Welcome to Nowhere

I am nowhere man. If you are here you are indeed nowhere. The music in this collection has nothing in common,
other than the fact it comes right out of nowhere.

Monday, July 6, 2015

Wallingford Riegger - Music for Brass Choir


















Wallingford Riegger was a consummate craftsman, deploying every note with precision and care. Music for Brass Choir, although completed later in his career (1949), exhibits the vitality that was his trademark:





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Wallingford Constantin Riegger was a fascinating and prickly figure in the history of American music. Although Riegger has been unfairly marginalized, works like his Music for Brass Choir, Study in Sonority, and Dichotomy remain powerful and uncompromising pieces. Making use of serial techniques before it later was the vogue in academia, Riegger's twelve-tone compositions were quintessentially American in their aggressiveness and rhythmic drive...a far different sound than the dry atomistic serialism of the fifties and sixties. It was Riegger's misfortune to have composed in a style that doesn't appeal to today's musical tastemakers.

He was born in Albany, Georgia in 1885. He learned the violin and the cello as a child and in 1904 went up to Cornell University but the following year transferred to the Institute of Music and Art, later known as the Juillard School. Between 1907 and 1910 he was in Munich and Berlin continuing his studies. He made his conducting debut with the Blüthner Symphony Orchestra in 1910. On his return to America he earned his living as a cellist in the St Pauls Symphony Orchestra in Minnesota. Surprising he returned to Germany from 1913-17 when the Great War was in progress. Here he conducted several opera and symphony concerts.

The circumstances of Riegger's death were as unusual as his life and music. While walking on a New York street one day in 1961, he became entangled in the leads of several dogs who had escaped from their master. The resulting fall resulted in brain injury and death soon after. 





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