I'm pretty swamped by writing jobs at the moment. Mostly for money - Bard pays the mortgage and electricity, but if I want to continue smoking Padrone cigars and drinking Old Vine Red, those liner notes and program notes have to keep coming. But one job I'm doing I'm very excited about: liner notes for the first commercial recording of music by Julius Eastman. Eastman (1940-1990) was a brilliant singer, fabulous pianist, politically aggressive gay African-American, outrageous personality, and one of the important musical figures of the … [Read more...]

Vivian Perlis, the great pioneer of oral music history, and Libby Van Cleve, expert oboist-turned-musicologist, are coming out with their first volume of oral American music history, Composers' Voices from Ives to Ellington (Yale Univ. Press, two compact discs included). I got an advance copy, and it's fascinating reading; can't put it down. Here's an excerpt from some 1977-78 interviews with the great Virgil Thomson: I came from Europe in the fall of 1940. I didn't have any money, and wasn't going to be earning any, so I came home. I took a … [Read more...]

Over at Sequenza 21, composer Galen H. Brown has written an essay explaining where my blog fits into musical politics, and arguing eloquently for my continuing it. He transplants into the musical realm David Brock's argument from his book The Republican Noise Machine that the Republicans took their own lunatic fringe overly seriously in order to alter the public perception of where the center of the political spectrum lies, moving it far right from where it used to be. Therefore, argues Brown, substituting the concept of Mainstream Classical … [Read more...]