Archives for February 2014

This morning I was looking through the evaluation file of a colleague who's up for tenure. He's someone who uses abundant humor in his work, and one of the external evaluators, noting that humor is always risky, said something so striking that I wrote it down: “Humor in art is an audience divider; you are automatically paring your viewership to a core that shares your sense of humor and sensibility.” Never thought of that before. I rather pride myself on some of my pieces being jokes, even if I think they're rather deep and extended and … [Read more...]

I liked what Nicholas Kristof wrote in the Times about academics using jargon to remove themselves from public relevance, and considered blogging it: A related problem is that academics seeking tenure must encode their insights into turgid prose. As a double protection against public consumption, this gobbledygook is then sometimes hidden in obscure journals — or published by university presses whose reputations for soporifics keep readers at a distance. Jill Lepore, a Harvard historian who writes for The New Yorker and is an exception to … [Read more...]

The other night before his wonderful concert, pianist Emenuele Arciuli, who is a great advocate for American piano music and has published a book, Musica per Pianoforte negli Stati Uniti, told me and composer Martin Bresnick that in Europe he often has to defend American music, which is attacked by composers there as being superficial, commercial, and lacking in technique. The next day, at New Music Box, web site of the American Music Center, composer Mara Gibson described how inspiring it was for her to study with German composer Helmut … [Read more...]

It is time again, next fall, for me to teach my Analyzing Beethoven class, which I am always happy to do. But I have been threatening for years to make it a Late Beethoven class, and I am on the point of succumbing. Every time I'm frustrated at how little of the late music I get around to teaching. I always spend two weeks analyzing the Hammerklavier and at least a week on Op. 111, and we go quickly through the C#-minor Quartet and the Grosse Fuge. Maybe I can get through the Kyrie and Gloria of the Missa Solemnis, and one year I dawdled for … [Read more...]

In addition to Emanuele Arciuli playing my Earth-Preserving Chant tomorrow evening in New York City, and my recent Helsinki premiere, this Saturday Nicolas Horvath is playing my piano piece Going to Bed: Homage to Philip Glass in Kiev, at the Night of Minimal Piano #2. I've been noticing for awhile, from my Hostmonster statistics, that the Ukraine is regularly in the top rankings of countries from which my web site gets hits; this week it's fourth, behind the U.S., Lithuania, and the U.K., in that order. For a long time Romania was near the … [Read more...]

Two new PDF scores went up on my website this week. One is not a terribly new piece: Mystic Chords (2012), which I've written about here before, and which consists entirely of quarter-notes with a different tempo marking on each beat. I had been waiting on putting up the score until I revised the opening, which I have now done. So there's a new recording as well, and I'm much happier with it. As often happens with mp3s, my computer keeps going back to the old mp3 when I click on it, and no amount of reloading has yet succeeded in bringing the … [Read more...]

Wow: famous Japanese composer I'd never heard of admits his music was ghostwritten. I sometimes wish I could claim that my music was ghostwritten, but I'm afraid I must accept responsibility for every note. UPDATE: Actually, subsequent reading about this has made me think that the real scandal is that this patent mediocrity was ever considered "the Beethoven of Japan" - showing that compositional celebrity is just as uncorrelated to talent or achievement in Japan as it is here. … [Read more...]