Featured composers series


Like Topsy, this series just sort of grew. Very early on, I did a program on Pierre Boulez without any intention that it would be part of a regular series. However, at about the time the speculative fiction/experimental music series was meeting its demise, I had already thought up and scheduled two more composer-centered programs, and so it occurred to me that perhaps that could be the making of a new series. Because the first Ligeti program kept getting rescheduled, it took a little while for me to nail down what the schedule for such a series might be; but I finally decided that -- as of March 2001 -- the featured composer series would run on the fourth Thursday morning of every odd-numbered month, more or less in perpetuity. I started numbering the programs from the point at which I started thinking of them as a series, but did also go back and renumber the Boulez program as "part 0" so as to treat it as a kind of ancestor to the series.

As of the beginning of 2003, the Featured composers series per se will cease to exist. There will definitely still be programs featuring individual composers, but I will no longer schedule them according to any recurring pattern, such as described above -- and to my mind, that means there is no longer a "series". (Programs centered on specific composers will still be grouped together in the appropriate section of the page that lists installments of Prisms by theme.) I decided to end the series because of a general rethinking of the Prisms format that culminated while the program was on hiatus in August and September 2002 -- essentially, I wanted to retain the Prisms format while making it more flexible, and consistently holding open specific dates increasingly seemed to be working against other goals, such as the ability to schedule guests on short notice, whip together programs in response to current events, or decide that my Featured Composer program on So-and-so could use another week's work before putting it on the air.

After the hiatus, I did go ahead and do one more Featured Composer program according to the pattern, both because I already had it in mind as an overlap with the Harnessings of the Sacred limited series that I wanted to finish up, as well as to give the series one last fond go. But henceforth, I will only schedule programs centered on specific composers in an opportunistic manner.

The following programs were, in one way or another, part of the Featured composers series: