Caitlin Smith is a Canadian composer living in Vienna. She studied jazz music and composition in Toronto and New York. She writes fully-composed music, as well as working with improvisers. She writes about contemporary music for I Care If You Listen. Her website is here.
György Ligeti’s Concert Românesc was banned by the Soviet government for the crime of getting too fancy with colouring on dominant chords. Though by no means overly dissonant, especially as compared to Ligeti’s later works, the last few minutes of this work do become ever so slightly crunchy.
The great jazz composer Bob Brookmeyer used to instruct his students that they should never write a solo section in their composition until it was absolutely inevitable that a solo should take place.
Jean Sibelius is purported to have written part of his Symphony no. 5 after having witnessed a large flock of swans take flight from his home in rural Finland. Whether this story is apocryphal or not, the “swan theme” has become part of the Western musical subconscious, with quotations showing up in jazz and pop music for much of the last century.
