In Sunday’s (1/17) New York Times, Corinna da Fonseca-Wollheim writes about the composers collective Sleeping Giant, whose members are Timo Andres, Christopher Cerrone, Jacob Cooper, Ted Hearne, Robert Honstein and Andrew Norman. “On Monday at Carnegie Hall, Sleeping Giant will present its most ambitious collaborative work: ‘Hand Eye,’ written for the new-music sextet Eighth Blackbird…. It is perhaps a sign of the fuzzy warmth of the current all-embracing new-music scene, where no one style is dominant… It’s a break from the tradition of groups of composers standing for a specific outlook…. In the 19th century, the Mighty Handful, led by Balakirev and also known as the Five, put forward a new Russian style laced with Orientalism. In post-World War I France, Les Six, which included Milhaud and Poulenc, represented an alternative to both German late Romanticism and French Impressionism. In the 1970s in Finland, … composition students including Esa-Pekka Salonen, Kaija Saariaho and Magnus Lindberg created the Ears Open! collective to push for serious engagement with Modernism.… The Bang on a Can collective, formed in the 1980s by the composers Julia Wolfe, Michael Gordon and David Lang, locked horns with an American new-music scene that was still largely dominated by European Modernism.” Sleeping Giant took part in a recent Music Alive residency at the Albany Symphony Orchestra, reported in the current issue of Symphony magazine.
Posted January 21, 2016
