Steve’s click picks #13
Philippe Kocher (b. 1973 — Switzerland) Philippe Kocher studied piano, electroacoustic music and musicology in Zurich and more recently music theory and composition with Detlev Müller-Siemens at the Musikakademie Basel,…
Best Actor in a Musical or Comedy
Hey – don’t worry if you don’t have a great date to go to the movies with tonight: just stay home and tune in to modernism’s official goofball, Mauricio Kagel.…
Buchwald and Me
The picture was taken about 11 am on November 22, 1963 in the newsroom of The Parthenon, the student newspaper of Marshall University in Huntington, W.Va. The young man, barely recognizable to me…
On Thursday, the Ogre erwartet devastating commentary.
Right now — just maybe — on Contemporary Classical Internet Radio, there might be the broadcast premiere of a string piece by Arnold Schoenberg. Is this the big moment? Find…
Last Night in L.A.: Blue-orange chords
The description in the title is how Messiaen described a section of the piano part in the second movement of his great “Quartet for the End of Time” (1941). Last…
Cold Wednesday Miscellany
Robert Ashley’s latest opera, Concrete, deals with the secrets of ordinary people who are accompanied by Ableton Live. It opens tonight. Steve Smith had a substantive piece in the Times…
Lost and Found
Jerry sent me a box load of CDs for review under the agreement that I will choose lesser-known composers. So a new column called “Lost and Found” is born, and…
But what I really want to do is compose!
Anyone who’s dabbled even casually with the music world knows it’s full of heartbreak, exhilaration, passion, and drama. A profession overstuffed with possibilities for storytellers in all media, it’s a…
Equality of the composing sexes
Five minutes before Elisabeth Lutyens appeared live on BBC Radio 4’s ‘Start the Week’ in 1979 she threatened to denounce Russell Harty as a ‘homosexual interviewer’ if he mentioned the…
Steve’s click picks #12
Our regular listen to and look at living, breathing composers and performers that you may not know yet, but I know you should… And can, right here and now, since…