Gustavo Dudamel

Gustavo Adolfo Dudamel Ramírez (born January 26, 1981) is a Venezuelan conductor. At age 27, he is presently the principal conductor of Sweden's Gothenburg Symphony, and in September of 2009 he will become the new Music Director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic. He has been described by the New York Times as "one of the hottest — and youngest — conducting properties around."
Dudamel was born in Barquisimeto in the state of Lara. He studied music from an early age, becoming involved with El Sistema, the famous Venezuelan musical education program, and took up the violin at age ten. He soon began to study composition. He attended the Jacinto Lara Conservatory, where he was taught the violin by José Luis Jiménez. He then went on to work with José Francisco del Castillo at the Latin-American Violin Academy.
He began to study conducting in 1995, first with Rodolfo Saglimbeni, then later with José Antonio Abreu. In 1999, he was appointed music director of the Orquesta Sinfónica Simón Bolívar, the national youth orchestra of Venezuela, and toured several countries.
Dudamel began to win a number of conducting competitions, including the Gustav Mahler Conducting Prize in Germany in 2004. His reputation began to spread, and he was noticed by conductors such as Simon Rattle and Claudio Abbado, who accepted invitations to conduct the Simón Bolívar Orchestra in Venezuela.
Dudamel debuted with the Philharmonia, the Israel Philharmonic, and the Los Angeles Philharmonic, among others, in 2005, and also signed a recording contract with Deutsche Grammophon. In 2006, his additional guest conducting appearances included concerts with the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, the Dresden Staatskapelle and the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic. He made his debut at La Scala, Milan, with Don Giovanni in November 2006. On September 10, 2007, he conducted the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra for the first time at the Lucerne Festival. In March 2008, he made his debut with the San Francisco Symphony.
In 2005, Dudamel first conducted the Gothenburg Symphony at the BBC Proms, on short notice as a replacement for the indisposed Neeme Järvi. In 2006, Dudamel was named Principal Conductor of the Gothenburg Symphony as of 2007. He will retain his position with the Simón Bolívar National Youth Orchestra.
Dudamel made his U.S. conducting debut with the Los Angeles Philharmonic (LAP) at the Hollywood Bowl on September 13, 2005 in a program consisting of "La Noche de los Mayas" by Silvestre Revueltas and the Tchaikovsky Symphony No. 5. The concert was attended by many American orchestra administrators, and the performance was well received by the Philharmonic, audience, and critics. On the strength of these performances, Dudamel was invited back with the orchestra at Walt Disney Concert Hall in January 2007 in performances of "Dances of Galanta" by Zoltan Kodaly, the third piano concerto of Sergei Rachmaninoff with Yefim Bronfman as soloist, and Bela Bartok's Concerto for Orchestra (the latter of which was recorded live and subsequently released by Deutsche Grammophon). In April 2007, during a guest conducting engagement with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, Dudamel was named the LAP's next music director as of the 2009-2010 season, succeeding Esa-Pekka Salonen. His initial contract in Los Angeles is for five years.
On April 16, 2007, Gustavo Dudamel conducted the Stuttgart Radio Symphony Orchestra in a concert in commemoration of the 80th birthday of Pope Benedict XVI, with Hilary Hahn as solo violinist, with the Pope himself and many other church dignitaries among the audience.
Dudamel is featured in the documentary film "Tocar y Luchar," which celebrates El Sistema.
"The 2007 WQXR Gramophone Special Recognition Award is presented to Gustavo Dudamel and the Simon Bolivar Youth Orchestra of Venezuela on the stage of Carnegie Hall on November 10."
A piece about Gustavo, entitled "Gustavo the Great" aired on American TV news program 60 Minutes with reporter Bob Simon on February 17, 2008.

