by Daniel Hathaway
HAPPENING TODAY:
At 12 Noon, the Amethyst String Quartet returns to open Trinity Cathedral’s 2025-2026 Brownbag Concert season. The program features Classical favorites by Mozart, Haydn, Ravel, and others. The selections are gems which continue to inspire modern composers and their movie and video game scores.
ANNOUNCEMENTS:
The Cleveland Orchestra and Marquee TV have announced a new global partnership featuring investments in original co-productions, special live-streamed events, and six digital productions set to debut on the streaming platform beginning August 29. Click here to read the press release.
TODAY’S ALMANAC:
The famous Franco-American harpist, composer, and pedagogue Marcel Grandjany was born on this date in Paris in 1891, and continued his career in the U.S. beginning in 1940. In this documentary video, Grandjany shows us his approach to playing and teaching the instrument.
And on this date in 1987, American composer Morton Feldman died in Buffalo, NY, where he taught at the University after spending his first 47 years working in his family’s children’s coats business.
A friend of John Cage and other avant garde composers, Feldman began his compositional career writing “indeterminate music” transmitted in unconventional, sometimes graphic scores, and after 1977 turned to quiet works of extraordinary length.
CIM New Music Ensemble members Madeline Lucas, flute, Shuai Wang, celesta, and Brian Sweigart, percussion, played his more-than-four-hour work For Philip Guston in Cleveland on March 31, 2012, in conjunction with an exhibition of monumental wooden sculptures by Ursula von Rydingsvard, the last concert to take place in MOCA’s midtown location.
I stopped in to hear part of that performance after covering another event, and wrote in a review:
During the half hour I sat in the main space, the keyboardist would play a soft cluster of notes, answered by a soft note from the flute and a single stroke from the percussion, followed by a soft cluster from the keyboard, a soft note from the flute and a single stroke from the percussion, followed by… When this slow sequence was interrupted and the percussionist played many (slow) repetitions of the same marimba note, it seemed like a seismic musical shift, but then the original material came back again.
For a taste of that work, watch a video of a 55-minute excerpt from a performance on November 2, 2014 by flutist Claire Chase, keyboardist Sarah Rothenberg, and percussionist Steven Schick, in Houston’s Rothko Chapel on the Da Camera chamber music series.
And here’s a shorter Feldman work from 1970 — before he embarked on his extended duration pieces: his The Viola in My Life 2 performed by the CIM New Music Ensemble in Mixon Hall on April 2, 2017.
