Harold Meltzer's Doria Pamphili
coming soon on Parma Records
Doria Pamphili 2007, revised 2015
First performance was in Istanbul in 2013, before the revision.
Harold Meltzer's music is always pure, absolute music, and nevertheless, he often has titles that draw our attention to his interest in architecture. Doria Pamphili likely refers to the Villa Doria Pamphili--the palace and park near Rome.
Bio
Harold Meltzer is inspired by a wide variety of stimuli, from architectural spaces to postmodern fairy tales and messages inscribed in fortune cookies. In Fanfare Magazine, Robert Carl commented that he “seems to write pieces of scrupulous craft and exceptional freshness, which makes each seem like an important contribution.” The first recording devoted to his music, released in 2010 on Naxos, was named one of the CDs of the year in The New York Times; the third recording—Songs and Structures, released in November 2018 on Bridge Records, made The New York Times list of the top 25 tracks of the year and in voix des arts was named the best contemporary music recording of 2018. And the second recording, released late in 2017 on Open G Records, elicited the most praise: an “enchanting and unpredictable release” (San Francisco Chronicle); “thrives on ample invention and an astute sense of color (The Wall Street Journal); “summoning up sounds from his ensemble that seem nearly impossible” (American Record Guide); “a composer fully in charge of his powers, and in his prime” (Fanfare Magazine).
A Pulitzer Prize Finalist in 2009 for his sextet Brion, Harold has been awarded the Rome Prize, the Barlow Prize, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and both the Arts and Letters Award in Music and the Charles Ives Fellowship from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Commissions in recent years have issued from the Los Angeles Philharmonic, Pittsburgh Symphony, Orpheus Chamber Orchestra, the Fromm and Koussevitzky Music Foundations, New Music USA, the Library of Congress, Boston Chamber Music Society, Concert Artists Guild, the ASCAP Foundation for the New York Festival of Song, and the Brooklyn Art Song Society. Founder and co-director for fifteen years of the new music ensemble Sequitur, Meltzer lives in the East Village of Manhattan. Upcoming projects include a Piano Concerto for Sara Laimon and the Boston Modern Orchestra Project, a duet for countertenor Anthony Roth Costanzo and tenor Paul Appleby of the American Modern Opera Company, and a full-evening cantata for The Crossing and Sandbox Percussion.
William Anderson
I compose, play plucked instruments, run ensembles, produce concerts, and advocate for new music, I soaked up contemporary American music for 30 years, working directly with composers from all over the map. In the last 20 years I began composing works that draw on that experience, with a particular concern for finding a coherent way to make reconciling musics that were sealed off from one another. How to make embarrassingly simple and charming music work with the most complex musical modalities? Tipping in this direction has made me aware of the dangers of grasping too firmly onto any one notion.
I've come to Macherey's vision that our shadow (what we're *not*) is radiantly present in our work. So it's perfectly reasonable to *love everything*. We're imbricated. --
**The true necessity of the text manifests itself in the fact that not a word of it can be changed and nothing can be added, even though it appears at each moment as though a new topic could be chosen, an alternative narrative selected. But it is precisely this ceaseless shadowy presence of other possible phrases which could be pronounced, this ineradicable sense that things could have been other than they are, which enforces the constraining necessity of the text we actually have before us.**--Macherey