Pianist Sang Woo Kang .::. Official Website

Minimalism – Dictionary.com defines the movement as “a reductive style or school of modern music utilizing only simple sonorities, rhythms, and patterns, with minimal embellishment or orchestrational complexity, and characterized by protracted repetition of figurations, obsessive structural rigor, and often a pulsing, hypnotic effect.”

Two years ago, I wrote a blog post about the experience of hearing Philip Glass’s “Mad Rush” at a concert, and noted back then that this was music that could be extremely beautiful both in its attractive textures, consonance, and hypnotism. On the other hand, I found it an extremely limited musical language [...]

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I think it’s fascinating to see the degree to which different kinds of artists are inspired by music. In literature, poems like T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets, techniques like the sprung rhythm in Victorian poet’s Gerard Manley Hopkins’s sonnets, or the novella The Kreutzer Sonata by Leo Tolstoy are testament to that fact. But what about visual art? We’ve already seen in John Cage’s Notations that the visual element can be an important aspect in these composers’ attempts to represent sound. It’s equally fascinating to see how various visual artists were likewise inspired by music. [...]

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I think it’s really easy to give composer John Cage a bad rap. Water Music? 4’33”? This is music that seems to be deliberately purposeless; avant-garde to the extreme. Much of his music can be likened to the practice of throwing paint on a canvas and surveying the chaos. It’s controversial. It’s confusing. It can be very difficult to listen to or enjoy.

It’s also incredibly exciting in its own ways for its own reasons, and even though it’s rare to see John Cage programming, John Cage has his enthusiasts. Check out this blog post about by Norman Lebrecht of Slipped Disc about a recent programming of John Cage’s Europeras 1 and 2. All six performances were (surprisingly) sold out [...]

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In the midst of a dominant Western classical music tradition, Asian classical composers tend to get overlooked, whether it be in live performance or in recordings. Few know that beginning in the 20th century, Korea had a fruitful classical music culture with individuals like Isang Yun being recognized by their Western counterparts as composers of great stature. Many of these compositions were unique for their blend of Western and Eastern influences, as these composers utilized a distinct Western heritage while retaining traditional Eastern elements like scales [...]

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Perhaps readers will not be too familiar with enigmatic classical composer Charles Tomlinson Griffes (1884-1920). This comes as no surprise, because though Griffes was a brilliant Impressionist composer with a unique musical language, he composed only a handful of pieces during his short life. He could count among his influences French Impressionism, contemporary European music with its bitonality and tonal ambiguity, and Asian music, a compositional influence that was relatively new at the time. His music is therefore a dynamic and distinct blend of these influences [...]

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