Missouri Classical Music News and Notes

Bishop has been commissioned to write a piece for the Texas Music Educators Association Region 18 Junior High Symphony Orchestra. The piece, “Ride!,” which commemorates Texas native Lance Armstrong's sixth Tour de France victory, will premiere on Nov. 20. Bishop was approached with this opportunity after writing a piece for another student orchestra in Texas last year.

“His music has been coming up more and more lately, and the kids find it exciting to play,” said Catrina Lotspeich, chair of the TMEA Region 18 Orchestras.

Her peeps are playing it cool, but Julia Irene Kauffman needs help.

Kauffman, the daughter of Ewing and Muriel Kauffman, wants to build a breathtaking performing arts center for the symphony, ballet and opera. Foundations under her control have pledged $105 million toward the $304 million project. Her significant other, Ken Dworak, is the project manager.

The dream has not been easy to realize. Land for the performing arts center was purchased five years ago, but no earth has turned. At one point, groundbreaking was scheduled for April 2003. Then it was April 2004. Now it's slated for August 2005.

Chen will be coming to the University of Utah next week as part of the Maurice Abravanel Distinguished Visiting Composers Series. Canyonlands New Music Ensemble, under the direction of Morris Rosenzweig, will play one of her works, ". . . as like a raging fire . . ." at its concert Tuesday evening.

Chen by phone from her home in New York said that ". . . as like a raging fire . . ." was written in response to 9/11. "It has all the emotions and expressions I had when I heard the news."

She was in New York when the attacks took place and was overwhelmed by what had happened. "I read all the stories in the New York Times. I was sad and angry, and this work reflects these emotions."

The piece was premiered in Philadelphia in late 2001 by Network for New Music and since then has been played frequently.

But Sussmayr's version lacks Mozart's transparency and cohesion; in many places, it just doesn't sound Mozartean. So in 1996, musicologist Robert D. Levin wrote his own revised version of the Requiem. That's the score that conductor Bernard Labadie and his ensembles, La Chapelle de Quebec and Les Violons du Roy, will perform Wednesday as a part of the Cathedral Concerts series.

However much [flutist Ruth Ann McClain] tried to relax before a concert, the nerves always stayed with her. But in 1995, her doctor provided a cure, a prescription medication called propranolol. "After the first time I tried it," she said, "I never looked back. It's fabulous to feel normal for a performance."

McClain, who was then teaching flute at Rhodes College in Memphis, started recommending beta-blocking drugs like propranolol to adult students afflicted with performance anxiety. And last year she lost her job for doing so.

One concern is that many musicians use beta-blockers without proper medical supervision. The 1987 survey of orchestra musicians revealed that 70 percent of musicians taking beta-blockers got them from friends, not physicians.

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Now you can listen to Glenn Gould recordings without the extraneous humming and singing OR add your own with the included microphone. Great for dinner parties!!!

Order your GG-DV2000 now for the introductory price of $4999.95 and we'll throw in the bodily function noise module at no extra charge. . . .

The Today Show, America's favorite morning TV show, will feature a profile of 'music man' Rob Kapilow on Monday, October 18, between 8 and 8.30 am* on NBC.

Audiences throughout America can tune in and meet the man who - more than any other since Walt Disney with Fantasia or Leonard Bernstein with his Young People's Concerts - has brought music into the lives and households of huge numbers of people, with his inimitable blend of accessible and humorous entertainment; probing and interactive compositions and workshops; magical musical incarnations of classic texts and children's books; and above all an intelligent and multi-dimensional circus of music in all its glorious and sometimes mysterious forms. NBC's own Katie Couric meets Rob Kapilow at the piano, where they talk about his new symphony examining the Lewis & Clark expedition through the eyes of American Indians, receiving its first St. Louis performance - in the expedition's gateway city - just hours after Rob's Today Show appearance. Katie Couric will also look at just exactly what Rob Kapilow does to bring music alive, through his "What Makes It Great?" presentations (in radio, in concert and now on CD), his Family Musik events (in concert and soon also on CD), his "Citypiece" compositions, and his life as a traveling musical ringmaster. With footage from concerts and events around the country, as well as an extraordinary behind-the-scenes look at the composer's collaboration with a Native American Blackfoot writer set against the backdrop of a Montana landscape, the Today Show will unveil just what it is that makes Rob Kapilow so great.

*check local listings; date and time subject to change

The Piano on the Edge Series continues this Sunday, October 17th, at 2:30PM in White Recital Hall with a program for piano four-hands by the Bugallo-Williams Duo.

Admission to the recital is free.

The series is devoted to artists or composers who take the piano to the edge, stretching the listeners ears and the performers abilities while remaining within the traditional confines of the piano recital.

Helena Bugallo and Amy Williams will perform 12 arrangements of Conlon Nancarrow's Studies for Player Piano. Nancarrow, an American composer who lived in Mexico City, wanted to explore writing canons at different tempi. The effect would be the same as if one person sang Row, Row, Row your Boat at one speed, never varying, and the next person came in with the second voice at a totally unrelated yet steady speed. For example, Nancarrow wrote canons with speeds at a ratio of the square root of 2 to 1! Hence the use of the player piano as the medium of performance. Nancarrow could punch the holes in the piano roll paper with great precision, assuring the accuracy of the metric relationships. He never imagined the pieces could be performed by human performers!

The Bugallo-Williams Duo has arranged several of the canons for performance by two people at one piano. I heard them perform last year in Miami, Florida, and was tremendously impressed and excited. Also on the program is the four-hand arrangement made by Igor Stravinsky of The Rite of Spring. It was intended for use in the ballet studio to assist with rehearsals, but it is nevertheless a tour-de-force to listen to in the concert hall.

What you do is this: you crack open a jewel case, take out the CD, booklet, and paper liner, and transfer them to the plastic sleeve. The genius thing is that you can fold the liner in such a way that you can still read the "binding," though it's at an angle. It takes up about one-tenth the space of a jewel case. I've been able to squirrel away a thousand or more new CDs without needing an inch of extra space.

Coleman's composition, “A Classic Triptych,” made its premiere at the season's last concert, on Aug. 1. . . .

Coleman, who grew up in Bristol, England, composed a tribute to three British cars: the MG, the Jaguar and the Mini. The inspiration was a ride Coleman took in an MG convertible through the mountains of North Carolina.

“A Classic Triptych” begins with this ride over winding and twisting roads. Coleman describes the theme in the first movement as “folk-like, with fast-moving music in the foreground and slower music in the background.” . . .

Coleman chose the fugue, a classic composition form, to depict the classic nature of the [Jaguar].