Canyonlands to play cutting-edge compositions

Canyonlands New Music Ensemble, under the direction of Morris Rosenzweig, will present a concert Monday featuring music by some of the leading cutting-edge composers of the 20th and 21st centuries.

"They're all pretty interesting composers," Rosenzweig told the Deseret Morning News, "and this concert may be slightly more intensive than some of our concerts in the past."

On the program will be Tristan Murail's "Winter Fragments" and "Estuaire"; Milton Babbitt's "Phenomena"; Mario Davidovsky's "Capriccioso"; and Fred Lerdahls' "Fantasy Etudes."

"A lot of these pieces have a tremendous amount of compositional involvement, and most of them are virtuosic," Rosenzweig said. "But all of the music is very colorful."

Monday's concert will be centered around Murail's music, since he will be visiting the University of Utah this week as the current honoree of the school's Maurice Abravanel Visiting Distinguished Composers Series.

Even among contemporary music devotees, Murail is hardly a household name. "He teaches at Columbia, and he and Fred are colleagues there," Rosenzweig said. "Tristan is a very prominent composer, but he has made his career more in Europe than in America."

As a composer, the French-born Murail has been influenced by two of the most important composers of the 20th century — Gyorgy Ligeti and Olivier Messiaen.

Murail was drawn to Ligeti's emphasis on creating masses of sound, rather than focusing on individual notes, in such seminal early works as "Atmospheres" and "Lontano." From this Murail developed his compositional concept of "spectral" music. "Murail and spectral are interchangeable," Rosenzweig said. "What he has done for most of his career is to explore the coloristic possibilities of sound in a very studied way. That's not to say his music isn't musical. It is. The music itself is very interesting."

Rosenzweig explains what lies at the basis of Murail's compositional technique this way: "If you could colorize an object with a certain hue or color or shading, that's what happens in his music. He colorizes sounds."

French composers from the time of the impressionists have been fascinated by exploring color, and Murail is but the most current link in that long tradition. "Debussy, Ravel and Messiaen, just to mention a few composers, have emphasized the coloristic possibilities of sound," Rosenzweig said. "And Tristan is just continuing that French tradition where color is an integral aspect of writing music."