I was pleased, at my November 20 lecture at Goldsmiths College in southeast London, to meet fellow blogger Tim Rutherford-Johnson, in attendance. He says I met him at a Goldsmiths appearance several years ago, but I hadn't remembered him from that time because he hadn't yet become a famous new-music blogger - in fact, no one had yet heard the word "blog." Tim flatteringly describes my talk in … [Read more...]

I love, and by "love" I mean "am nearly made physically ill by," this paragraph that's been added to the … [Read more...]

OK, kiddies, gather around, it's time to reap the benefits of your uncle Kyle's globe-trotting. I'm back, having paid $50 US to carry an extra 10 kilos of new CDs onto the plane in my suitcase, not to mention the box of CDs that I paid good Euros to mail home from Dublin. I must now be considered southern Columbia County's leading expert on Dutch and Irish composers, and so I pass the expertise on to you via … [Read more...]

LONDON - I've heard a lot of music in Europe, but the concert I was most excited about, that I'd planned on hearing months in advance, was the premiere of my Dutch composer friend Renske Vrolijk's Charlie Charlie. To hear it, in fact, I had to leave England between lectures and fly, then train it, back to Den Bosch in The Netherlands (a town whose more official name is S' Hertogenbosch, and no one was quite able to explain why it has two names). Let it be some small window into the logistics of my journey that it was cheaper for me to fly back … [Read more...]

[Update below] DUBLIN - One of the best things I've done in Europe was spend 25 bracing hours with one of my composer heroes, Charlemagne Palestine. I'm astonished to have had the opportunity. I had heard stories of Palestine from the early '70s on, but never heard a note until 1994, when his old Shandar vinyl disc Strumming Music was finally released on CD. I had come to figure that he was a legend whose music was lost to history, but since 1994 more than a dozen Palestine recordings have appeared, some of them old archival recordings, others … [Read more...]

DUBLIN - Henry David Thoreau's wonderful dictum: My life has been the poem I would have writ, But I could not both live and utter it. will have to be modernized: My life has been the blog I would have writ, But I could not both live and update it. I've been living rather than blogging, but I can pause long enough to announce that I will be performing Custer and Sitting Bull - perhaps for the last time ever, if I have anything to say about it - tomorrow night at 8 in the Printing Room at Trinity College in Dublin. Ireland. Along with a couple of … [Read more...]

Pianist Geoffrey Douglas Madge and the Orkest de Volharding, conducted by Jussi Jaatinen, … [Read more...]

I stayed in Aarhus, Denmark, courtesy of Wayne Siegel, a California-born composer who's lived in Denmark since 1974, moving up to the position of the country's only official electronic music professor. Wayne and his wife, the novelist Elisabeth Siegel, have a pet jackdaw named Alice. A jackdaw is a raven-like bird, though smaller, native to Europe. Having been rescued as a baby bird by a man with a beard, Alice loves men with facial hair, and took to me right away. She's noisy, as birds tend to be, and every sound I would make in her presence … [Read more...]

Everyone with an opinion about the future of classical music should read Richard Taruskin's elegantly brilliant article … [Read more...]

UPDATE: Thanks to those who offered to translate: I took the first person up on it. As for reading the fine print, you can drag the image to your desktop and it will open as a much larger image (at least this works on my Mac). … [Read more...]

ON THE TRAIN FROM BASEL TO HAMBURG - For years I've wanted to visit the Paul Sacher Stiftung in Basel and look through the Conlon Nancarrow archive there, full of manuscripts that I last saw in his studio in 1994, while he was still alive. I've finally done it. It wasn't quite the cornucopia I had imagined. While all of the official works in his oeuvre have been catalogued, the great bulk of his papers await classification. Hit-and-run interlopers like myself, Nancarrow book or no Nancarrow book, aren't allowed to charge in and start throwing … [Read more...]

