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Imani Winds bring music for thought to Oberlin (Mar. 7)

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by Kevin McLaughlin

The Imani Winds completed a brief residency at Oberlin Conservatory in spectacular and moving fashion with a recital of new and involving works in Warner Concert Hall on March 7.

A pre-concert panel — which brought together Oberlin faculty members with the Imani Winds’ Monica Ellis and Chamber Music Detroit’s Bryan Jones — helped frame the music to come. Jeff Scott’s Fallen Petals of Nameless Flowers, an unflinching look at the U.S. criminal justice system historically misapplied to young men of color, served as the emotional and consequential center of the program, and the through-line of the discussion.

Jody Kerchner shared her activity as Director of the Oberlin Music at Grafton Choir, playing excerpts of music written and performed by its incarcerated members while they listened in real time on a livestream.

[Read more…]

Credo Chamber Music: Arianna String Quartet (July 3)

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by Delaney Meyers

The Arianna Quartet returned to Credo Music at Oberlin Conservatory for a week of coaching, teaching, and a performance on Tuesday, July 3rd. The sold-out audience in Kulas Recital Hall was treated to a lovely escape from the summer heat with an evening of first-class chamber music. [Read more…]

Nicholas R. Jones Young Writer Fellows named for the summer of 2018

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by Daniel Hathaway

Meyers-KoeningerTwo talented young writers have joined the ClevelandClassical.com masthead as Nicholas R. Jones Young Writer Fellows for June and July. They will participate in all aspects of running a website devoted to classical music including conducting interviews, writing previews and reviews of events and posting them to the site, maintaining our concert listings, and managing social media.

The fellowships are named in honor of the long-time Oberlin Professor who lent his support and writing skills to the website from its founding in 2008 until his retirement in 2017. Major funding for the fellowships comes from the Mandel Foundation. [Read more…]

Preview: Oberlin Artist Recital Series: a conversation with Leipzig String Quartet cellist Matthias Moosdorf

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by Mike Telin

WithLeipzig-Oberlin-Mastroianni all of the exceptional repertoire to choose from, why is it that an all-Beethoven string quartet recital still excites audiences and players? “The quartet has performed a lot of complete cycles of composers such as Mendelssohn and Brahms or Mozart, and if you compare the possibilities, you have to realize that Beethoven is the top of the top,” says Leipzig String Quartet cellist Matthias Moosdorf. The quartet, who are currently touring seventeen Beethoven quartets, will perform a concert on Sunday, March 3 at 4:00 pm in Finney Chapel at Oberlin as part of the Oberlin Artist Recital Series.

“You can combine any piece with another and it works perfectly, especially when taken from the early, from the middle and from the late periods’” Moosdorf said in a phone conversation from Leipzig. “But it doesn’t matter which quartets you choose because in the end, the result will be a fantastic evening.” Moosdorf will be joined by his Leipzig colleagues Stefan Arzberger & Tilman Büning, violins, and violist Ivo Bauer, in performances of the Quartet in B-flat, op. 18, no. 6, “La Maliconia”,Quartet in f, op. 95,“Serioso” and the Quartet in E-flat, op. 127.  [Read more…]

Rubin Institute winners announced in Oberlin

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By Daniel Hathaway

Oberlin, OH — January 24, 2012. At a Sunday morning ceremony in Klonick Hall of the Oberlin Conservatory of Music on January 22, Dean David Stull and donor Stephen Rubin announced the winners of the grand prize and public prize in the first bi-annual Rubin Institute for Music Criticism, which began on January 18.

Rubin Winner

The $10,000 prize went to Jacob Street (above, with Rubin and Stull), a master’s candidate in historical performance from North Reading, MA. In a surprise development, the panel awarded honorable mention to Megan Emberton, a senior piano major from Chelsea, MI, along with a cash award of $2,500. [Read more…]

Oberlin Rubin Institute Preview: The decline of quality in popular music-making vs. James Blake

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By Gabe Kanengiser

KanengiserOver the past hundred years, popular music has crossed over into nearly all genres. In the nineteen twenties, pop music was marked by jazz and blues styles, while nearly forty years later it was defined by artists such as Elvis Presley, The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, and Marvin Gaye. Despite Michael Jackson’s reign as “The King of Pop” during the eighties and nineties, the emergence of far too many boy bands, meaningless and crass hip-hop artists (this by no means discredits the meaningful and tasteful), and the unfortunate number of “plastic-platinum” pop-singers, it seems that the quality of popular music has declined.

What is popular music? Music is often divided into three categories: popular music, art music, and traditional or folk music. Popular music can be in any genre but must appeal and be distributed to large quantities of people; Art music “requires significantly more work by the listener” in order for it to be fully appreciated. Traditional or folk music is often disseminated through oral traditions, and is centered in cultural of historical events.

