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Elodie Lauten in
Google and other search engines do not easily
locate the more recent articles about Elodie Lauten in the New York Times
database; oddly enough, some old reviews show up, but not the more significant
one from 1984 by Bernard Holland "New Music Can Be Easy on the Ear".
T his page attempts to remedy this technical
issue.
New York
Times Quotes about Elodie Lauten
"Elodie
Lauten’s music extracts order from chaos." Bernard Holland
"Elegiac
melodies...pungent and intriguing." Anthony Tommasini
"...
a longtime fixture of the the city's new music community." Bernard
Holland
"Lovely, effective and affecting... with clarity and directness..." Allan Kozinn
MUSIC REVIEW; A Libretto via Ginsberg Captures a City's Spirit
By ALLAN KOZINN
Published: June 6, 2001
Quote
Waking in New York'' is an opera without opera's attributes when it is
actually a lovely, effective and affecting example of something else:
a song cycle, for vocal ensemble and chamber orchestra. Ms. Lauten has
treated Ginsberg's poetry and its underlying spirit carefully, even reverently.
She tucked his personal and sometimes diarylike texts into her own agreeably
melodic and eclectic style, but she also appears to have listened carefully
for traces of the music that animated Ginsberg's soul. When she found
them, both in direct references and by implication, she incorporated them
into her settings in the form of blues melodies, the soulful wail of the
gospel singer, hints of jazz and the insistent rhythms and bright melodies
of pop music. Perhaps most crucially, she presented Ginsberg's texts with
clarity and directness, never obscuring his ideas or pacing for the sake
of a purely musical effect.
Review/Music; Cycle With Origins in India
By BERNARD HOLLAND
Published: December 17, 1993
Quote
Ms. Lauten has presented a cycle of 12 keys whose fundamental origin is
the tonic note of Indian music (our low C-sharp at 136 cycles per second,
not the concert hall's A = 440). The scales moreover are not major or
minor but mutations of European and Asian modes. Creating synthesized
sound out of an electronic keyboard, "The Gaia Cycle" offers the symmetry
of 12 five-minute sections. Layers are placed atop percussion lines, and
Ms. Lauten's keyboard playing noodles and decorates gracefully. Although
repetition is a major engine of this music -- bringing with it a peaceful
sense of stasis -- every section has its distinctive timbre, movement
and emotional quality. "The Gaia Cycle" seems less interested in creating
order than in finding order in natural processes. There is a certain serenity
in this kind of acceptance.
NEW MUSIC CAN BE EASY ON THE EAR E-MAIL
By BERNARD HOLLAND
Published: June 3, 1984
Quote
The most innovative new music now showing up on records is often the least
forbidding. ...Elodie Lauten, for example, is a French pianist living
in New York whose music straddles the concert hall and the worlds of pop
and jazz. Her ''Concerto for Piano and Orchestral Memory'' on the Cat
Collectors' label stands in diametric opposition to the dour, renunciatory
style of Ralph Shapey or Ben Johnston, whose music also appears on some
new record releases. Miss Lauten's harmonic combinations are familiar
- even well-worn - but it is the way they are used which makes them interesting.
Her concerto's eight movements seem to occupy a series of circular orbits
around which the music drifts. In Mr. Shapey's music, we feel order being
forcibly extracted from surrounding chaos. Miss Lauten, on the other hand,
acknowledges and accepts her chaotic world and seeks to burrow out a place
within it. There are repeated piano figures, sometimes lazy, sometimes
quite active, with constant small changes in accent and interval within
the patterns. Miss Lauten's ''orchestra'' consists of three strings, trombone
and processed tapes. It often drones in the background but at times joins
with sounds from everyday life - birds, beeping video games, sirens.
A Bit Off Key and Proud of It
By ANTHONY TOMMASINI
Published: May 21, 1997
Quote
A good example of what makes a microtonal piece microtonal was Elodie
Lauten's ''Discombobulations.'' Its musical materials were nothing special,
just some undulant repeated riffs for flute (Andrew Bolotowsky), specially
tuned guitar (Jon Catler) and synthesizer (Ms. Lauten), over which the
soprano Meredith Borden sang elegiac melodies in a stratospheric range.
But the performers are adept at playing between the standard pitches,
so the result was like some lilting minimalistic music that was slightly
off pitch in a pungent and intriguing way.
Quote
WAKING IN NEW YORK. This musical portrait of the beat poet Allen Ginsberg
is by Elodie Lauten, a longtime fixture in the city's new music community.
(Holland).
Quote
ARTS BRIEFING: HIGHLIGHTS; Opera: Works In Progress
Published: May 25, 2004
Thursday from 2 p.m. to 5:30, audiences can drop in and hear concert performances
with the City Opera orchestra and full casts of singers in excerpts of
works by the composers Tom Cipullo, Richard Danielpour, John Eaton, Jennifer
Griffith, Daniel Felsenfeld, Donald Hagar, Elodie Lauten and Adam Silverman.
(Tommasini )