The Archive of Recorded Sound at Stan­ford Uni­ver­sity is delighted to announce that the Richard Max­field Col­lec­tion (ARS.0074) can now be lis­tened to online, via the collection’s find­ing aid on the Online Archive of Cal­i­for­niahttp://www.oac.cdlib.org/findaid/ark:/13030/kt6q2nf5jm/.

This col­lec­tion fea­tures nine dis­tinct works by the pio­neer­ing Amer­i­can elec­tronic music com­poser Richard Max­field, com­posed between 1959–1964, four of which are believed to be pre­vi­ously unpub­lished (Dromenom, Elec­tronic Sym­phony, Suite from Peri­pateia, and Wind). Addi­tion­ally, as Max­field fre­quently pro­duced unique edits of his work for each per­for­mance, many of the open tape reels that form this col­lec­tion include alter­na­tive edits to those pre­vi­ously pub­lished, such as the tapes for Amaz­ing Grace which fea­ture three dif­fer­ent ver­sions of the work.

You can read more about Max­field and this col­lec­tion on the Stan­ford Libraries Blog - http://library.stanford.edu/blogs/stanford-libraries-blog/2014/07/richard-maxfield-collection-now-streaming-online.

For the full story, please see Musi­cal Amer­ica.

“The very first peo­ple to hear or see any part of Brahms’s Fourth Sym­phony in 1885 had some sur­pris­ingly hereti­cal things to say about the piece. Brahms and a friend played through the sym­phony on the piano to a group of his clos­est con­fi­dants, crit­ics and col­lab­o­ra­tors, but the reac­tion was one of those dev­as­tat­ingly uncom­fort­able silences. Eduard Hanslick, Brahms’s crit­i­cal cham­pion, broke the uneasy atmos­phere after the first move­ment with the unfor­get­table com­ment, “I feel I’ve just been beaten up by two ter­ri­bly intel­li­gent peo­ple”. As Brahms’s biog­ra­pher Jan Swaf­ford reveals, another friend, the writer Max Kalbeck, turned up at Brahms’s apart­ment the next day to rec­om­mend that the com­poser should not release the piece to the pub­lic in its cur­rent form. Instead, he sug­gested, he should keep the finale as a stand-alone piece, and replace both the slow move­ment and the scherzo. Riven by self-doubt, Brahms was unsure that he would allow the piece to have any life beyond its pre­miere in Meinin­gen that Octo­ber. Only the work’s pos­i­tive recep­tion there, and the grad­ual, grudg­ing change in his friends’ atti­tude to the piece at its Vien­nese pre­miere, con­vinced Brahms that the Fourth Sym­phony could survive.”

For the full story, please see The Guardian.

“Today marks 100 years since was born — or, as the musi­cian might have put it, since he arrived on Earth. An influ­en­tial jazz com­poser, key­boardist and band­leader, Sun Ra always insisted he was just vis­it­ing this planet.”

For the full story, please see NPR.org.

“The clue’s in the title, surely: Janáček’s Sin­foni­etta is pre­cisely that; an orches­tral diver­tisse­ment and an occa­sional enter­tain­ment rather than an actual “sym­phony”. If you think that a piece that begins and ends with a pha­lanx of mil­i­tary fan­fares, per­formed by an addi­tional ensem­ble of 13 brass play­ers - includ­ing nine trum­pets – can’t pos­si­bly be taken seri­ously as one of the 20^th century’s most com­pelling sym­phonies, then look away now. But I’m here to make the case for Janâček’s work (one of his final mas­ter­pieces, pre­miered in 1926, two years before his death) as the prod­uct of a unique approach to sym­phonic form, for the 1920s – or indeed for any other time.”

For the full story, please see The Guardian.

“In 1944, Aaron Cop­land started work on his Third Sym­phony, com­mis­sioned by con­duc­tor Serge Kous­se­vit­sky and the Boston Sym­phony Orches­tra. What would end up becom­ing a piece that, in Copland’s words, would “reflect the euphoric spirit of the coun­try at the time” when it was pre­miered in 1946, started out with the less nation­al­ist but equally chal­leng­ing goal of pleas­ing Kous­se­vit­sky and the conductor’s lik­ing of “music in the grand man­ner” while remain­ing true to what had become Copland’s sig­na­ture style, music of the pop­ulist but sophis­ti­cated dar­ing of Appalachian Spring, Billy The Kid and Rodeo. ”

For the full story, please see The Guardian.

“Bach’s Pas­sion con­tin­ues to move audi­ences nearly three cen­turies after it was first heard in St. Thomas’s Church in Leipzig, Ger­many. Stand­ing as one of the pil­lars of West­ern sacred music, it is at once mon­u­men­tal and inti­mate, deeply sor­row­ful and powerful.”

For the full story, please see NPR.org.