Order, Not Chance, Reigns in Philip Glass’ Kepler
Philip Glass always does the unexpected. Or, as he said to me when we were talking on the phone about his subsequently Oscar-nominated score for Errol Morris’ 2003 The Fog…
Review: Evan Ziporyn’s A House in Bali
Old age isn’t for sissies or the timid and I think the same thing can be said about writing for the stage, especially if it’s the operatic one. It took…
Love and Rockets: San Francisco Composers Chamber Orchestra Plays Old First Church
We like to think that we live in the light, or as the current phrase goes — “it’s all good ” — when in reality everything really seems to happen…
Force of Nature – Frederic Rzewski Solo Piano UC Davis
It’s sometimes said that composers are either German or French, and American vanguard one Frederic Rzewski, with his much vaunted admiration for Beethoven, is clearly on the German side. But…
Being, Nothingness and Morton Feldman
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4TEWQZ5tLD0 Some people like to think that music is always somehow about something… usually them. My bad love affair, the world will never understand me, much less remember me. And…
Gerhard Samuel – A Small Remembrance
We take so much for granted – the sun will go down , the sun will come up – that we never seem to realize that some day it won’t…
On Becoming Gandhi: Satyagraha
My dear late best friend Danny Cariaga, classical music critic extraordinaire of the Los Angeles Times, once observed that people went to Wagner’s operas when they were new because they…
Where We Live
The world has always been violent, hence the classical desire to restrain the beast within. But is this kind of art enough when the world seems to spin out of…
I Left My (Spanish) Heart in San Francisco
Things happen when you pay attention. Resemblances line up, and disjunctions jar. These things certainly happened when I caught Word for Word’s theatricalization of James Baldwin’s Harlem-set story Sonny’s Blues,…
You Can Trust Your Car to the Man Who Wears a Star
Dance is always about music, and music is, more often than not, about dance. But how does dance animate music, and music animate dance? This seemed to be the central…