aworks :: "new" american classical music

String Quartet No. 5 (1988). Gloria Coates /avow. cloirti/

Image by Tonyç via FlickrLife's a Pitch blogs about the post-post blog world. She specifically writes about Gramophone Magazine. What I didn't know was that their archives are now online. Let's see, a quick search for Gloria Coates turns up this review:

Much of this is to do with Coates' systematic employment of glissandos and microtones. The opening of Quartet No 5 (1988) uses diatonic material but half the quartet is tuned a quartertone higher. At first it's excruciating but then the separate tunings seem logical, like the different

Avow. CLoirti

GLORIA COATIS Sake/mm.4a tiorali rhythmic systems of T\Tancarrow's piano studies.

Fortunately, as a new music person, I'm used to finding the good stuff amidst the gibberish...

COATES, G.: String Quartets No...

String Quartet No. 8 (2002). Gloria Coates /current preoccupation/

Image by Tonyç via FlickrAlex V. Cook has a post about contemporary composers and his particular interest in string quartets. Related, I've been listening to the music of Gloria Coates for the last week and it's her string quartets that are the most provocative. This in turn led me to this Sequenza21 interview of the composer:

In 1962 in a graduate composition class I had written a string quartet entirely of glissandi. My professor became very upset and wrote on the piece, "A glissando is used once or twice in a piece for color, but the entire piece with glissandos is too...too...."

So far, her music sounds less like anything else I'm listening to but I don't know if this will be a lasting condition.