Archives for November 2012

A recording of my 2011 orchestra piece Serenity Meditation has arrived, courtesy of the Bowling Green State University New Music Festival, and conducted by J.J. Pearse. The piece, curated for this event by John Luther Adams, is based on three Ives songs, mostly “Serenity” and to a smaller extent “Sunrise” and “General William Booth Enters into Heaven.” It’s dedicated to Neely Bruce, who commissioned the keynote address in which I mentioned those three songs as examples of Ivesian stasis. I’ve had so little experience with orchestras that it’s still a thrilling shock to hear an orchestra play something and realize I wrote it. I wish the microphone had been a little closer to the celesta, which plays a major role, but the performance is quite nice.

When I moved my web site I didn’t re-upload the four-plus-hour recording Sarah Cahill and I made in Kansas City of Dennis Johnson’s minimalist piano classic November. Several people have asked me to reinstall it and I keep forgetting, but it’s up here now. Andy Lee is recording the piece for the Irritable Hedgehog label, so there will be an excellent commercial studio recording out soon. I’ll let you know.

“I might end up never firing the pistol. Contrary to Chekhov’s principle.”
“That’s fine, too,” Tamaru said. “Nothing could be better than not firing it. We’re drawing close to the end of the twentieth century. Things are different from back in Chekhov’s time. No more horse-drawn carriages, no more women in corsets. Somehow the world survived the Nazis, the atomic bomb, and modern music.”

– Haruki Murakami, 1Q84, p. 1108

And I started reading the book because it mentioned Janacek’s Sinfonietta in the second sentence.

Since his memorial service I’ve been desperately longing to hear William Duckworth’s Simple Songs about Sex and War, but I couldn’t find my old tape of it. (There’s a commercial CD, but the performance is weird and too disappointing to listen to.) Finally I ran across an mp3 on a hard drive – he and Nora must have given it to me last time I visited – and for all those similarly susceptible I post it here. Based on poems written for Bill by Hayden Carruth, it is the perfect postclassical song cycle, sung by the incomparable Barbara Noska (a Relache member when it was written) in a consummate postclassical vocal style, and with lovely synth accompaniment by John Dulik. Anybody who could write this deserved far more acclaim than the Pulitzer hacks.