by Nicholas Stevens
Much like genres, names of arts organizations constitute a sort of contract between artist and audience: mislabel something at your peril. The shouting that greeted The Rite of Spring at its debut offers an example. Patrons had paid for a nice evening at the Russian Ballet, and instead watched as dancers stamped all over the floorboards — and their expectations — to an insistent beat. All this to say that when the founders of fp (fresh perspectives) Creative named their classical and new music venture, they implicitly promised that their offerings would represent the best kind of break from convention. Last week, the call of a trumpet heralded a fulfillment of terms.
There was an unspoken tension between the composers on the Akron Symphony’s January 18 concert. Gustav Mahler’s hour-plus Fifth Symphony dominated the one-night-only program at E.J. Thomas Hall, which also featured an uncharacteristically short work by Richard Wagner — no slouch when it comes to profundity and grand gestures in his own music. Yet Wagner’s somewhat humble place on the program provided a conceptual key to Mahler’s self-contained, sometimes overwhelming symphony.
In Paris, 1534, Pierre Attaingnant published a book of motets that utilized the aptly named “O Antiphons.” His 
