Sonic surprises | Bangkok Post: Arts & Culture

CLASSICAL

Gone are the days when a new release of chamber music by contemporary composers triggered avoidance mechanisms in listeners intimidated by overbred, academic compositional styles. Nowadays, young composers are giving us pieces strongly rooted in pop, something that composers had been doing for many centuries before strict serial methods put the kibosh on the practice.

BEAUTIFUL MECHANICAL
Son Lux: Beautiful Mechanical; Annie Clark: Proven Badlands; Shara Worden: A Whistle, a Tune, a Macaroon, A Paper, a Pen, a Note to a Friend; Sarah Kirkland Snider: Daughter of the Waves; Judd Greenstein: Clearing, Dawn, Dance; Gabriel Kahane: Song. yMusic. New Amsterdam Records, CD NWAM032 or download.

A number of adventurous record companies, some run and staffed by composers and performers, have been following this trend and helping listeners to discover recent music, mostly for small ensembles, that balances intellectual content with the kind of direct emotional appeal that non-specialist audiences had almost given up looking for. One label that has been especially generous with interesting new work is the New York-based New Amsterdam Records. Some time back in this column I discussed a New Amsterdam release called Awake, on which the Now Ensemble played new pieces by six composers, some of them members of the ensemble. I was enthusiastic about it then, and if I were to write about it now, after many more hearings, I would be even more so.