“All the Rage … a solo violin work written in recent weeks by Philadelphia composer David Serkin Ludwig, a Curtis Institute faculty member … is just one of the 40-and-counting short pieces for unaccompanied violin that Jennifer Koh has commissioned in recent weeks,” writes David Patrick Stearns in Sunday’s (5/17) Philadelphia Inquirer. Koh is premiering the new works “in her weekly Facebook Live programs…. Other performers, institutions, and foundations—from the Guggenheim Museum to the New Jersey Symphony Orchestra—have been commissioning and performing pieces in response to the COVID-19 crisis…. Taken together, these direct artistic responses are the classical soundscape of the pandemic…. Composer/pianist Conrad Tao, one of 30-plus Guggenheim-commissioned artists, created the music video What I’ve Been Doing, riffing on ‘the drip of my leaky ceiling; the tone of running water hitting a drain … the rustling of a low-density polyethylene plastic bag.’ …Composer Missy Mazzoli, concerning her Koh piece Hail, Horrors, Hail (quoted from Paradise Lost), says, ‘The pause has forced me in a good way to try something totally new.’ The piece [features] themes repeated in ways that become obsessive and hysterical. Koh isn’t asked to scream: Mazzoli does it for her.”
Change font size
