Many thanks to David Schwartz for posting another one of his priceless composer interviews from his vaults, this time a 1976 conversation with Leonard Rosenman (who had recently won an Oscar for Barry Lyndon, pictured above):
I haven’t heard it yet—but Lenny didn’t really have a filter, so it should be fun.
Minor rant.
For how much Rosenman prided himself on his concert work and cutting-edge musical style, so much of his output (like the referenced Duo for Violin and Piano) is so stereotypical of mid-20th-century serialism and other modernist techniques that it, ironically, just comes across as horribly ephemeral and even passé by contemporary standards. As much as one can admire Elliott Carter, Pierre Boulez, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Charles Wuorinen, etc., whose works might have well been scripture among a few zealous academics and fanatical modernist devotees, who actually listens to this stuff anymore? While that vocal minority was busy canonizing this style as the only good new music, the classical audiences who weren't chased away entirely were far more interested in hearing…