and motives often stand on thin ice. Who is to say whether or not she is disillusioned with modernism, or anything else? And in any case, what difference does it make? Whatever the reasons, Zwillich has embraced a post-modern sensibility that acknowledges the complexities of the gulf between the world today and the “good old days” of classical music.
Here’s a short piece by Zwillich that I found on YouTube. It’s called Lament, and was written in 2000, in memory of Judith Arron, who was artistic director at Carnegie Hall. A phrase that sounds like a quotation from Schubert’s “Standchen” adds to the reflective and introspective mood of the piece.
It’s nicely played by the cellist Lachezar Kostov – and a pianist whose name I don’t know.
© Colin Eatock 2015
Personally, I think that such speculations about composers’ convictions and motives often stand on thin ice. Who is to say whether or not she is disillusioned with modernism, or anything else? And in any case, what difference does it make? Whatever the reasons, Zwillich has embraced a post-modern sensibility that acknowledges the complexities of the gulf between the world today and the “good old days” of classical music.
Here’s a short piece by Zwillich that I found on YouTube. It’s called Lament, and was written in 2000, in memory of Judith Arron, who was artistic director at Carnegie Hall. A phrase that sounds like a quotation from Schubert’s “Standchen” adds to the reflective and introspective mood of the piece.
It’s nicely played by the cellist Lachezar Kostov – and a pianist whose name I don’t know.
© Colin Eatock 2015
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