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

Check out our highly acclaimed Arthur Berger: Words for Music, Perhaps

Return to the full catalog

Buy recording

CD price: 16.99

Track listing

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