I finished my doctoral courses at Northwestern in spring of 1981. The summer found me lounging around in my apartment, drinking vodka tonics in the afternoon and taking down phone numbers from truck-driving schools and bartending schools, as advertised during Leave It to Beaver reruns. In the middle of this, the phone rang, and my composition teacher Peter Gena asked, “Do you want a job?” Peter had taken on the temporary directorship (with Alene Valkanas) of the New Music America festival, which moved from city to city. It had started in … [Read more...]

This article by Roy Rivenburg in the LA Times suggests that digital technology is gradually making the world quieter, to an extent that makes movie sound effects engineers rethink the way they give audio cues in soundtracks: Electronic cash registers eliminated the ka-ching of their ancestors; digital cameras erased the traditional shutter-click and advancing-film noises of their predecessors; PowerPoint presentations chased away the clunks and whirs of slide projectors. The lifespan of sounds seems to be shrinking, Valentino said: "We sent … [Read more...]

Merry Christmas: I updated my Postclassic Radio playlist on Christmas Eve - strikes me as kind of a festive activity - for the first time in awhile. Putting new pieces on the station is a cinch, but keeping the playlist current turns out to be the tedious part. I'm streamlining the process to make it easier. Anyway, I recently got access to an old box of cassette tapes that's been in storage for ten months, and it's a cornucopia of new music mostly from the 1980s that never got commercially released: works by Todd Levin, Bunita Marcus, Maria De … [Read more...]

Speaking of music in which nothing happens, I got a superb new NAD amplifier yesterday, and today I gave it what may be one of the supreme stereo system tests: I played Eliane Radigue's Adnos I. This tape work from the late '70s by a reclusive French composer of almost mystical reputation (released a couple of years ago on Table of the Elements) is a gorgeous continuum of analogue electronic tones, changing in slow and subtle ways. The texture is extremely rich, with pulsing tones going in and out of tune in the bass and a layer of ringing … [Read more...]

My complaint about people who listen to new music and automatically respond, “I know a rock group sounds just like that!” brought an excellent anecdote from a reader who said that it reminds me of an exchange I heard while auditing [Fred] Frith's composition class at Mills; he'd play examples of various music and ask students whether the music was “rock” or “classical.” He played the beginning of Tony Conrad & Faust's Outside the Dream Syndicate, (monolithic 2/4 bass & drum stomp). Girl instantly says aloud, “rock.” Frith says … [Read more...]

I’ve returned from the dead - the dead of semester-end academia, when one’s life is no longer one’s own. A friend wrote to tell me that my blog fans are near suicide, and while I don’t flatter myself that such is even metaphorically the case, I can take a hint. The last day of class the students played their compositions (it’s a theory class - harmonic correctness is required, creativity isn’t). Then they, not unreasonably, demanded that I play something of my own. So I complied with the one piece of my own I can play on short … [Read more...]

I've been absent because of school duties and computer problems. (When I moved from a 4GB computer to a 40GB, I laughed at the idea of ever filling it up - now I'm realizing it's too small to play fast and loose with aiff audio files the way I need to.) But I stumbled across a cache of my rare cassettes, and I've put up some recordings on Postclassic Radio that you'd have a hell of a time finding anywhere else. One is the sole work by Conlon Nancarrow that isn't commercially recorded: his Trio No. 2 of 1990, for oboe, bassoon, and piano, close … [Read more...]

An article in The Guardian linked from Arts Journal suggests that, since the best-selling albums do not match up to critics' top-ten choices, the public clearly pays no attention to music criticism, which is thereby demonstrated to have become irrelevant. The obvious retort to this was published decades ago by Virgil Thomson, and since Googling it produces no results, it seems advisable to trot it out again here: "Music criticism may be unnecessary. It is certainly inefficient. But it is the only antidote we have to paid publicity." The fact … [Read more...]

Hey, it's December, and Postclassic Radio's composer of the month is Mikel Rouse! Tonight at Walter Reade Theater in New York City I'll be receiving my ASCAP Deems Taylor Award for the station, along with Robin Cox of Iridian Radio. I told ASCAP that the station was Robin's idea and I stole it from him, and that he should get the award alone, but they split it between us. It confirms what I've said all my life: you don't get the things you deserve, but you get other things you don't deserve instead, so it evens out. In college I got C's in the … [Read more...]

This article by Mel Gilles is the most solid advice for the Democrats and the Democratic party I've seen. … [Read more...]

