Month: June 2010

So where’s Meryl?

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Yes, Meryl Streep was at the American Academy of Arts and Letters Ceremonial week before last, being inducted as an honorary member. But somehow she didn’t get into the following pictures, so you will have to be satisfied with a bunch of composers.

L to R: James Primosch, Steven Stucky, Ellen Taafe Zwilich, Pierre Jalbert, Shulamit Ran, Daniel Asia, David Felder, Barbara Petersen of BMI

L to R: David Felder, Daniel Asia, James Primosch

New music trivia buffs will have noted that all the composers in these pictures are published by the Theodore Presser Company - so thank you to Judith Ilika, head of promotion at Presser, for wielding the camera.

Fleming’s composers

jamesprimosch4 Comments

The New York Times has now devoted three articles (1, 2, 3) to the “controversial” Renée Fleming “indie rock” album. (Whew, gotta be careful, I might use up my monthly irony quotes quota on the first day of the month.) Why this record deserves so many column inches is a mystery. (Surely there were albums by composers of “non-pop” released in the last month that deserve to be mentioned in the Times.) Who cares if Fleming has done a pop album? She is a superb artist of historic stature, I’m sure the new record is fine. Isn’t what she has not done more strange, and disturbing: she has not recorded an album of music by living composers of concert music - apart from the opera André Previn wrote for her? (And why was that piece - oh, never mind.) If she really idolizes the late Jan de Gaetani, as she seems to in her book, then why doesn’t she emulate her? Why not a disc with Fleming doing something by Crumb, or Harbison? Why not something new by a composer of her own generation? Why is Fleming doing Death Cab for Cutie considered interesting enough to occupy not just one but two Times critics over three articles, including two in the Sunday Arts and Leisure? Yet neither Fleming, nor her handlers, nor the Times consider the idea of her (not) doing the work of living composers of interest?