Anthony Joseph Lanman

I just found a concert of the guitar/violin duo Duo 46 online. It’s a concert they played in Calgary at St. Stephen’s Anglican Church on April 5th, 2008, and is presented on the Canadian Broadcasting Corporations web site. You can listen to the entire concert online for free, and I have to say they played my piece particularly well. I also really enjoy the pieces by Beaser, Liderman and John Oliver.

I met guitarist Matthew Gould and violinist Beth Schneider when I was a student at the University of Texas in 1997. I wrote Sonata 46 for them in 1998, and they’ve since played it so much and in so many places, I’ve totally lost track of it. They’ve had to have played it at least 50 times, which blows my mind.

You can check it out here:

http://www.cbc.ca/radio2/cod/concerts/20080405duo46

Carlos Rafael Rivera

I thought I would start a new series of blogs about composers that I respect, and whos music I think is shaping the classical music of the 21st century. I’ll be doing this by telling you about how I discovered their music, and how they personally affected me in the beginning. I’ll be introducing you to some of their work, and pointing you to where you can find more, so you can discover them for yourselves.

I was introduced to Carlos Rafael Rivera’s music back in 1998, when I was a student at the University of Texas studying classical guitar with Adam Holzman. Every Wednesday afternoon, all the guitarists in his studio would attend “rep. class”. This was a kind of master class, where various people would play whatever pieces they were working on in front of everyone, and Adam would comment (or yell - lol).

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I came across this You Tube video of Pierre Boulez doing a kind of presentation of parts of his piece Sur Incises. It reminded me how much I love this piece. The audio quality of the You Tube video does not really do it justice, but I thought I would post it anyway.

The ensemble is very unique - 3 pianos, 3 harps and 3 percussionists (usually playing vibraphones). The combined sound is something so wonderful - a white crystalline sound world, sometimes shimmering with an ethereal beauty, other times pulsing with brutal primal rhythms.

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I just heard today about the controversy surrounding the band Coldplay and the guitarist Joe Satriani. A friend of mine posted a status update on Facebook congratulating Satriani on winning the Grammy for Song of the Year. Being a guitar child of the 80’s, I was shocked and kind of elated at the prospect of Joe Satriani winning song of the year in 2009. However, it was explained to me that Satriani is suing Coldplay for plagiarizing their song “Viva la Vida” from Satriani’s “If I Could Fly“. I was linked to a really great, in-depth analysis of the two tunes done by guitarist Andrew Wasson, and I think Coldplay is in big trouble. If there is any justice, Satriani will win his lawsuit hands down. Here are the videos Andrew posted.

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The first thing was an announcement of an article that I appeared in:

There’s a new feature in the classical guitar magazine Soundboard this month (Volume 33, 2007). The magazine is published by the Guitar Foundation of America. There is a little about me, and they have also published my first guitar etude. Classical guitarists - please check it out!

Audio: Etude No. 1 for Classical Guitar:

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Juventas, a young new music ensemble based in Boston, is once again performing one of my pieces. This group of talented performers and composers have been very good to me and my music, having performed il dolce stile nuovo and Sonata 46 in the past. This time, they will be performing my fast and furious flute and piano duo Cerulean Soliloquy. Performances will take place on Saturday, February 28 at 8pm at The Boston Conservatory’s Seully Hall and Monday, March 3 at 7:30pm at Eastern Nazarene College’s Musica Eclectica Concert Series in Quincy, MA.

Audio: Cerulean Soliloquy

Many of you who know me well well know that I am a huge nerd. One of the nerdy things I love, and have always loved is video games. Even as a kid, I would spend hours programming games in BASIC on my TI99/4A computer, and then leave the computer on all night because, as I never had a hard drive, as soon as I shut the computer off, the game would be gone. Before that I had the Atari 2600 - after the TI99 I had a Commodore 64, then an Amiga and finally a PC - all of these systems were for one primary purpose - playing games.

My life obviously took a different turn as a musician and composer, but I still have a passion for games, my current passion being World of Warcraft, the MMORPG (and for those not hip enough to know, that means Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game - gah) that was developed by Blizzard Entertainment and released in November, 2004.

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This is genius…

I would totally go see this. Why is it that the one scene where Khan puts the slug things in their ears made the biggest impact on everyone who saw it?