Publications: PMP Magazine

Published annually by the Philadelphia Music Project

Feature articles from 2007
Download the complete issue of PMP here (10.9 MB)

 

 

Improvisation: Charting the Unknown
By David R. Adler

It’s easy to agree with Nietzsche’s maxim from Twilight of the Idols: “Without music life would be a mistake.” But what would music be without improvisation? Though today it is chiefly associated with jazz, improvisation crosses all boundaries, informing many of the world’s musical traditions. The Philadelphia Music Project’s 2007 grantees include artists working in a range of disciplines, employing improvisation in various proportions and with vastly different results. Peruse the season’s offerings and one will find big bands, jazz encounters with classical orchestra, avant-garde experimentalists, virtuosi of Carnatic (South Indian) music, keepers of the klezmer heritage, and interpreters of Renaissance and Baroque masterworks. These performers would seem to share little in common. But a close look at some of the skills and practices involved can reveal striking commonalities. Improvisation is something that bridges oceans, cultures, aesthetic temperaments and even historical periods.

Around Philadelphia, The World Beckons
By Anastasia Tsioulcas

Musicians and dancers from all over the world have found a home in Philadelphia, and it’s no wonder—the city has welcomed a diverse array of new arrivals ever since its founding.

According to research published by the Balch Institute for Ethnic Studies at the Historical Society of Philadelphia and the Fels Institute of Government at the University of Pennsylvania, the city has experienced a decline in immigration in the 20th century and into the 21st; it’s a pattern unlike other major American cities, which have seen continued immigrant growth. Nonetheless, many vibrant ethnic communities have made the Philadelphia area their new home, including Central Europeans in the period immediately following World War II, Cubans, Greeks, Vietnamese, Filipinos, and Koreans. Today, the communities in Philadelphia with the largest number of foreign-born members are from Vietnam, Ukraine, China, India, and Jamaica, while groups from other nations such as Mexico are becoming larger and having an ever-increasing presence in the city.

George Crumb’s Autobiography
By Dan Webster

George Crumb is finishing his autobiography. Not in so many words, but in “American Songbook,” the six books of folk song settings he finished, after five years’ work, in summer 2007. The final two books, “Voices from a Forgotten World,” and Book VI will be premiered over the next two seasons by Orchestra 2001. It’s a complicated undertaking, for the 78-year-old composer finds deeply personal meaning and reference is almost every note of the songs he has so carefully set. He is equally enthralled by the vast field of percussion instruments with which he has surrounded the pristine songs.

Michael Brecker: A Tribute
By Tom Moon

In the middle of “Hijera” on her 1980 live album Shadows And Light, Joni Mitchell asks her audience to listen for “shades of Michael Brecker coming through the snow and the pinewood trees.” On cue, the Philadelphia-born saxophonist saunters in, and in just a few measures, his soprano saxophone steers Mitchell’s restless ode in a new direction. There’s nothing unusual about the break—Brecker, who died in January 2007 after a struggle with a rare blood disorder, routinely laced apt and idiomatically astute magic into the tiniest crevices of pop tunes. What’s unusual is Mitchell’s name-dropping. It’s like she’s lifting the curtain on what she once famously termed the “star-maker machinery behind the popular song” long enough to reveal one of her secret weapons—Brecker’s fiery saxophonistics, which was also an X-factor on records by James Taylor, Paul Simon, Funkadelic, John Lennon and countless others.

“I Dwell in Possibility”: Emerging Composers on Composing
By Willa Rohrer

This year, PMP grantees paid particular attention to the emerging composer. Alongside world premieres by giants such as George Crumb, Terry Riley, Sir John Tavener, and Christian Wolff were commissioned pieces by their lesser-known counterparts. But when I set out to interview emerging composers Richard Belcastro, Stratis Minakakis, Mike Holober, and Yevgeniy Sharlat about their work and careers, a peculiar problem presented itself: it is difficult to say what, exactly, the term “emerging composer” means. There are a few common assumptions: emerging composers are talented, full of promise, on their way to bigger and better things. But on the whole, we seem to define the phrase through a process of negation—it’s much easier to say what an emerging composer isn’t (rich, famous, dead, Beethoven) than what an emerging composer is.

Music as Memory: Composing American Life
By Alyssa Timin

Among the many reasons that people make music, one is to remember a social experience. This year, the Philadelphia Music Project provides support for four programs that commemorate collective moments in very different ways. At the Mann Center for the Performing Arts, Wynton Marsalis and the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra, in collaboration with Yacub Addy and Odadaa!, celebrated one of the birth sites of American music; Mendelssohn Club of Philadelphia performed John Adams’ “On the Transmigration of Souls,” composed in memory of September 11th; the Kimmel Center will host Phil Kline’s “Zippo Songs,” which honor American soldiers in Vietnam, and Orchestra 2001 premiered the fifth volume of George Crumb’s “American Songbook,” in which he re-envisions turn-of-the-century popular music. Spanning several centuries of political misdeeds, cultural contestation, and artistic invention, these projects highlight the role of memory itself in social change.