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NEWSDAY ARTICLE:

Gene Pritsker's Unconventional Music 
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Composer combines classical, hip-hop and heavy metal sounds
By Chuin-Wei Yap
STAFF WRITER
Newsday, Inc.
February 19, 2003
In one corner of composer Gene Pritsker's studio in his Manhattan apartment, nestled in a jumble of equipment and scores, stands a Fender Jimi Hendrix Voodoo Stratocaster guitar. It is an aficionado's instrument, and it takes a second look for a layman to understand its sly, seductive subversion."It's an upside-down Strat," Pritsker, 31, explained. "Jimi used to play a right-handed Strat, re-strung for a left-handed person. This is a left-handed-looking Strat made for a right-handed player."

Pritsker's music, like that guitar, is about groundbreaking hybrids. Imagine three bars of a Bach cantata twirling faintly behind a hip-hop grind or Motown grooves trailing into a Puccini aria. Then imagine the heavy metal Black Sabbath classic "Paranoid," scored for a full orchestra. This latest venture from Pritsker has won the collaboration of the Brooklyn Philharmonic Orchestra, which will deliver his composition as an encore at its American Lollapalooza festival Friday and Saturday.
Russian by origin, Pritsker labels himself a guitarist and rapper, but it is quickly apparent that these tags are a convenient concession. His appetite for marrying different sounds is insatiable. "Aesthetically, we should be able to appreciate music from any culture and genre," he said. "Stravinsky used jazz rhythms. Beethoven and Bach used drinking songs. Now it's all classical music. At that time, these were frat songs!"

The Brooklyn Philharmonic gig is far from Pritsker's debut. He's already had premieres of his compositions at Carnegie Hall and Athens Hall in Greece, as well as Sweden and Argentina. He plays in Manhattan clubs, like the Knitting Factory and Downtime, and has just completed a Canadian tour. But Pritsker never had it easy pushing his brand of music. He studied composition as an undergraduate at the Manhattan School of Music. The jazz and classical establishment there, locked in conservatism, had initially looked askance at Pritsker's work. One professor stormed out of a concert Pritsker held, and he was refused enrollment in the school's master's program. But Pritsker has his share of supporters at the school. "He's very gifted," said Giampaolo Bracali, a professor of classical composition there. "He was always a hard worker and very experimental. Those were the formative years."

Pritsker's music is not designed for easy listening or to melt into the background. It is insistent. It demands attention and curiosity. And it pays careful homage to the international roots it borrows from, down to the 12/8 African beats that he used for one piano and drum score.
Those more keenly attuned to new sounds recognize Pritsker's worth. "It's wicked, street-influenced New York, ahead of its time," said Kristjan Jarvi, conductor of the American Lollapalooza performance. "I'll approach performing Gene's arrangement like he does arranging it - as horror metal music, with an awesome groove."

Pritsker is no stranger to fording tough cultural boundaries. He grew up in a project in Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn. Then more than now, it was a quiltwork of gangs, Italians, Asians, Russians and blacks, among others. The high school he attended made the headlines for shoot- outs. "I know people who got shot. I got jumped a couple of times," he said. "You grow up with this, it makes you stronger. It makes you see the darker side of life, and if you're smart, you don't stick to it, you see beyond it."
His father, a jazz saxophonist, and his mother, a pianist, escaped to the United States from the Soviet Union in 1978. In those difficult days, both parents struggled to land well-paying jobs in New York. His father became a piano tuner, while his mother took a succession of odd jobs.

Pritsker speaks of his parents with pride, letting on that his father now plays in a big band comprising fellow Russian musician immigrants who gave up their first loves for non-musical jobs. The Pritskers got their son on the violin when he was 4. But by 12, he'd switched to the guitar, "because I wanted to play metal." By 17, he had figured out how to write his own music and was immersed in a heady froth of jazz, classical music, pop and rap.

His parents' support carried Pritsker to the corridors of Manhattan's uptown conservatory. But the man remains a Brooklyn thoroughbred. "Brooklyn was my childhood," he said. "It's where I got my skills. It's an important part of my life."
An avid reader who can have six books - from Descartes to Dickens to Buddhist texts - going at once, Pritsker often allows literature and philosophy to sneak into his work. One composition, "Cancer Ward," takes its title from Soviet dissident Alexander Solzhenitsyn's novel of the same name. The song's motif threads through a kaleidoscope of drumbeats, symbolizing cancer in Solzhenitsyn's protagonist.
Today, Pritsker's output is prodigious, with more than 230 compositions under his belt. The musical styles on each new song shift as quickly as Pritsker can absorb new influences. "I'm a big filter," said Pritsker. "My whole thing is about anti-labeling. I just don't want people to say that my music sounds like something else." 
Copyright (c) 2003, Newsday, Inc.

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Article in a newspaper in Kazan:
Gene Pritsker's Serenade for Clarinet and String Quartet, performed at the Festival "Europe-Asia 2005" by the Lumina String Quartet and clarinetist Philip Bashor is a serious composition where the expressive idiomatic clarinet line is a part of an alive, flowing stream of sound. This line is clearly distinguished on the canvas of the composition. Also impressive is a successful realization of form, which is not necessarily the case with some other composers, who while announcing a certain structure give us in fact something entirely different. Pritsker's music has one immediately distinctive feature, particularly for a European ear: its musical language is peculiarly American. First of all the energy, density of texture, rhythmic variety and drive, constant tonal harmonic and enharmonic exchanges, sometimes with great frequencies. Excluded are conventional ways of developing, instead, it is an unending flow of changes of melodic and polyphonic elements. Pritsker's fantasy is unending and all these various elements are logical and convincing. Even when the elements seem unrelated, still one almost immediately can see strong connection. Gene Pritsker managed to create a well-proportioned dynamic composition that strongly represents the American school.
- Writer and composer Oleg Lubivetz, Kazan 

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Article in The Music Connoisseur:
Composer/performer Gene Pritskers Poetic Subjects Eternal II for ensemble, presented at New York University's Frederick Loewe Theatre, off Washington Square, in New York City, on May 29, 2003, represents serious important work, employing the vernacular of our times, and fusing the best of that idiom with classical elements. What Pritsker is doing is using the technique of rap as a dynamic element of artistic creation. Performed by members of Mr. Pritskers eclectic hip-hop band: Sound Liberation, the series of poetic sound pieces were refreshing, exciting, in-your-face real, and the music tracks were like nothing this reviewer has ever heard before (totally fascinating) and, clearly, superior to and occupying a different level than what is commonly heard in rap genre pieces as one walks the streets of the city, rides its subways, or just tries to get some sleep as a boombox with wheels passes by ones bedroom window late at night. 
-John de Clef Piñeiro, The Music Connoisseur