Meet the Composer

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Building on a long-standing collaborative relationship, Marcos Balter wrote Intercepting a Shivery Light for the Anubis Quartet, a saxophone ensemble, in 2012. The piece's title is an anagram for Everything in its Right Place, a Radiohead song, which Marcos admits is an important song for him "and many members of [his] generation."

For Marcos Balter, stellar composition requires the dedicated, daily practice of an athlete. He doesn't think it possible to unearth and hone brilliant musical ideas without slogging through a whole bunch of failures along the way, nor does he believe that the compositional demigods we revere so highly – Bach, Beethoven, Mozart – birthed only masterpieces. He worries too many creatives get tongue-tied attempting consistent genius, and that their work suffers for it. Marcos has learned to embrace failure, and that these failures can lead to incredible breakthroughs.

In 2012, the Grammy award-winning Brooklyn Youth Chorus commissioned the the future Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Caroline Shaw to write a new work for their upcoming Benjamin Britten centenary celebration concert at Carnegie Hall. The result, "Its Motion Keeps," is a swirling piece for SSA choir and viola that employs at once the familiar (repetitive, calming ostinati) with the strange (extended techniques, clashing dissonance).

Caroline Shaw began her love affair with music at the age of two, when her mom started teaching her violin. Throughout her childhood, Caroline had a lesson every Wednesday afternoon, and sang and played in school and at music camps, falling for chamber music by Mozart and Clara Schumann. Caroline always made things; when she was bowled over by a Brahms sonata, she'd try and figure out how to construct her own sonatas. As a young adult, she continued on a rigorous, violin-centric path, earning both undergrad and masters degrees in violin performance from Rice University and the the Yale School of Music.

In 1844, Asenath Nicholson, a school teacher, reformer and proprietor of an all-vegetarian boarding house in New York City, travelled to Ireland to "personally investigate the condition of the Irish poor." Upon her arrival, she saw the beginnings of the Great Famine, a seven-year period of mass starvation and disease in which it is estimated over one million people died and a million more emigrated from Ireland. Nicholson's writings and first-hand observations from the time are stitched together to form the narrative backdrop of The Hunger, a multi-media opera by Donnacha Dennehy.

Donnacha Dennehy is an Irish composer who thought he was going to study with spectral icon Gérard Grisey in Paris. When he showed up, however, it was apparent that Grisey had accepted him into his study under the mistaken notion that he was not, in fact, a gentleman but a lady.

A bit put off by Grisey's visible disappointment with his gender, as well as the strikingly uninteresting uniformity in the style of his students work, Donnacha headed to Amsterdam, where he met Louis Andriessen, who changed his life. Donnacha's music fuses the old (sean-nós and other Irish styles) and the new (just intonation, pulse-based textures) to create something all his own. It's a music that is at once satisfying and supremely strange.

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About the podcast:

Meet the Composer is a Peabody Award-winning podcast that takes listeners into the minds and creative processes of the composers making some of the most innovative, compelling, and breathtakingly beautiful music today.

Follow Meet the Composer on Twitter: @MeettheComposer
Like Meet the Composer on Facebook: www.facebook.com/meetthecomposer

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Q2 Music is WQXR, New York's multi-platform home for dynamic modern music. Discover countless new artists via our 24/7 music stream – hand-crafted daily to reward your curiosity – and surprise your imagination with a world of exhilarating new music.

Produced by Q2 Music. www.q2music.org
Follow Q2 Music on Twitter: @Q2Music
Like Q2 Music on Facebook: www.facebook.com/q2music

Andrew Norman was a well-feted kid composer, a precocious pre-adolescent who wrote works with grand, filmic gestures for his middle school orchestra and had the local newspapers filling their style sections with profiles invoking Mozart. Then he went to college.

All of a sudden, Norman's musical world exponentially widened; he was exposed to styles and practices so far outside of his previous experience that he stopped composing altogether. How could he write what he had been writing in a world rich with Lachenmanns, Xenakises and Carters, who were manipulating, torquing and stifling sound to create a whole different world of music? Norman almost left music entirely for architecture, but in flirting with this other career, he actually found his way back to composition, ultimately birthing a style that stunningly weds texture and drama in a unique and wonderful way.

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About the podcast:

Meet the Composer is a Peabody Award-winning podcast that takes listeners into the minds and creative processes of the composers making some of the most innovative, compelling, and breathtakingly beautiful music today.

Follow Meet the Composer on Twitter: @MeettheComposerLike Meet the Composer on Facebook: www.facebook.com/meetthecomposer

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Q2 Music is WQXR, New York's multi-platform home for dynamic modern music. Discover countless new artists via our 24/7 music stream – hand-crafted daily to reward your curiosity – and surprise your imagination with a world of exhilarating new music.

Produced by Q2 Music. www.q2music.orgFollow Q2 Music on Twitter: @Q2MusicLike Q2 Music on Facebook: www.facebook.com/q2music

Gordon Wright, the Alaskan composer, conductor, professor and environmentalist, was John Luther Adams's best friend. When he died suddenly in 2007, Adams wrote three pieces for solo violin titled Three High Places, vignettes representing moments Adams and Wright shared while camping. These pieces eventually led Adams to write his first string quartet, at age 59, called The Wind in High Places. In a process that Adams likens to "primitive man discovers fire," he approached the traditional music form in a way that felt true to his compositional identity. The entire work is built on natural harmonics and open strings, allowing an airy, breathy timbre.