Penrose meets Lucier
An overly self-conscious trip to a store with a flyswatter in hand inspires Christopher Penrose to create this gentle and humorous parody of Alvin Lucier’s I am Sitting In a…
New Music Criticism on the Mean Streets of the Intertubes
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YdkGaNQVOFs&feature=related[/youtube] I was checking out video performances of Christopher Rouse compositions, when I came across the lively exchange excerpted below from the comments section of the above performance of Ogoun…
In praise of Eric Lyon
Why do some extraordinarily talented people never show up on the radar? Eric Lyon is one such unsung genius. I understand he’s been impressing folks in Brooklyn the past few…
Ominous Portents
I found one of my favorite reviews from the 1990’s (Roger Reynolds’s Dreaming and Harvey Sollberger’s Passages), and posted it here. There was a minor controversy surrounding Roger Reynolds’s commission…
BOAC All-stars and Paul Dresher Ensemble, 1995
I’ve been uploading my old reviews on my blog. Today’s upload is a review I did for a new music festival at the University of California, San Diego in 1995:…
The astounding success of Messiaen’s Quartet for the End of Time
There’s yet another new music series here in San Diego: Connections Chamber Music. I reported earlier this year on their concert featuring Reich, John Adams, Daugherty, and Matthew Tommasini (the…
Music inspired by World War II
There are many compositions dealing with the horrors of World War II. Some of them, like Penderecki’s Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima, have little to do with the war–Penderecki…
Fun with Google Books, Part 1
I’ve been happily exploring all the free stuff available on Google Books, including complete runs of out of print magazines like Life. Check out what Igor Stravinsky used to…
Pat Metheny goes steampunk?
The orchestrion is a fairly old instrument, going back to the mid-19th-century. Pat Metheny and the mad scientists at the League of Electronic Musical Urban Robots have teamed up to…
Unsilent Night in San Diego
If you’re in the San Diego/Tijuana region today, or if you happen to be at your computer at 6 pm PST, tune in to KSDS FM (88.3), our beloved jazz…