However, who is to say that a song cannot be all three of these? [Read more…]

Oberlin Rubin Institute Preview: How does a composer forge an online identity in the 21st Century?

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By Mandy Hogan

HoganComposers continually forge new roads into artistic wildernesses. How does a composer forge an online identity in the 21st century? YouTube, Facebook, PureVolume, InstantEncore, and MySpace are large commercial sites that provide platforms for emerging and established artists to shine. They allow users to access and discover new music and musicians instantly. So perhaps the more important question is, how can musicians form a unique identity in the midst of millions of artists without being conflated with someone else or swept into an unwanted genre?

The medium that people use to enjoy music has changed from vinyl records to CDs to iPods and YouTube videos, but the music remains. What will remain in our psyche? What types of composers will we become? But ultimately, the question is: how will what we make become who we are? And that is the question for all of us.

Composers in the 21st century range from Jay-Z to Jennifer Higdon to Philip Glass to Esperanza Spalding. Some write Pulitzer-Prize winning violin concertos, others perform, produce, create, and design hip-hop albums, and still others jam in the garage with their friends. [Read more…]

Oberlin Rubin Institute Preview: Composers in the 21st Century and the question of “selling out”

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By Meghan Farnsworth

FarnsworthComposers of centuries past and present have sought various avenues to maintain the particular brew of their craft. Whether these roads have guided their careers towards writing music befitting of the demands of a patron with two-thousand francs to spare, or for a pharmaceutical company, like Pfizer — the producers of that jagged little pill, Advil — composers have always needed to meet the bidding of a greater power in order to survive in the music industry.

For twenty-first century composers, however, does this mean sacrificing the aestheticism of beauty in art for the demands of the almighty dollar? Nowadays, it’s inevitable to avoid commercial venues — i.e. film, TV, radio, etc. — as a way towards meeting a financially stable career in composition. In some respects, many classical music elitists would find this route clichéd and unworthy of high art. So, one ultimate question comes to mind: is music composed in the style of the commercial route considered to be “sold out”?

How classical music is viewed today is much different than it was in centuries past. Music never reached the possibility of being categorized as “sold-out”. [Read more…]

Oberlin Rubin Institute Preview: Clearing up misconceptions of Juke

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By Sam Rosenberg

RosenbergOn the Internet, history gets written backwards. Network consciousness starts on the periphery, as independent dots connect around the edges filling in the unknown piece-by-piece, reaching back to create a history and molding a collective impression. The cliché is that information travels on the web at near instantaneous speeds, but collectively piecing together the history of a scene from afar takes much longer than you would think, and leaves an uneven and distorted perception in the collective consciousness. The rise of interest in, and popularity of Chicago Footwork and Juke music outside of Chicago, particularly in England over the last two years, is a case study for the messy, complicated tangle of network historiography.

By comparison, the actual history of Juke and Footwork in Chicago is fairly simple. It’s easy to connect it to the long lineage of African-American music traditions and to see points of connection with popular dance music. Disco leads to House leads to Ghetto House leads to Juke and to Footwork. This chain is a timeline but also a pyramid with each step up growing smaller in terms of resources available to it and the size of the communities involved. By the end of the 90’s, Dance Mania, the premier label for Ghetto House, shut its doors and a corporate takeover sanitized Chicago radio, implementing national programming formats with little room for local music. Pivotal figures like DJ Deeon dropped out of the scene and younger producers and DJs waiting in the wings to join them now lacked the infrastructure and platforms to release their music and gain exposure outside of their communities. [Read more…]

Oberlin Rubin Institute Preview: Metamorphosis of the Concert

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By Charlotte Dutton

DuttonThere are those who welcome change and those who resist it. Classical music patrons who fall into the latter category would have everyone believe that their choice of music is dying. When asked to elaborate, those dejected, averse-to-change listeners will cite the same signs of its imminent death that have been listed ever since the birth of rock and roll: aging patrons and half-empty concert halls. For them, classical music is engaged in a losing battle. However, forward thinking classical music lovers, who welcome and even embrace change, see opportunity rather than wreckage. It is not the music that is dying but rather, the tradition in which audiences receive it.

Although classical music tends to draw an older, “graying” crowd, not all of its enthusiasts are dropping like flies. Therein lays a flaw in cynical patrons’ point of view: their information is faulty due to its subjectivity. Perhaps older audiences appreciate and understand classical music better than other genres; maybe they were exposed to it or found interest in it later in life. Could it be that their current life experiences draw them to classical music just like the current life experiences of energetic college students draws them to pop or techno? That is not to say, however, that classical music does not have a footing in younger generations. Simply look at the myriad conservatories and music schools dotting the international landscape – it seems that almost every urban center has at least one decent to excellent music school. [Read more…]

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