by Mike Telin & Daniel Hathaway
It’s common for people who don’t like contemporary music to describe it as “noise,” but in 1913, the Italian painter and forward-thinker Luigi Russolo proclaimed intentionally-created noise to be the concert music of the future. In his Futurist Manifesto, L’arte dei rumori (The Art of Noises), Russolo summarizes the evolution of Western music and arrives at a radical conclusion:
Ancient life was all silence. In the 19th Century, with the invention of machines, Noise was born. Today, Noise is triumphant and reigns sovereign over the sensibility of men…As it grows ever more complicated today, musical art seeks out combinations more dissonant, stranger, and harsher for the ear. Thus, it comes ever closer to the noise-sound…We must break out of the limited circle of sounds [of the orchestra] and conquer the infinite variety of noise-sounds. [Read more…]
On Saturday, January 17 at 8:00 pm in William Busta Gallery, and on Sunday, January 18 at 4:00 pm in Plymouth Church, Les Délices, in collaboration with Blue Heron Ensemble, Scott Metcalfe (left), director, will present a fascinating concert entitled Fourteenth Century Avant-Garde.
Certain chamber music ensembles make intuitive sense. A string quartet has four voices with matching timbres, perfect for writing balanced counterpoint, while a wind quintet provides a variety of colors and allows for cohesive ensemble playing, since all the players must breathe. But the Prima Trio’s combination of clarinet, violin (or viola), and piano is less obvious. Each instrument hails from a different family, each with a distinct tone color and disparate methods of articulation and phrasing. 
Visitors from Boston were the headliners for the Akron Symphony concert at E.J. Thomas hall on Saturday evening. Guest conductor Benjamin Zander and 20-year-old cellist Jonah Ellsworth brought along major works by Antonin Dvořák and Dmitri Shostakovich and gave them compelling performances. 
The first faculty concert of Oberlin’s Winter Chamber Music Festival on January 9 brought a capacity-plus crowd to Kulas Recital Hall and gave students in the program the first of several opportunities to hear how things are done by the veteran chamber players who are coaching them this month. 
Beethoven is a big part of Jonathan Biss’s life. That might be an obvious assertion to make about a touring classical pianist, but the great German master looms perhaps larger over Biss than for most. In his case, Beethoven is the subject of recordings, writings, a commissioning project, and even a college course. On January 20 in the University of Akron’s E.J. Thomas Performing Arts Hall, you can hear one aspect of his devotion to the composer, when he will present a program for the Tuesday Musical Association that begins and ends with Beethoven. 
Mezzo-soprano Anne Schwanewilms is indisposed and unable to travel to Cleveland for The Cleveland Orchestra’s January 15 tribute to Pierre Boulez on his 90th birthday. 
If you had to guess the composers of two of the pieces performed by the Wasmuth Quartet on January 6 by sound alone, you would almost certainly guess wrong. As part of Oberlin Conservatory’s Chamber Music Intensive & Festival, the young string quartet presented music by Haydn, Webern, and Ligeti in Kulas Recital Hall, but probably not the Ligeti or Webern you would easily recognize.