by Jarrett Hoffman
During the COVID-19 pandemic, performers and presenters have grappled with cancellations by giving virtual performances and releasing videos from the past.
Composers have been flying a little more under the radar — and in a way, that’s natural. “Sheltering in place isn’t that much different than being on deadline for a piece,” Oberlin Conservatory professor Stephen Hartke wrote by email. Cleveland Institute of Music professor Keith Fitch agreed: “A quarantined composer is not so different from a non-quarantined composer.”
Hartke and Fitch are two of the eight composers — including professors, freelancers, and young professionals — who agreed to share their thoughts for this article. After establishing that all things considered, they’re healthy and well, we delved into how — or whether — the pandemic has impacted their writing.
Over the past ten years the music of Jean-Féry Rebel has become familiar to 
Born in Romania, displaced by the Nazis, educated in Hungary, and finally settling first in Vienna then in Germany after the 1956 Hungarian revolution, György Ligeti spent a lot of his life on the move. Musically nomadic as well, he chased after a number of different compositional styles. Two of Ligeti’s pieces composed thirty years apart formed the backbone of the Oberlin Contemporary Music Ensemble’s arresting program in Gartner Auditorium of the Cleveland Museum of Art on Saturday afternoon, April 11.