Featured Composer: Martin Bresnick
Martin Bresnick's compositions, from opera, chamber and symphonic music to film scores and computer music, are performed throughout the world. Bresnick delights in reconciling the seemingly irreconcilable, bringing together repetitive gestures derived from minimalism with a harmonic palette that encompasses both highly chromatic sounds and more open, consonant harmonies and a raw power reminiscent of rock. At times his musical ideas spring from hardscrabble sources, often with a very real political import. But his compositions never descend into agitprop; one gains their meaning by the way the music itself unfolds, and always on its own terms.
Besides having received many prizes and commissions, the first Charles Ives Living Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, The Rome Prize, The Berlin Prize, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a Koussevitzky Commission, among many others, Martin Bresnick is also recognised as an influential teacher of composition. Students from every part of the globe and of virtually every musical inclination have been inspired by his critical encouragement.
Martin Bresnick's compositions are published by Carl Fischer Music Publishers, New York; Bote & Bock, Berlin; CommonMuse Music Publishers, New Haven; and have been recorded by Cantaloupe Records, New World Records, Albany Records, Bridge Records, Composers Recordings Incorporated, Centaur, Starkland Records and Artifact Music.
Martin Bresnick's new work And I Always Thought was premiered in PLEXUS: L'Invitation au Château on 1 May 2016 at Cranlana, Toorak.
And I Always Thought (2016)
And I Always Thought is a musical trope based on two poems of Bertolt Brecht - "And I Always Thought" and "Legend of the Unknown Soldier Beneath the Triumphal Arch". Though this composition consists only of "poems without words", it is the hope of the composer that an attentive listener might sense and follow it's lyric trajectory.
And I Always Thought was commissioned by, and is dedicated to PLEXUS – Philip Arkinstall (clarinet), Monica Curro (violin), and Stefan Cassomenos (piano).
– Martin Bresnick