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...

“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...

Perhaps it’s all because of his iconic name but composer John Adams has a knack for making headline works, pieces that become the talk of a season. With a title like “Nixon in China,” his first opera was guaranteed to garner attention back in 1987. It didn’t hurt that the work itself was colorful, humorous and insightful.Adams has continued in the so-called CNN-school of American opera with “The...

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...

The late great gay poet Alan Ginsberg channeled a ferocious anger and fear over nuclear proliferation into his 1978 epic poem “Plutonian Ode.” Composer Philip Glass, who was a friend and East Village neighbor of Ginsberg, responds with a similar urgency in his Symphony No. 6 “Plutonian Ode,” a mercurial score that’s nearly an hour-long (Orange Mountain Music). Soprano Lauren Flanigan gives the searing vocal part...

On the morning of 9/11 from his Greenwich Village apartment, David Del Tredici could hear the sirens — and their unsettling sound opens his newest work “Paul Revere’s Ride.” Patriotism may have led Del Tredici to the famous Longfellow poem (“Listen my children and you shall hear…”), but his grand and colorful setting for soprano, chorus and orchestra is more fantasy than jingoism. It receives a thrilling,...

It would be easy to say that 14 years after the death of Leonard Bernstein, the legendary American composer, conductor and educator casts a long shadow.  But sunsets, darkness and shadows are just not the right metaphors.  Bernstein is still a star, and his glowing light seems stronger than ever. Some evidence: Almost 50 years after its premiere, “West Side Story” receives an average of 300 productions a year...

In the 10 years since classical guitarist Sharon Isbin came out publicly as a lesbian, she’s won a Grammy Award, and has had one recording after another hit the Billboard charts. So much for the dangers of living an open life. Isbin has become the preeminent classical guitarist of our time on her own terms – by studying Bach but also embracing world music, and by commissioning some of today’s most adventuresome composers...

The increasing longevity of humans has advantages for composers. Because the music world gets obsessed with birthdays and anniversaries, composers who make it to age 70 and beyond can expect tribute concerts at least every five years, and heightened attention to their music in general. Performers and audiences are led to think, “There’s a living master in our midst we best pay attention.” Two who fit that bill are...

The Dixie Chicks should take heart. Although they have had their songs dropped from radio stations and been booed at awards shows because of their statements against President Bush, a fellow Texan, they are not alone in the annals of American music for being shunned because of their politics. In his day, the great American composer Aaron Copland (1900-1990) also faced the difficulties of being a politically engaged artist. In...