Ann Southam

[andyleedma]

Thought I'd drop by and make a plug for Ann Southam's music. I've seen postings about her here before, but I thought it might be nice to give a few more suggestions as to repertoire as I've played/read-through a lot of her music now.

She's a Canadian composer that passed away last year and her piano music is really quite stunning. Sometimes she employs a mixture of twelve-tone and minimalism, like in Simple Lines of Enquiry (https://www.amazon.com/Simple-Lines-of-Enquiry/dp/B002CR1FDA), and others it's a beautiful, sort of postminimalist style like in Glass Houses Revisited (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3TTY-ybM3rQ). You can order and even borrow a lot of her scores through the Canadian Music Centre (https://www.musiccentre.ca/apps/index.cfm?fuseaction=composer.FA_dsp_biography&authpeopleid=435&by=S), and if you register on the site you can listen to TONS of archival recordings. I should also add that everyone I've dealt with at the CMC has gone out of their way to be helpful. There are some great people working there, and no, I get nothing in promoting their organization.

Yes, I'm biased as I just completed a recording project of her music, but I really do think more people should be looking into her scores. Pieces that I'd recommend, in addition to those mentioned are:
Soundings for a New Piano (streamed here https://bit.ly/noVr7S)
Qualities of Consonance
Rivers (3 sets)
Soundstill

Most of these are hand-engraved, but once I got used to her handwriting, I found I preferred those scores to the computer-engraved ones.

Enjoy!

[nanabush]

Out of curiosity, I rented the 'Glass Houses' for a few weeks from the Canadian Music Center.  They are really cool sounding, but I could not even touch them.  That is the peak of rhythmic difficulty in anything I've ever seen (in a piece that also sounds nice too!).  One of those things that works well hands separately, but the shift in meters at different times is mind boggling like some of the stuff you'd see in the Ligeti Etudes.

The Glass Houses #5 is really a stunning piece.

[andyleedma]

That's interesting. I haven't seen the score to Glass Houses, and I'll be curious what the CMC will be doing now that Christina Petrowska Quilico has made those revisions with Glass Houses Revisited. I'd be really curious to see those scores.