Connor Koppin and Matthew Hohlman (Composers to which you should be listening 7)

As part of the new MusicSpoke project (follow us on Facebook and Twitter and Instagram), I have been talking to fabulous piles of composers. They are just lying around your cities and burbs organizing bits of sound for your listening pleasure.

Last week, I had the chance to chat with Connor Koppin. Check out his website here. Connor is a young and gifted composer. He has a wonderful sense of pacing in his music. I like so much that he allows an idea to develop without rushing ahead to the next thing too quickly. Composers are always balancing unity and diversity. Too much in one direction and the thing gets dull. Too much in the other and it breaks apart from lack of continuity. Go follow him on soundcloud and listen to this bit of beauty here. Also, he has a fun name to say.

I also had a chance to catch up with Matthew Hohlman. Check out his website here. Matthew is interested in all sorts of stuff. Matthew is another one of those composers that seems comfortable writing across several harmonic vocabularies and idioms. He can write concert music and film music. He can write tonal music and atonal music. A fun starting place is to go here and scroll down to the String Bass Quintet (!). Matthew also has a wonderfully sardonic wit, so if you ever have the chance to talk to him, do it. He had me cracking up the whole time we talked.