My friend George is looking forward to a respite from Cage performances now that the centennial is ending. He says it got so bad he couldn't even enjoy "Silent Night" anymore.   … [Read more...]

A week from today and tomorrow, I'll be in Amsterdam for the University of Amsterdam's conference on Phil Glass's Einstein on the Beach. I'm taking part in a panel discussion January 5, and on the morning of the 6th I'll give a paper on my analysis of Einstein, the writing of which I am interrupting briefly to make this announcement. My interest is in the intuitive and nonlinear (right-brain) structuring of the piece's music, which was such a departure from the process-oriented minimalism of previous years. In fact, while it's easy to see … [Read more...]

People are telling me they've received their copies of my Robert Ashley book from Amazon. (I still have only one myself.) There's one story Bob told me that I didn't include in the book, just because a scholarly book like this didn't seem the right place for it. (Well, there are several stories, but one he didn't ask me to keep to myself.) When Bob was a toddler his mother and grandmother were giving him a bath in the sink, and he managed to stick his finger into an empty electrical socket. He lost consciousness and they frantically tried to … [Read more...]

For reasons not yet clear to me, the Oxford University Press blog has been doing a series of articles about Mars, and they asked me to write an entry on Mars and music, from an astrological point of view, which is now up. They are plotting some major announcement about Mars, and apparently I am one of the few musicologist-composer-writer-astrologers around since the death of Dane Rudhyar. I almost declined, but then reflected that Uranus is trining my ascendent, which suggests that benefits may come my way from totally out-of-left-field … [Read more...]

A single copy of my new book Robert Ashley has just arrived in the mail, inexplicably delayed these last few weeks but just as welcome now. Amazon is still giving the official release date as Dec. 16 10, so perhaps there's time to get it for Christmas. A few weeks ago I put what are, for now, the finishing touches on my Robert Ashley web site of musical examples, with charts and transcriptions from six of the operas, the piano sonata, and Outcome Inevitable. While musical examples in the book would have been nice, these have the advantage … [Read more...]

From the Society for Minimalist Music website, here's the invitation for the Fourth International Conference on Music and Minimalism, Long Beach, CA, 3-6 October 2013: You are kindly invited to submit proposals for the Fourth International Conference on Music and Minimalism, jointly hosted by UCLA and the California State University, Long Beach on the campus of CSULB in Long Beach, CA, 3-6 October 2013. All scholars interested in music and minimalism are invited to submit paper proposals. The conference welcomes all papers concerning … [Read more...]