Author: Douglas McLennan

Gustav Holst had four years to add a Pluto movement to his suite “The Planets” before he died. He didn’t do it, of course, and the suite has never suffered in popularity for it. Now the Halle Orchestra will premiere a “Pluto” movement, newly composed by Collin Matthews, and some are asking if it’s just a publicity stunt. In fact, a bit of a mini-trend is brewing in finishing dead composers’ works. – The Scotsman

• Composer dedicates “Pluto” to Holst’s daughter: “I suspect she would have been both amused and dismayed by this venture,” says Matthews. – BBC 03/17/00

The “most famous record store in the world” is closing. HMV’s Oxford Street store, for almost 80 years at the center of the retail recording business, is calling it quits – and with it a lot of history fades away. – London Times

Composer Frederick Stocken is no fan of Pierre Boulez. Stocken acknowledges that Boulez was a revolutionary in his younger days, fighting to throw off the repression of tonality. But as the 20th Century progressed, “it was the old story of the revolutionaries becoming as repressive as the masters they had sought to overthrow. In the musical world, the Young Turks became a powerful, “anti-establishment” establishment in which all that was subversive was acceptable and anything deemed traditional was banned. Far from fulfilling its emancipatory promise, atonality became just another dogma, an “official” art. If the parallels between communism and modernism have any truth, how is it that the Marx-influenced aesthetic of Boulez did not collapse with the downfall of communism?” – New Statesman