Charles Ives

One might say Charles Ives was the most original and most radical, and arguably the greatest, of the American composers of art music. One might also say that he was one of the most innovative figures in music history because he is named America’s first major composer.
Charles was born in Danbury, Connecticut on October 20, 1874. His father was George Ives, a bandleader in the Union Army who had served with General Ulysses S. Grant during the Civil War. George gave his son Charles a highly unorthodox musical education by European standards.
It was not an option to learn of the three B’s – Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms. He received much instruction in harmony and counterpoint (counterpoint being the harmonious opposition of two or more independent musical lines). He would also be given lessons on the violin, piano, organ, cornet, and drums.
Most importantly young Ives was taught how to “stretch his ears,” as he said. This method of instruction would play a HUGE part in the progression of Ives’ creative composing. In order to practice “stretching his ears,” He was made to sing a song called “Swanee River” in the key of Eb while his father accompanied him on the piano in the key of C – this was a useful lesion in polytonality.
Since his ancestors had attended Yale it was expected for young Charles to enroll in the same University to study music. He took courses in music from a composer who studies in Germany. His name was Horatio Parker. Because of Ives young, independent ideas about how music should sound, these ideas clashed with Parker’s traditional European training in harmony and counterpoint. Ives opted to leave his experimental musical ideas out of the classroom and express his musical creativity in extracurricular musicals and things of that nature. He graduated with the class of 1898 with a maintained D+ average in grades. He did not pursue music as a profession because he realized that the people of his time would not pay money to hear the music he would create.
Instead of pursuing music he headed to New York and Wall Street. In 1907 Ives and a friend formed the company Ives and Myrick, an insurance agency that became the largest company in the United States. Long hours of work and spare-time composing caused an undermined to his health and in 1918 he had a heart attack. This decline in health caused Ives to think of retirement. Upon retirement in 1930 the company had sales of $49 million. So Ives had been a millionaire for sometime before he retired.
He was a modernist of the most extreme; given the time period he lived in.
Ives devised radical, compositional techniques and was the first composer to use polytonality extensively. Polytonality is the simultaneous sounding of two or more keys. This would make pieces of music sound distorted or cause tonal clashed and the tune would seem out of phase with other tune’s. He also experimented with quarter-tone music - music in which the smallest interval is not the chromatic half step but half of a half step. Ives would always take the familiar and “defamiliarize” it - making the old, sound very modern.
The Three Places in New England (Orchestral Set No. 1) is a composition for orchestra by Charles Ives. It was composed across a long span of time (sketches date back from 1903, while the latest revisions were made in 1929), however the bulk was written between 1911 and 1914. Three Places consists of three movements in Ives’ preferred slow-fast-slow movement order:

I. The "St. Gaudens" in Boston Common (Col. Shaw and his Colored Regiment)
II. Putnam's Camp, Redding, Connecticut
III. 'The Housatonic River at Stockbridge

The three movements are ordered with the longest first and the shortest last, and a complete performance of the piece lasts eighteen or nineteen minutes.
The piece has become one of Ives' most commonly performed compositions. It showcases most of the signature traits of his style: layered textures, with multiple, simultaneous melodies, many of which are recognizable hymn and marching tunes; masses of sound, and tone clusters; and sudden, sharp textural contrasts.
Each of the three movements is named for a place in New England. Each is carefully composed to make the listener feel as though he or she is at that very place, experiencing its unique atmosphere. Ives’ use of paraphrasing American folk tunes is particularly important in creating such an effect, as it provides the listener with some sort of tangible reference point from which to access the music. In this way, Ives makes the music accessible even though it makes heavy use of chromatics which, at the time of its writing, was seen as an advanced trait.
Ives' music was largely ignored during his lifetime as an active composer, but since then his reputation has greatly increased.
Although Charles Ives had brought his work to completion long before his death in the spring of 1954, it is still largely unknown to the American musical public. Some do not even know his name; others have heard of him as a composer from professional musicianship; still others have gained an impression when some of his work had a public performance.
For all of the obscurity and neglect that followed this man no one would argue of what an enigmatic composer he was and how difficult it was to understand and explain many of his works.

Beautiful!

This may be stated without danger of hyperbole: Lalah Hathaway, as the older daughter of classic soul music artist Donny, and classically trained vocalist Eulaulah, is the poster child for genetic coding. Given such auspicious DNA, one is not surprised to discover her a gifted—even brilliant—singer.
Not shocked in the least. And, of course, these types of assumptions are not necessarily just, but talent is expected ? Considered birthright—the scheme of the stars, the design of a divine hand. It makes it all the more impressive that, while Lalah has been imbued with—and influenced by—her begetters' faculties, she is, ultimately, her own artist—an individual voice seeking a singular aesthetic and pursuing it arduously, painstakingly, and sans compromise. She is an artist managing the feat of all great artists—to borrow from existing color, only to create brilliant and unexpected pastiche. To be, at once, familiar and foreign.

In 1990, Lalah was responsible for an acclaimed debut album, eponymously titled and compliments of Virgin Records. Words like "smoky" and "confident" were used to describe it. Then, in 1994, came the album A Moment, also on Virgin. Again, glowing reviews. She was said to be the possessor of "torchy elegance" and to have made a "solid" and "independent step" in contemporary Rhythm and Blues. Lalah joined Joe Sample—jazz veteran of The Crusaders fame—for 1999's The Song Lives On; he provided the formidable piano tracks and she? well, she did what she always does: mesmerized us with a more than notable, persistently sultry vocal performance. Most recently, she has come to the table with a group of songs that reveals an even greater maturity and a darkly original approach to production.

Happy Mother's Day

No words could completely describe the thanks that mothers across the world deserve. It is but a shame that merely one day out of the entire year is given to honor mothers everywhere. However, I will take this day I am given to show much honor and respect to my mother. I hope you will do the same regardless of the circumstance.