Incarceration and Musical Inspiration Part One: Meeting the Men at Auburn’s Maximum Security Prison
Imagine a class where every student feels it is a privilege to learn, yearns to participate and be heard, and absorbs all of the material with passionate curiosity. Within the nightmare of incarceration flourished the dream of education, an unabashed, provocative insight into musical meaning and expression.
Disguise the Limit
Some NMBx thoughts on Halloween: costume ideas with Matthew and critic-at-large Moe.
Hindustani Music: The Four-Syllable Darling and Text Setting in Hindi
Learning Hindi in its written and sung forms simultaneously has been revealing in so many ways. Little idiosyncracies I would have otherwise missed in the language are illuminated through song.
Intense, Hardworking and Fun Loving—Remembering Stephen Paulus (1949-2014)
Steve was tremendously disciplined. He composed every day, whether he wanted to or not. He completed everything he started. You could count on him for advice. He gave me the best financial advice of my professional life when he said “Just envision the amount of money you will need next year, believe it, and it will be there.” He was right.
ACF Announces 2014 JFund Awardees
The American Composers Forum (ACF) has announced that twelve new music projects have been awarded grants through the Jerome Fund for New Music (JFund).
Disposable Spaces, Plastic Music
We mostly listen to recorded music, and we likely hear it alone—in a car, through headphones, maybe through a set of speakers at home. This kind of listening space is simultaneously ephemeral—in that it is fundamentally malleable—and monumental—in that its infinite repeatability aspires to cultural permanence.
We Are Sitting In (Another) Room: Improv with Architecture
Today marks the 40th anniversary of Nicolas Collins’s Pea Soup, a piece that uses electronics to “play” the signature acoustics of a space. In honor of that milestone, Collins today unveils Pea Soup To Go, a free virtual jukebox programed with recordings of 70 different versions of the work.
Hindustani Music: Cultural Collisions (and Washing Machines)
The unlikely collisions between the two musical cultures I inhabit bring up so many questions for me about musical perception: What do people from one musical culture hear in the music of another culture? How much of our aesthetic association with specific music comes from repetition and reinforcement within our musical culture, and how much is simply hard-wired into us as humans?
The Know-Nothings of Jazz
Institutionalized jazz is safe, museum-piece jazz, but the music still happens in basements and lofts and living room performance spaces. These are the alternative venues and institutions for a music that, by definition, is outsider music, counter-culture music.
Chicago: A scavenger hunt of world premieres
It was Open House Chicago this weekend. Open House is, apparently, a worldwide celebratory architectural free-for-all phenomenon that started in London. But I’ve only ever experienced it in Chicago. Here, it usually falls in late October, when each rainstorm is a tender rite of passage that strips the city of a bit more color.
League of American Orchestras & New Music USA Announce 12 New Music Alive Residencies
Twelve orchestras and composers have been selected to receive Music Alive: New Partnerships grants of $7,500 each, the League of American Orchestras and New Music USA announced today.
Swinging the Machine
“Swing” itself, musically speaking, is a pretty vague concept. It has to do with rhythm, but it has to do with so much more than rhythm: it considers the flow of musical experience through the lenses of momentum and vitality.
Getting Past Difficult Pronunciations to Answering Some Difficult Questions—the 2014 ISCM World Music Days
Finding a way to attend the International Society for Contemporary Music’s annual World Music Days ought to be a new music aficionado’s equivalent to going on the hajj. Here are some highlights from this year’s edition which was held in Wrocław, Poland.
Music in a Time of Snapchat: Ephemeral Contexts
It’s fair to say that we yearn for more opportunities to enjoy music in less formal spaces. But can you still have a valuable musical experience while ordering a drink, chewing an hors d’oeuvre, or making conversation?
Boston: A Fight for Love and Glory—Pipeline! at 25
Boston loves its exemplars—those acts that either are so singular as to make (and, sometimes, break) the mold, or that so fully embody a sound, or a genre, or an attitude, as to aspire to a kind of universal standard.
Hindustani Music: Let It Go
When I began to study Hindustani music, I treated the recording of each lesson the way I would have treated the score of a Beethoven sonata, meticulously learning and memorizing each phrase, with all its subtle twists and turns. It took me years to realize that most Hindustani musicians do not practice this way.
Three Musicians Among 2014 USA Fellows
Alison Brown, Daoud A. Haroon, and Meshell Ndegeocello are among the 34 newly announced United States Artists Fellows. Each will receive an award of $50,000.
Lainie Fefferman: Strength In Numbers
“I like things that are minimal, unexpectedly simple, and surprisingly powerful… In math and music I think it’s really striking how you can take these tiny little ideas, and they can explain huge reactions.”
Sounds Heard: Christian Wolff—Pianist: Pieces
In Wolff’s music, one might say that the implied history of each piece, the fact of its composition, its notation, its interpretation and performance, is elevated to the point where it is not just present, but it is, in fact, how the piece is experienced. Every sound is a reminder of its own origin.
Monumental Listening
Is a lavish setting one of the chief preconditions for our enshrinement of cultural objects?
Chicago: The Unbearable Intimacy of Wandelweiser
I asked my friend and colleague Andrew Tham to join me in attempting to create a new kind of concert review: one that embraced, rather than attempted to deny, our subjectivity; one that could be a bit rough around the edges. What follows is the story of our experience of the Chicago Wandelweiser Festival.
Hindustani Music: Recitals of Gratitude
Gurupoornima creates a space for social and musical interaction between students, which helps to establish a community of students of varying levels of proficiency and to inspire them to continue progressing in their studies.
DarwinTunes and Cultural Reductionism
Stating that the DarwinTunes experiment proves that “selection rapidly evolves music from noise,” among other dubious claims, is problematic to say the least. Yet media coverage of the research may be perceived as a mirror of how our society generally interprets music.
Off the Trail: Absorbing the Reflection of the PCT
Environmental degradation and cultural annihilation aside, the total combination of sounds on the PCT is something that is interesting and wondrous to behold. There’s often a special kind of beauty in the confusion that arises when you’re not entirely sure what you’re hearing.
