The Pew Center for Arts & Heritage

PMP Magazine 2008 – 2009

Publications: PMP Magazine

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Feature articles from 2008:
– “Jazz Horizons: A Diverse Lineage in Context” By David R. Adler
– “Penderecki’s Journey” by Dan Webster
– “From Archive to Stage: Discovering Early Music” by Heidi Waleson
– “Looking at Inspiration: Visual Art and Historic Sites Spark Composers’ Imaginations” by Alyssa Timin
– “Music Without Borders: On Defying Definition” by Shaun Brady

Jazz Horizons: A Diverse Lineage in Context
By David R. Adler

Anthony Braxton (photo by Emiliano Neri)

The term “jazz” covers a vast and contentious aesthetic terrain, pushing musicians to new frontiers of technical excellence and creative depth. This season, the Philadelphia Music Project funds performances that highlight the music’s idiomatic range and expansive potential. The slate includes a tribute to the late trumpet master Clifford Brown; accounts of the experimental yet wholly distinct languages of Anthony Braxton, Julius Hemphill and Andrew Hill; and a residency involving Brooklyn composer-bandleader John Hollenbeck with 12 handpicked musicians representing the cream of today’s Philadelphia improvising circuit. While these offerings may suggest a chronological timeline, they do not propound a view of music as a linear progression. Rather, in jostling together the most “traditional” swing-oriented work with the most “avant-garde” outpourings, from the ’60s to the ever-unfolding present, these programs seem to say: We can have it all.

Penderecki’s Journey
By Dan Webster

Krzysztof Penderecki (photo by Donald Lee)

Birthday honors may range from a pat on the back to the touch of a jeweled sword on the shoulders of the kneeling hero. But how to classify the near-Olympic celebration preceding the 75th birthday of Polish composer Krzysztof Penderecki? Has any composer—ever—been swept into such a tidal flow of honors, performances, tributes and world travel on the occasion of a 75th birthday?

Richard Stone, Emlyn Ngai and Gwyn Roberts of Tempesta di Mare (photo by Bill Cramer)

Orchestras, opera companies and ensembles that play music written in the 18th century or later can usually look to commercial sources for their performance materials—scores, parts, and the like. But historical performance groups, many of which specialize in seeking out music that has not been heard for centuries, have a tougher job.

Their sources are not publishers or music libraries, but microfilm, rare book collections, and scholars, and their finds often require considerable work before the parts can be placed on the music stands. The Philadelphia Music Project has been a regular partner to Philadelphia-based ensembles in helping to finance the research that makes such programs unique. And three such ensembles—Tempesta di Mare, Piffaro, and Philomel—have found that the wonders of modern technology, specifically the Internet and music notation computer software, can now make the research piece of the historical performance equation a lot easier to tackle.

Among the many projects that PMP will support this season, three invite composers to base new works on specific objects and places, including paintings, quilts, and the historic Eastern State Penitentiary. The Philadelphia Museum of Art has commissioned pianist Jason Moran to create a work inspired by the upcoming exhibition, “Gee’s Bend: The Architecture of the Quilt,” and Chamber Music Now will produce a concert of thematic commissions inside the penitentiary’s dramatic Cellblock Seven. Network for New Music will present a full season of concerts with commissions responding both to visual artwork and historic locations, from 19th-century oil paintings in the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts to a remote kingdom in northern Nepal.

Keeril Makan (photo by Scott Irvine)

Nearly three centuries ago, Swedish botanist Carl Linnaeus devised a system for neatly classifying living organisms, a well-defined, hierarchical system based on shared physical characteristics. A mere two decades after his death, European scientists were confronted with the platypus, a creature whose bizarre mixture of mammalian and birdlike features challenged the Linnaean system.