Logorrhea Belatedly Given Up for Lent

Someone noted that by the time you get to paragraph 14 of one of my posts, you realize I haven't really taken to the spirit of the blog format. It's true, I'm not really into the whole brevity thing, El Duderino. I yearn for my glory days when the Voice used to give me a lovely, ad-less, 1700-word page to fill up, and to fit into that I'd have to shear 700 words off of my first draft. But this will be brief.

This Sunday night - Easter, admittedly - in Boston, Rodney Lister will give a concert for toy piano including my Paris Intermezzo (most of which was written on a plane returning from Paris in 1989) on a wonderful-sounding concert of many works for toy piano. In addition to my essay and other pre-existing ones by Eve Beglarian, Richard Whalley, and Dai Fujikura, he's playing premieres of pieces written for him by Lyle Davidson, Pozzi Escot, Stephen Feigenbaum, Michael Finnissy, Philip Grange, John Heiss, Derek Hurst, Matthew McConnell, Matthew Mendez, Nico Muhly, Ketty Nez, Dave Smith, Jeremy Woodruff, William Zuckerman, and himself. (Some of the pieces involve violin, electronics, boombox, and so on.) The concert is on Sunday, April 8 at 8:00 PM in the Marshall Room in the Music Building at Boston University (855 Commonwealth Avenue).

The following Sunday April 15 at 7:30 - tax day, admittedly - the Da Capo ensemble will play my Hovenweep at Princeton, at Wolfensohn Hall at the Institute for Advanced Study. (Advanced study of what, I have no idea.) I just ran across a review that said, "If Brahms had delved into jazz, he might have come up with something similar to Kyle Gann's Hovenweep." I'll buy that. It's a concert modeled around folk influences, and the rest of the program includes composers Jon Magnussen, Joan Tower, Chinary Ung, Reza Vali, and Stefan Weisman.