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Chamber music is a form of classical music that is composed for a small group of instruments—traditionally a group that could fit in a palace chamber or a large room. Most broadly, it includes any art music that is performed by a small number of performers, with one performer to a part. However, by convention, it usually does not include solo instrument performances.
Albert Giraud was a Belgian poet who wrote in French.
Dreimal sieben Gedichte aus Albert Girauds "Pierrot lunaire", commonly known simply as Pierrot lunaire, Op. 21, is a melodrama by Arnold Schoenberg. It is a setting of 21 selected poems from Albert Giraud's cycle of the same name as translated into German by Otto Erich Hartleben. The work is written for reciter who delivers the poems in the sprechstimme style accompanied by a small instrumental ensemble. Schoenberg had previously used a combination of spoken text with instrumental accompaniment, called "melodrama", in the summer-wind narrative of the Gurre-Lieder, which was a fashionable musical style popular at the end of the nineteenth century. Though the music is atonal, it does not employ Schoenberg's twelve-tone technique, which he did not use until 1921.
Jan (Janice) DeGaetani was an American mezzo-soprano known for her performances of contemporary classical vocal compositions.
Eighth Blackbird is an American contemporary music sextet based in Chicago, composed of flute, clarinet, piano, percussion, violin, and cello. Their name derives from the eighth stanza of Wallace Stevens' poem Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird.
The Da Capo Chamber Players are an American contemporary music "Pierrot ensemble," founded in 1970. Winners of the Naumburg Award in 1973, its founding members included composer/pianist Joan Tower, violinist Joel Lester, and flutist Patricia Spencer. The current members are Curtis Macomber, violin; Chris Gross, cello; Steve Beck, piano; Patricia Spencer, flute; and Meighan Stoops, clarinet.
The Fires of London, founded as the Pierrot Players, was a British chamber music ensemble which was active from 1965 to 1987.
Rudolf Kolisch was a Viennese violinist and leader of string quartets, including the Kolisch Quartet and the Pro Arte Quartet.
Jacques-Louis Monod was a French composer, pianist and conductor of 20th century and contemporary music, particularly in the advancement of the music of Charles Ives, Edgard Varèse, Arnold Schoenberg, Anton Webern and uptown music; and was active primarily in New York City and London during the second half of the twentieth century.
Bethany Beardslee is an American soprano particularly noted for her collaborations with major 20th-century composers, such as Igor Stravinsky, Milton Babbitt, Pierre Boulez, George Perle, Sir Peter Maxwell Davies and her performances of great contemporary classical music by Arnold Schoenberg, Alban Berg, Anton Webern. Her legacy amongst midcentury composers was as a "composer's singer"—for her commitment to the highest art of new music. Milton Babbitt said of her "She manages to learn music no one else in the world can. She can work, work, work." In a 1961 interview for Newsweek, Beardslee flaunted her unflinching repertoire and disdain for commercialism: "I don't think in terms of the public... Music is for the musicians. If the public wants to come along and study it, fine. I don't go and try to tell a scientist his business because I don't know anything about it. Music is just the same way. Music is not entertainment."
A Pierrot ensemble is a musical ensemble comprising flute, clarinet, violin, cello and piano, frequently augmented by the addition of a singer or percussionist, and/or by the performers doubling on other woodwind/stringed/keyboard instruments. This ensemble is named after 20th-century composer Arnold Schoenberg’s seminal work Pierrot Lunaire, which includes the quintet of instruments above with a narrator.
ascolta is a modern music ensemble. Its programming runs the gamut from classical modernism to the limits of contemporary classical and its boundary with rock music. The main focus of the ensemble's work is on world and national premieres of compositions written for the group.
Jane Marian Manning OBE was an English concert and opera soprano, writer on music, and visiting professor at the Royal College of Music. A specialist in contemporary classical music, she was described by one critic as "the irrepressible, incomparable, unstoppable Ms. Manning – life and soul of British contemporary music".
The Auricle Ensemble is a chamber ensemble based in Scotland. It was created by a co-operative of professional musicians working in the UK in 2007 and has become known for its diverse programming. The group is based in the West End of Glasgow, with rehearsal space and administration based at St Bride's Church, Glasgow. The Auricle Ensemble performs throughout the year as a resident ensemble in the St Bride's at 7 series, and repeats these concerts across Scotland, in places such as the University of Edinburgh, Falkirk Town Hall, Byre Theatre St. Andrews, Isle of Bute, Wigtown Book Festival.
Jane's Minstrels was a virtuoso British new music ensemble set up in 1988 by the English soprano Jane Manning and her husband, the composer Anthony Payne. Its founder members were the horn player and conductor, Roger Montgomery, the pianist Dominic Saunders and the guitarist Stephanie Power; later they were joined by the clarinetist Dov Goldberg, the percussionist Richard Benjafield, the violinist Fenella Barton and the pianist/composer Matthew King among others.
Pierrot lunaire: rondels bergamasques is a cycle of fifty poems published in 1884 by the Belgian poet Albert Giraud, who is usually associated with the Symbolist Movement. The protagonist of the cycle is Pierrot, the comic servant of the French Commedia dell'Arte and, later, of Parisian boulevard pantomime. The early 19th-century Romantics, Théophile Gautier most notably, had been drawn to the figure by his Chaplinesque pluckiness and pathos, and by the end of the century, especially in the hands of the Symbolists and Decadents, Pierrot had evolved into an alter-ego of the artist, particularly of the so-called poète maudit. He became the subject of numerous compositions, theatrical, literary, musical, and graphic.
Mohammed Fairouz is an American composer.
The Chamber Symphony No. 1 in E major, Op. 9 is a composition by Austrian composer Arnold Schoenberg.
Valerie Coleman is an American composer and flutist as well as the creator of the wind quintet, Imani Winds. Coleman is a distinguished artist of the century who was named Performance Today's 2020 Classical Woman of the year and was listed as “one of the Top 35 Women Composers” in the Washington Post. In the year 2019, Valerie Coleman composed a piece titled Umoja, Anthem for Unity which was performed by the Philadelphia Orchestra. This achievement was a very special one because it was the first time that a living African-American woman composer was commissioned by the Philadelphia Orchestra.
Pietro Scarpini was an Italian classical pianist, harpsichordist, composer and conductor, who had an international performing career as a pianist from the late 1930s to the late 1960s. He was particularly known for interpreting 20th-century repertoire, including Schoenberg's Pierrot lunaire and Busoni's "vast and fiendishly difficult" Piano Concerto.
References
- Lunatics at Large Website
- Lunatics at Large New York Times review
- Lunatics at Large profile on Fractured Atlas
- Katharine Dain
- Mannes College The New School for Music
- Samuel Vriezen
- Ryan Brown
- William Funk
Artists participating in the Sanctuary Project: