Alvin Singleton
Music of Alvin Singleton on PSNY (Project Schott New York):
Alvin Singleton
has been one of the leading compositional voices in America since the
1960s, as a member of a cohort of American composers who fused the
inheritance of European Modernism with a unique style of American
individualism. Raised in Brooklyn and trained at Yale, Singleton resided
in Europe for most of the 1970s, returning to become the
composer-in-residence at the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra in 1985, and has
since become an acclaimed American composer. For the first time, a selection of Singleton's music is now available for immediate download via PSNY.
Though
Singleton has worked extensively with orchestras, he has also written
works for chamber ensembles, theatrical pieces, and vocal ensembles. Two
early works from 1966—Mutations for solo piano, and Epitaph for
double SATB chorus—show Singleton's own unique take on the
transformations of melodic material, nodding toward the Serialist
tradition but going his decidedly own way.
(Singleton composing in his Atlanta studio, late 1980's)
In the 1970s, Singleton's writing for solo performers and small chamber groups pushed on that tradition even further: 1974's Be Natural,
for any trio of bowed string instruments, includes ludic and
improvisational elements that emphasize the creativity inherent in
musical performance, and 1978's Argoru IV is
a fiendishly difficult piece for solo viola, meticulously notating
music to the point of it sounding improvisatory during performance. Both
pieces were recently performed as part of a portrait concert at
Brooklyn's Roulette — check out a video of Be Natural from that concert, below:
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