The music classroom of the future, they say, will possess a computer on which the professor can scroll through a menu and select any significant piece from the history of music, click on it, and have it immediately heard over the classroom sound system. I forget who “they” are, or where I heard or read this, or who was supposed to upload the utopian CD collection, nor do I yet know of anyone living in this fantasy world. The technology is there and would be easy to install, but my department isn’t putting the money into it yet, nor is … [Read more...]

Having just had performances in San Francisco and Berkeley, I then had one in Seattle, and have one coming up in Pasadena on November 19. I meant to tell you about the one in Seattle, but I thought it was on Nov. 17 and I just noticed that it was Nov. 12. Anyway, the Seattle Chamber Players played a one-minute quartet that they asked me to write, in a series of such brief works to celebrate their 15th anniversary. So I decided the piece should be in four movements, and called it Minute Symphony. I haven’t heard how it went. Anyone hear … [Read more...]

This is too good not to spread around. I found it here first, but it's scattered around the internet: When a candidate for public office faces the voters he does not face men of sense; he faces a mob of men whose chief distinguishing mark is that they are quite incapable of weighing ideas, or even of comprehending any save the most elemental — men whose whole thinking is done in terms of emotion, and whose dominant emotion is dread of what they cannot understand. So confronted, the candidate must either bark with the pack, or count himself … [Read more...]

After a short hiatus, I’ ve finally gotten back to working on Postclassic Radio, and there are new pieces up by Linda Catlin Smith, Nicolas Collins, Molly Thompson, Paul Bailey, Joseph Koykkar, Dave Smith, Paul Dresher, and others. There was an article in the Los Angeles Times last Sunday, Nov. 7, about my station and Robin Cox’s Iridian Radio, due to our both winning the ASCAP-Deems Taylor Award. I couldn’t access the article without subscribing, but author Chris Pasles kindly sent me a PDF of it, and Cox e-mailed me the text. It quotes … [Read more...]

If you find profanity offensive, you will not enjoy the message to our Southern brethren at fuckthesouth.com, but I find it heartwarming, which I suppose completes my transformation into a Northeastern liberal. … [Read more...]

Young composer Keith Corbin has written a rather nice Elegy for America, inspired by what he correctly calls the horrible catastrophe of November 2, 2004: "59,459,765 Americans said that they favor a policy of Violence over Peace, Intolerance over Justice, Large Corporations over Economic Sanity, and Fear over Freedom and Liberty." You can hear an mp3 of the MIDI version of Corbin's piece, based on a funereal variation of our national anthem. One thinks of Charles Ives's song "An Election: Nov. 2, 1920," lamenting the country's similarly … [Read more...]

On November 3, the day after the election, 250 Bard College students staged a peaceful protest in the neighboring village of Red Hook. They sat down in the street in the town's sole intersection, delayed traffic, attracted curious onlookers and a few insults, and left. That was it. Somehow the event came to the attention of the Kingston police force in neighboring Ulster county, across the river. Thirty Kingston police came to escort the students away. Twelve students were walking back to campus together, when one stepped over the white line on … [Read more...]

Composer Lawrence Dillon, grad and former faculty of Juilliard but now living and teaching in North Carolina, cries out for the 25 million red-staters who voted for Kerry and sanity: Don't you think we've been depressed enough this week without taking all the blame for Bush's resounding victory? And how do you feel about the 2.8 million New Yorkers who voted for Bush -- more than in North Carolina and Arizona combined? What exactly is their excuse for being so stupid? On the night of November 3rd [with my North Carolina colleagues] all … [Read more...]

This concession speech by Adam Felber seems to me to strike exactly the kind of conciliatory tone we should take toward our mighty red-state conquerors. You should read the whole thing, but I'll provide my favorite excerpt here: There are some who would say that I sound bitter, that now is the time for healing, to bring the nation together. Let me tell you a little story. Last night, I watched the returns come in with some friends here in Los Angeles. As the night progressed, people began to talk half-seriously about secession, a red state / … [Read more...]

I’m writing about politics now not because I believe I know more about it than anyone else, but because after November 2 - an even darker day for America than September 11* (better 3000 Americans killed than 59,000,000 voting their approval to genocide and sexual torture) - I couldn’t find anything on the internet to make me feel better. For many hours there was just nothing, then the articles started rolling in, predictably, by Democrats blaming themselves. The Repugs eat this up, that every time they cream us we act like it’s our own … [Read more...]