Arthur Berger: Words for Music, Perhaps
BMOP/sound
1031
September 2013
Disc 1: 56:24
  • Boston Modern Orchestra Project
  • Gil Rose, conductor

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Track listing

Disc 1 
 Words for Music, Perhaps (Three Poems of Yeats)
1.I. Crazy Jane on the Day of Judgment
2.II. His Confidence
3.III. Girl’s Song
 Chamber Music for 13 Players
4.I. Variations
5.II. Fantasy
 Septet
6.I. Leggiero
7.II. Sostenuto
8.III. Moderato
 Diptych: Collage I and Collage II
9.I. Collage I
10.II. Collage II
 Collage III
11.I. Leggiero e flessibile
12.II. Gentile
13.III. Grazioso
14.IV. Cantabile
15.V. Tranquillo
16.VI. Amabile con moto
17.VII. Calmo
18.VIII. Poco
19.IX. Coda: Sostenuto
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News and Press

[CD Review] La Folia reviews Arthur Berger: Words for Music, Perhaps

BMOP expands the Berger discography with chamber music. The three Yeats poems require female voice plus trio of flute, clarinet and cello. Chamber Music and Septet make explicit their numbers. Berger’s notes reveal his struggles to forge an American serial style outside of Stravinsky’s influence. Chamber Music is one of the results of that development, an elegant combination which looks to Webern. Profoundly evident in these lucid works is Berger’s splendid handling of sonority.

La Folia Full review
[CD Review] Fanfare Magazine on Berger: Words for Music, Perhaps

As a graduate student I remember Arthur Berger's music being described in the halls as "white-note Webern." In fact, as Rodney Lister's notes clarify for me, it was Milton Babbitt, who, in a 1950 article, described the music as "diatonic Webern," a moniker that apparently stuck the same way to Berger as the notorious "Who Cares If You Listen?" stuck to Babbitt (incidentally not that composer's title).

Fanfare Magazine Full review
[CD Review] Arthur Berger: Words for Music, Perhaps on BMOP/sound

History is a relentless homogenizer. What begins life as a blooming, buzzing confusion, continuously evolving in manifold and unpredictable directions, once passed through the coarse sieve of history, becomes calcified, reified, downgraded from a vital, animate organism into an abject fossil. Time as one part petrification, one part putrefaction. Take the great late Renaissance polyphonists, Lassus, Palestrina, and Victoria.

I Care If You Listen Full review