Composers keep score. That’s actually a pun, because “score” is a term for a piece of music when it’s written-out on paper. But composers do keep count and not just of beats. More often than not, they also keep a tally on how many times their music gets played each year.  That’s especially the case when it comes to orchestral performances, because if a conductor leads a full orchestra in your music then it means you’ve arrived. When it comes to living composers played by American orchestras, Jennifer Higdon is a leader of the pack.  Her orchestra piece “Blue Cathedral” was written...

In 1980 Darren K. Woods was a tenor in the chorus of the Houston Grand Opera with visions of heading to Broadway before starring in his own television sitcom. Fate and the music world had other things in store. Following recommendations of friends, he spent that summer in the young artists program at the Seagle Music Colony outside the little Adirondack village of Schroon Lake in Essex County about 90 miles north of Albany.  Founded in 1915 by renowned baritone Oscar Seagle, the colony has offered generations of young singers a haven to study and grow before venturing on to professional careers. ...

“Those gay composers sure write beautiful music.” Those were a friend’s first words to me during an intermission at a concert late this past spring at the Troy Savings Bank Music Hall.  He could have been speaking of so many different folks, such as the Americans Aaron Copland, Virgil Thomson, or Leonard Bernstein, to name just a few. Or from the classics there’s Tchaikovsky or Handel, for that matter.  But on this occasion the swooning was prompted by music of John Corigliano. We heard a fair amount of Corigliano this past season in Albany. There were works on two different programs...

It was back in 1994 that Sharon Isbin, the preeminent classical guitarist of today, first disclosed to the press that she was a lesbian.  The decision followed several years of agonizing over the possible implications, and the internal dialogue continued well after word was out. “Each time I would walk in a room I thought ‘they know,’” she told me a few years ago. “This deep echoy bass voice kept saying ‘they know.’” But if the public knew something, they seemed to approve.  That was certainly the message she got at her first New York concert after making the leap into full disclosure. “I...

Check the credits in fine print on recent projects by Bjork, Antony and the Johnsons, Rufus Wainwright and Philip Glass, among others, and you’ll find the name Nico Muhly.  Over the last couple of seasons he’s become the It Boy of contemporary music. But on his most recent project, Muhly’s distinctive name certainly isn’t buried among arrangers, conductors and musical assistants. He wrote and conducted the score to Stephen Daldry’s feature film “The Reader,” which stars Kate Winslet in an Academy Award wining performance. In addition to the soundtrack CD for “The Reader,” three...

The words “sound” and “art” taken together make a pretty good definition for music itself, but “sound art,” as a composite term, actually refers to a particular strain of creativity. Rather than the stringing together of notes on a printed score, as in traditional musical composition, sound art is more the shaping of sonic elements, usually with very high-tech tools or in some rather low-tech primitive manner. It’s something like sculpture made for the ears rather than the eyes. Lesbian composer Annea Lockwood is one of its most eloquent practitioners. Lockwood’s signature work...

It’s an old and kind of silly pastime among musicians of a certain stripe — to sit around and theorize about which instruments attract the most gay men. The topic came up a few years ago while talking with composer Ned Rorem, who had a typically confident deadpan answer: “All choir directors without exception are gay. No brass players, fewer tenors than you might think, 50 percent of baritones…” I hold that the gayest of instruments is the organ. The first gay man I remember as a child growing up in Texas was the organist at my Catholic church and elementary school....

Typical of a major conductor in our jet set age, Marin Alsop, who appears with the Philadelphia Orchestra at the Saratoga Performing Arts Center on Wednesday, has bases of operation located in a variety of far flung cities. First is Baltimore, where in September she begins her second year as the music director of the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra. With her 2005 appointment to the post she became the first female leader of a major American orchestra.  And there’s Santa Cruz, California, where she’s completing her 16th summer directing the Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music. Alsop also recently...

In 1988, accordionist and composer Pauline Oliveros made a recording with a trombone player and a percussionist inside a 2 million-gallon empty cistern buried 14 feet below ground at Fort Worden, near Port Townsend, Wash. The resulting CD on New Albion Records was titled “Deep Listening,” a play on the unusual location and also an apt description of the trio’s meditative and reverberant improvisations. Soon thereafter, Oliveros realized “Deep Listening” more broadly described the aesthetic approach to contemporary music she had been pursuing for 30 years. While it...

At last month’s Champaign on the Park, the annual fundraiser for the Lark Street Business Improvement District, Michael Weidrich did something of a runway turn on the stage. First, he was presented with an award for his work as founder of First Fridays, the successful gallery night based primarily in the Center Square neighborhood.  Moments later he returned to the stage having just been re-introduced as the new executive director of the BID. Though duties in his new post are varied, from working with street cleaning crews to organizing restaurant nights, Weidrich’s immediate attention has...