I'll be in California the second half of this week. I've been invited to Sacramento State's annual Festival of American Music. I'm involved in the following three events:Nov. 6: Thursday at noon, I start the event by giving the keynote address in the Music Recital Hall. Nov. 7: Friday at 10 AM, I give a Composer's Forum on my music in Capistrano Hall, room 205.Nov. 9: Sunday at 7 PM I give a pre-concert talk (Capistrano Hall 151) prior to a concert in the Music Recital Hall by the Seattle Chamber Players. My old Seattle friends will be … [Read more...]

October is the cruelest month. Or rather, late October/early November: my first-year students know diatonic chords and a few non-chord tones, but it's awfully difficult to find pieces of music (even hymns!) devoid of accidentals for people still stymied by secondary dominants. One piece that I've found wonderful for teaching around Halloween is Barber's Adagio for Strings - I'm not a fan of Barber or the piece, but they all know it by heart, and the film industry has done very well by it. And a lot of it stays in B-flat minor and teaches the … [Read more...]

We in American music owe a great debt to John McCain and Sarah Palin. Those two have so cheapened and tainted the word "maverick" that it will be at least a generation, maybe two, before anyone will be able to use the word non-ironically again. And that means, surely, that there will be no more talk about the "American maverick composers." As I've written here before, the musicological purpose of the word "maverick" is to legitimize certain handpicked composers despite the unconventionality (as compared with alleged European norms) of their … [Read more...]

I had a lovely lunch yesterday with my former editor from the Voice, Doug Simmons, who hired me and edited me for seven heady years. Each of us had some anecdotes from those years we'd never told the other before. The guy who'd recommended me for the job (who might want to remain nameless in this instance) once called Doug up, furious about some new infraction I'd committed in the paper. "You're the guy who recommended him to me," Doug expostulated, "I'd never heard of him before." "I think I've created a monster!," the guy exclaimed, and hung … [Read more...]

From Peter Garland: I Have Had to Learn the Simplest Things Last. … [Read more...]

I refuse to do those "playlist" things that tell you what I'm listening to lately, because 1. I go for long periods without listening to anything, and I'm entitled because I've already spent way too much of my life involved with other people's music; 2. half of what I do listen to is for teaching reasons; 3. I often listen to pieces because I'm planning to steal ideas from them, so admitting it would sometimes be too revealing. But lately I'm listening over and over to a mammoth work that's long fascinated me, Grand Hotel (1989) by Cornelis de … [Read more...]

One of the more anti-American parts of the country:UPDATE: I keep glancing at this and thinking it's my post on the Hudson Valley painters. I wonder why. … [Read more...]

My profile of Larry Polansky is now out in the November/December Chamber Music magazine. The cover story is on Ned Rorem. … [Read more...]

Someone's applied the exact same rhythmic technique to Sarah Palin that I did to Custer.  … [Read more...]

Pursuant to requests from our European affiliates, the deadline for submissions to the Second International Conference on Minimalist Music is being moved back to January 31, 2009. Thanks to all those who've already submitted - you've given us an early idea of what we can expect, and the results are already exciting. Some members of the Society, though, just found the preparation time too... too... too minimal.  … [Read more...]

There's a lot of new interest in the songwriter/cellist/composer Arthur Russell, who died of AIDS in 1992, because of his work in dance electronica. I don't know how far the interest extends to his early minimalist music, but I ran across my old Arthur Russell vinyl discs yesterday, and it occurred to me that I've never played his music on PostClassic Radio. So I've put two records up, Instrumentals 1974 Vol. 2, and Tower of Meaning (1981). Some of the Instrumentals have a nice beat to them, but Tower of Meaning (conducted by Julius … [Read more...]

Pianist Sarah Cahill has been trying to get me together with Japanese composer Mamoru Fujieda, and Saturday he and I managed to have lunch in New York. Among other points of commonality, he's written a book on microtonality (I should say, I am currently writing a book on microtonality; I will always be writing a book on microtonality; I am so wary of the thousands of picayune errors of fact and number that my fellow microtonalists will hit me with, that I am planning to time its publication to occur mere moments before my death, so that their … [Read more...]

[UPDATE: Anwer below] Don't you wish your doctoral music exams could have gone on forever? I know I do. And here, just to relive a little of the thrill, is a small test reminiscent of same. If you can guess the composer's name, you and I have a lot to talk about, but failing that, guess 1. the date of composition, and 2. the date of the composer's birth. Here's an mp3 of the passage so you don't have to drag your computer to the piano.Answers later.UPDATE: OK, several people (including Alex Ross, who sent me a separate note) figured out that … [Read more...]

Off topic, I realize, but this Palin article by Matt Taibbi from Rolling Stone is too entertaining not to share:Here's the thing about Americans. You can send their kids off by the thousands to get their balls blown off in foreign lands for no reason at all, saddle them with billions in debt year after congressional year while they spend their winters cheerfully watching game shows and football, pull the rug out from under their mortgages, and leave them living off their credit cards and their Wal-Mart salaries while you move their jobs to … [Read more...]

I wrote an article on William Schuman for Symphony magazine, which I'll give you the details on presently. I couldn't really spare the time, but chances to write about Schuman are rare, and I love his music too much to have resisted. I gather that being a huge Schuman fan puts me in somewhat of a minority (what else is new?). There is a prejudice abroad that Schuman's composing career was only propped up by his powerful position as President of first Juilliard and then Lincoln Center. Don't you believe it. I met Schuman once. He had some … [Read more...]

One more word about Clementi, and as example a piece I bring into many classes. I was always a collector of canons, even before I discovered Nancarrow, and Clementi was something of a fanatic about them. (Sometimes to his detriment; the otherwise magisterial Op. 40 No. 1 Sonata is a little marred by its canonic scherzo, which doesn't bear enough weight for the rest of the piece.) There are eight canons in his massive, almost-five-hour piano opus Gradus ad Parnassum, and two of them are inversion canons. It seems to me that an effective … [Read more...]

Somebody urged me to join Classical Lounge, so I did, and lots of people there wanted to add me to their friends list, and I always pushed the "accept" button. And I started getting notices that people wanted to befriend me on Plaxo Pulse, so I'd go over there and thread my way through the web site, and then the similar LinkedIn requests started pouring in. And I got invited to join NetNewMusic, as did apparently my entire circle of acquaintances, because most of my e-mail time over the next couple of weeks was spent acceding to requests to … [Read more...]

The monothematic sonata (in which the main theme reappears as the second theme, and sometimes representing other functions as well) is reflexively associated with Haydn, but it could just as well be identified with Muzio Clementi. Except that Clementi approaches the idea with more nuance than Haydn. Often Clementi bases all his themes on the same motive, or else the second theme is a variation of the first, and perhaps the closing theme the inversion of the first. For instance, in the Op. 37 No. 2 Sonata in G, the opening theme: is varied to … [Read more...]

I truly wish that it had been my lifelong dream to publish books about music, because it comes all too easily to me and I could have fulfilled my dream in short order. Unfortunately, in the late 1960s it became my passion to write music and get it performed, which 40 years later I still find a more challenging proposition (the getting-performed part, I mean). Writing a book is a solitary occupation that sometimes actually pays for itself; putting out a CD requires tremendous enthusiasm from performers and cooperation from sound engineers, plus … [Read more...]

Composers Neely Bruce, Kyle Gann, William Duckworth, and Anthony Coleman grouped around pianist Lois Svard, Lewisburg, PA, 1989 or '90. … [Read more...]