Tomorrow night (October 18) at 8, pianist Lois Svard is playing my music in a program at Muskingum College in Concord, Ohio. She'll play my recent work On Reading Emerson (which is coming out on a New Albion disc with Sarah Cahill any minute now), along with "The Alcotts" from the Concord Sonata, Bill Duckworth's Imaginary Dances, and George Tsontakis's Ghost Variations. Gann and His World, indeed. Thursday, October 25 [note - I had originally listed the wrong date], I'm giving a concert of microtonal and Disklavier works at the Mendelssohnsaal … [Read more...]

AMSTERDAM - I'm not over here just turning European musical society on its ear, you know. In fact, I don't seem to be doing that at all. I haven't yet had to place a revolver on the piano to quell potential riots, the way Antheil did when he came to Europe - audiences here have simmered down over the years. But besides performing and lecturing, I'm also working on my book, whose title had already changed from Music After Minimalism to Music After the-Music-Formerly-Known-as-Minimalism, and now may have to be titled … [Read more...]

This Tuesday, October 9, at 8:30 PM I'll be presenting half of a microtonal concert at the Karnatic Lab in Amsterdam, at their De Badcuyp space, 1st Sweelinckstr. 10 in Amsterdam. This concert features myself, Ned playing a duet with recorder player Susanna Borsch, and the Scordatura Trio, which consists of vocalist Alfrun Schmid, violist Elisabeth Smalt, and on keyboards my good friend Bob Gilmore. Bob is the Irish musicologist who wrote the excellent Harry Partch biography, edited a recent volume of the writings of Ben Johnston, and has now … [Read more...]

Brian McLaren sent me this: I love how the piano keys run out to the very edge of the piano. And end on E. … [Read more...]

I've been posting way too many photos - probably more of you have already seen Yurp than I imagine - but I couldn't resist this image of John Luther Adams (front) listening to his Veils and Vesper installation at the Muziekgebouw: It was a fantastic space for it, high-ceilinged and well insulated from other spaces despite its openness, and surrounded on various sides by wood, concrete, metal, and glass - tieing in conceptually, in that respect, to John's percussion music, which groups instruments via those categories. Walking among the … [Read more...]

AMSTERDAM - The painter Philip Guston was Morton Feldman's best friend. In 1970, Guston abandoned the abstract expressionist style he had been closely associated with, and began painting cartoonish figures that often included shoes, disembodied eyeballs, and hooded figures. To say Feldman was shocked would be an understatement. As someone recently told me the story (heard from someone else who was there), Feldman came to the initial exhibition and Guston came up to ask him what he thought. For several minutes, Feldman simply couldn't speak, and … [Read more...]

Rumor had it that Pierre Boulez performed in Amsterdam at the same time as the Output Festival, and I think I ran across his group: Isn't this the Ensemble InterContemporain, with Pierre on the far right playing drum? In any case, they were the hottest music I've heard here so far. There was a lot of I, flat VII, flat VI, V over and over in the bass, but for variety they'd go into I, V, I, ii, V, and there were so many repetitions that I can't imagine how they kept everything straight at the riotous tempo they took. I was most impressed with … [Read more...]

...is fantastic, isn't it? I don't think there's been any part of this trip I've looked forward to more than just hiding away in some cubbyhole where no one knows how to reach me, and composing my pointy little head off. The phone doesn't ring, no one stops by, people start to assume you're unreachable, there's no refrigerator full of tempting food, there's not even anything on the walls worth looking at, and if you're in a country where you don't speak the language, even the idea of trying to run out and do errands is pretty disinviting. It's … [Read more...]

AMSTERDAM - The new Muziekgebouw hall on the Amsterdam waterfront, which only opened about a year ago, is a spectacular space - or rather, spectacular collection of spaces. In addition to the comfortable and precision-engineered main hall, there is the upstairs black box called Bimhuis (billed as a space for jazz and improv, but actually perfectly well-suited for new music in general), as well as several vast foyers superb for concerts, sound installations, and the like. I'm halfway attending the Output festival of new music employing electric … [Read more...]