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NPR Interview with Michael Gordon: El Sol Caliente premiere

January 29, 2015
WLRN’s Alicia Zuckerman interviews Michael Gordon and film maker Bill Morrison about their work El Sol Caliente.

Listen to an audio piece about how composer Michael Gordon and filmmaker Bill Morrison work together and what went into their 13th collaboration, inspired by the 100th anniversary of the city of Miami Beach.

The composer Michael Gordon and filmmaker Bill Morrison have been fusing their visions for upwards of 17 years …

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interviews

Big risks and adventurous friends: How composer Julia Wolfe became a renegade

September 15, 2022
NPR Music
Editors’ Picks

Sometimes, all you need is a little push. In the fall of 1976, when Julia Wolfe arrived at the University of Michigan from Pennsylvania, she was just 17 and viewed herself as a “wild teenager” with her sights on social sciences and politics. Activism was a possible path. Music wasn’t on her radar.

But one day, a friend coaxed Wolfe into taking a peculiar music class, taught by a forward-thinking Quaker who didn’t care how much you knew about composing…

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news

‘the little match girl passion’: Best of 21st Century

The Guardian UK has listed David Lang’s the little match girl passion as one of the top 25 works of classical music written in the 21st Century. The composition received a Pulitzer Prize, the recording won a Grammy Award, and the score has since become one of the most performed new works in the world.

the little match girl passion has been staged by Glimmerglass Opera and Portland Opera, choreographed by the Paris Opera Ballet and the Royal Swedish Ballet, with theatrical productions in Moscow, London, Edinburgh, and Sydney…

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news

Concertgebouw Orchestra streams ‘Fountain of Youth’

Until February 6, the fiery Concertgebouw Orchestra, with the terrific conductor Klaus Mäkelä, streams Wolfe’s recent piece: Fountain of Youth. Click here to watch their performance.

The piece is noisy, it’s youthful. Washboards! Wild trumpet screams!

People have searched for the fountain of youth for thousands of years. The thought was that if you bathed in or drank from the fountain of youth you would be transformed, rejuvenated…

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news
news

Eighth Blackbird premieres ‘composition as explanation’

February 25-26, Eighth Blackbird premieres David Lang’s composition as explanation at Duke Performances.  The new work is a nod to Gertrude Stein’s candid and circular 1926 lecture. Lang integrates composition and innovative aspects of theater, performance, and choreography. To create actors out of Eighth Blackbird, Lang sought out director Anne Bogart, co-artistic director of SITI Company. With Bogart at the helm, Lang envisions a new kind of musical artist, one with the formal training of actors on stage…

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