Tristan Perich’s 1-Bit Symphony stands quite eloquently in contrast to the 21st century’s love affair with the endlessly copyable digital file. While CDs have been traded for the instant gratification of the easily distributed MP3, Perich has shifted the frame and managed to make the fragile plastic jewel case once again worthy of shelf space.
By Colin Holter
If we’re trying to sort out the relationship(s) between the practices of vernacular and cultivated music in present-day America, my suspicion is that it would be much easier to take a cue from Pierre Bourdieu and chart the positions of various kinds of music within the field of production—in other words, by the conditions under which they’re produced and consumed. I grabbed the nearest envelope and got to work.
By Frank J. Oteri
Even though I think I was experiencing something of an aural mirage, I could not help hearing echoes of the soundtrack to Vertigo in all the music that was played during Cabrillo’s final concert at the Mission San Juan Bautista, the site where Vertigo’s denouement was filmed.
ETHEL’s latest CD Oshtali is a collection of vital, engaging compositions by a talented group of young composers that not only provides a tribute to the heritage and future of the Chickasaw Nation, but that also creates a strong sense of optimism for the future of contemporary music in the US.
By David Smooke
I feel the need to remind myself of this process, because I’m beginning a new piece—one that is larger than any I’ve attempted to date—and I’m frightened.
By Joelle Zigman
Upon reflection on my first blogging experience, I’ve come up with at least ten life lessons I’ve learned from the past six months of thrusting my opinions into the public.
By Dan Visconti
I began working on a commercial scoring project with a video artist this week, and although the collaboration has been very fruitful it’s also been riddled with minor awkwardness and misunderstandings that come with trying to communicate musical concepts to non-musicians.
By Alexandra Gardner
I did all that really fun stuff and they’re going to (*gasp*) pay me for it?! Sweet!
By Colin Holter
In what respect is “alt-classical” contemporary music?
Soon after Thomas Wirtel, a.k.a. Thomas Shabda Noor, met Morgan Powell at North Texas State University in 1957, experiments in group improvisation commenced on a weekly basis, experiments profoundly informed by music of the 20th-century avant garde.
By Frank J. Oteri
The reason film is a remarkable medium is because it’s a mirror; the reason music is a remarkable medium is because it isn’t.
By David Smooke
Like music itself, success (and its inverse: failure) is a difficult phenomenon to pin down, and that the more I work to create a specific definition of a successful composer, the more the issue becomes slippery and difficult to grasp firmly.
The nine volume Ezra Laderman boxed set, a generous offering of a single living composer’s output, offers listeners an opportunity that is all too rare.
By Joelle Zigman
I’m looking for a third professional path: one that accommodates the midbrow composer.
By Dan Visconti
The only requirement for membership in the Portsmouth Sinfonia is that individual performers play an instrument in which they were not proficient.
By Colin Holter
I stopped applying to summer programs about five years ago, and every summer I wonder whether I’m shooting myself in the foot by clinging to my hard-earned money rather than flitting away for two weeks of networking and music-making.
Composer/guitarist Scott Johnson has a knack for orchestrating the pitches and rhythms of recorded speech, and his most recent CD Americans, takes that ball and runs with it.
BY Frank J. Oteri
Folks who do not believe in an open and tolerant society have always been wary of music.
By David Smooke
I kept encountering performers who would tell me how much they liked my music and would promise to perform pieces if I could find a venue or would express their desire to commission if funding could be found; there is no magic panacea and instead I would need to create my own opportunities.
By Joelle Zigman
A massive shift in popular music towards creating intelligent art would lead to active listening on the part of consumers, and to long-term planning on the part of the music-writer.
Bunita Marcus’s process of composing The Rugmaker was quite literally her process of remembering the trauma that had happened to her as a child.
By Dan Visconti
So much of human history was lived in the precious available daylight, with activities after nightfall severely limited; music must have been one of the only forms of creative expression available to humans after nightfall.
By Colin Holter
At the University of Minnesota’s Junior Composers
Institute, the students—who are also required to be capable instrumentalists—write pieces for one another rather than work with a resident ensemble or soloist.
