|
|
Other Stories
Mann of the Hour
A Scholarly Blockbuster
The Ascent of the Composer
The Joy of Soy
Got Juice?
If Cancer Runs in Your Family
Time Heals Earth's Wounds
Good News for Southern California
Milestones
In Print: Talking to Your Doctor
|
|
FOR SOME PEOPLE, putting their two-year-old to bed inspires nothing but frustration. Not so for USC music professor Stephen Hartke. He dedicated his orchestral piece, The Ascent of the Equestrian in a Balloon, to his two-year-old son because “I realized that it described the nightly ritual of getting him off to bed.” And it was this piece that was chosen, from over 1,300 entries, as one of six finalists – and the only one written by an American – in the international BBC Masterprize competition for classical music composition.
What Hartke found most appealing about the prestigious Masterprize was not the $45,000 award, but rather the emphasis the competition placed on performance.
“Generally speaking,” he told the Los Angeles Times, “I’ve never paid much attention to international competitions. But Masterprize was interesting because there was so much performance involved. I really can’t believe the level of commitment to getting the music out there.”
The Masterprize competition combined traditional juried competition with extensive broadcast and recorded performances. And not only did Masterprize organizers want audiences to hear the works; they also wanted them to help select the winner. Hartke and the other five finalists were recorded by Daniel Harding and the London Symphony Orchestra, and the resulting CD was distributed with the March issue of BBC Music Magazine. Readers were encouraged to listen and vote for their favorite. Non-subscribers could also visit the competition’s web site, which featured recorded samples and a voting ballot. In selecting the winner, the popular choice was given as much weight as that of Masterprize’s professional jury.
LIKE MOST OF THE WORKS in this year’s competition, The Ascent of the Equestrian in a Balloon (named after an 18th-century engraving which depicts a horse and rider ascending into the clouds on the ornate platform of a hot-air balloon) was not composed expressly for the competition. Hartke wrote the piece for Leonard Slatkin and the National Symphony Orchestra, who premiered it in 1995.
E.T., Call Home
In a Nov. 28 Star-Ledger article on “pagerspeak” - numerically-coded messages that young people send each other via pagers - telecommunications expert A. Michael Noll compared the jargon and its exclusivity to “Valleyspeak” or police codes: “The beeper terms are something young people understand that no one else does. [It’s] something to distinguish them from older folks.”
|
