Evelyn Glennie performing...

A friend of mine (he's also a composer and arranger), Ryan Youens, alerted me to a You Tube video of Evelyn Glennie playing a piece called Libertango.  It's a wonderfully evocative piece, not sharp in the rhythmic sense in a way many tangos are, but warm and tender, with resonating bass notes rumbling along underneath.   And all done with four sticks.   I think piano playing is difficult sometimes, but creating this sort of music with four quite awkwardly-held sticks is a miracle.

And then, of course, there's the added complication in this performer's case, of being profoundly deaf. She lost her hearing at the age of 12....

Blimp is up and away

Ryan Youen's Blimp is now on You Tube being played by the Auckland Symphonia. Runs about three minutes.



Having been doing quite a bit of orchestrating of the music for Grimhilda! in recent weeks I know just how long it takes to orchestrate even a couple of minutes of music - and the number of instruments involved in my pit orchestra won't be as large as this group, by any means. Haven't quite got to the point of having dark circles under my eyes as yet, since I can work in the daytime (and not have to try and fit the music around a forty-hour working week doing something unrelated), but I suspect by the time the show is starting to get into production there may be not only dark circles but bags under the eyes as well.

Writing about music - well or badly

A few weeks back a young composer friend of mine, Ryan Youens, mentioned the strange things music critics say about modern music. It's as if they're trying to be elliptic because there's really nothing real to say about the subject in hand. Here are a few quotes from the article Ryan alluded to:

Chris Watson's about nothing ... really was, as his pieces are, replete with incident, four players charting ingenious textures on either side of an searching cadenza for Lardelli's brilliant guitar.
When I first read that, I thought it meant Chris Watson's piece really was about nothing. It pays not to give your music titles that can be just a tad too ambiguous. Here's another example:
Alex Wolken's the body linguistic may seem a complex, spidery affair on paper, but in performance the four players made it all lucid. Did "plan and place collide", as Wolken's programme note suggested they would? Perhaps, yet the miracle was that, for all the fluttering and swooping, one never felt the lack of a structural anchor.
Now, that could mean anything. It could mean 'I loved the piece', 'I hated the piece', 'I had no idea what it was about and wished I was home stroking the cat in front of a roaring fire', or, 'The piece wended its way into my soul in such a fashion that I was discombobulated for the next 24 hours.'
It wasn't surprising to find these reviews were written by William Dart, in the NZ Herald. I know for a fact that William Dart is an extremely intelligent musicologist - and perhaps performer (I've never come across him in the latter capacity.) He presents a program on Radio NZ Concert every weekend - Sunday nights, if I remember rightly - in which he plays a host of alternative music (not so much 'serious' - closer to 'pop') and again and again regales us with lengthy introductions in which he tells us of the wonders we're about to hear. Again and again I listen in vain for these wonders when the music actually plays. Where he gets all this extraordinary stuff from, I have no idea.
Anyway, somewhat apropos of all that, I received an email out of the blue the other day from a PR company in New York. Ariel Publicity & Cyber PR is a New York-based digital firm that connects artists to blogs, podcasts, Internet radio stations and social media sites. How they do this is by presenting a digital publicity campaign that gets artists prominently featured on blogs, podcasts, and Internet radio worldwide, and supercharges their Facebook, Twitter, and other social media profiles. They work to increase the artists' overall online exposure and lay a virtual cornerstone upon which to build their future success. I'm quoting, as you can tell.
In this instance they were promoting to me (and no doubt hundreds of other bloggers) a couple called Shelley and Cal. You can watch their video of a song called, Maybe, either on MySpace, or You Tube.
How does all this connect to the way I started this post? Well, while the blurb written about Shelley & Cal isn't quite in the William Dart league, it's still, to me, not saying anything much. It follows in the footsteps of so much verbiage about music, particularly Christian rock, which is the scene S&C partly inhabit. Stuff such as:
Every so often we're fortunate enough to be exposed to music that somehow creeps into our hearts and minds, and moves even deeper into our souls and spirits to touch and change.
or
"MAYBE" ....speaks to the hopes and yearnings of the human heart and the questioning we all go through."
Don't get me wrong, Maybe is easy on the ear and....I don't know what else. I don't hear the words of this kind of music easily; if there's a video I'm more likely to be trying to read the video than listen to the words. (But, as is so often the case with music videos, it's full of random stuff that doesn't really say much.) I'll have to give it another earful and see if I can see what it's really all about. The video is plain confusing - which may be the way videos are meant to be these days!

Ryan Youens

A few years ago at Dunedin City Baptist (somewhere between 2002 and 2005) a young fellow called Ryan Youens used to play the piano during the worship, on occasions. It was a period when we had a number of fine pianists; there was also another youth who was training to be a doctor.

Ryan's been gone from Dunedin for at least three years, so it was good to catch up with him on Facebook today, and learn something of what he's doing.

He completed his Masters degree in composition early in 2007 at the New Zealand School of Music in Wellington, working with Jack Body, Michael Norris and John Psathas. (Note that his teachers include one of my favourite composers and one of my not-favourites!)

Ryan had already had a fairly illustrous academic time: he began studying at Auckland University in 2001, moved to Otago University, studied with Anthony Ritchie and graduated with a Bachelor of Music degree with first class honours in 2005. He also received a couple of prizes during his Otago stint.

Ryan’s work has been performed by the Gruppetto Quartet (Greece), Auckland Symphony Orchestra, Southern Sinfonia, Marama Chamber Orchestra, Dunedin Youth Orchestra, Southern Consort of Singers, The Committee and at the 2007 Asian Composers League Festival in Wellington.

He's been a part of the NZSO/TODD Young Composer Awards on three occasions and his piece “Rakaia” was a part of the 2008 NZSO/SOUNZ Readings.

Ryan now lives back in Auckland, his hometown, works as a composer, music copyist and engraver, teaches music, conducts several orchestras and is frequently arranging and orchestrating music which has been performed in New Zealand, Europe, North and South America.

Sounds like Ryan has a busy career ahead of him!

Thanks to the SOUNZ site for some of this info