Corey Dargel

Corey Dargel (born October 19, 1977, in McAllen, Texas) is a composer, lyricist, and singer of electronic art songs that "smartly and impishly blur the boundaries between contemporary classical idioms and pop" (New York Times).[1]

Career

Formally trained in music composition, Dargel studied with Pauline Oliveros, John Luther Adams, and Brenda Hutchinson, and received a B.M. from Oberlin.

According to Dargel, "The singer-songwriter approach to art song composition is a natural and refreshing alternative to the hegemony of traditional art song and operatic performance."[2] Dargel typically writes both words and music for all of his songs and, in his earlier compositions, he accompanies his own voice with a prepared electronic soundtrack. His debut album, Less Famous Than You, released in May 2006 on Use Your Teeth records, is clearly within the singer-songwriter tradition despite its incorporation of totalist rhythmic relationships. But his follow-up, Other People's Love Songs, released in 2008 on the contemporary classical label New Amsterdam Records, further blurs the lines between indie pop and the conceptual and post-minimalist conceits of downtown contemporary classical music.[3]

In May 2010, New Amsterdam released a follow-up, a 2-CD set entitled Someone Will Take Care of Me, which combines two song-cycles performed by Dargel with live musicians most usually associated with contemporary classical music performance: On Removable Parts, he is joined by pianist Kathleen Supové, and on Thirteen Near-Death Experiences he is joined by members of the International Contemporary Ensemble (ICE) and composer/drummer David T. Little. The instrumentation for these two cycles clearly references the classical song cycle tradition; the former voice and piano combination is the original instrumentation for 19th century romantic song cycles (e.g. Franz Schubert's Die schöne Müllerin, Robert Schumann's Dichterliebe, etc.), while the latter's small ensemble of flute, clarinet, violin, cello, and piano was introduced by Arnold Schoenberg for his 1912 song cycle Pierrot Lunaire and, with or without the addition of a percussionist, has become a ubiquitous ensemble for the performance of 20th and 21st century classical music and has been also used in countless vocal works including Peter Maxwell Davies's Eight Songs for a Mad King.

Dargel has also performed and recorded music by other composers, including Oliveros, Eve Beglarian, k. terumi shorb, Phil Kline, and Nick Brooke.

Discography

Studio albums
  • Less Famous Than You (Use Your Teeth, 2006)
  • Other People's Love Songs (New Amsterdam Records, 2008)
  • Someone Will Take Care of Me (New Amsterdam Records, 2010), with the International Contemporary Ensemble, Kathleen Supové and David T. Little
  • Last Words from Texas EP (Automatic Heartbreak, 2011)
  • OK It's Not OK (New Amsterdam Records, 2015)[4]

Compilations
  • Unreleased Songs (2001–2011) (Automatic Heartbreak, 2011)

References
  1. Tommasini, Anthony (September 17, 2005). "At the Mercantile Library, Contemporary Classical Performers Lean Perilously Close to Pop". New York Times. Retrieved February 4, 2010.
  2. Dargel, Corey (February 22, 2006). "More Song, Less Art(ifice): The New Breed of Art Song". NewMusicBox. Retrieved June 21, 2010.
  3. Sheridan, Molly (October 23, 2008). "Love connection". Time Out New York. Retrieved June 21, 2010.
  4. "Records". Corey Dargel. Retrieved June 13, 2020.


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