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I've just read composer Allen Shawn's Arnold Schoenberg's Journe y (Harvard 2002) and can recommend it highly.  It's a modest length (ca. 300 pages) work of advocacy for the music and for Schoenberg himself, written in a personal and concrete style making it a nice companion to both Charles Rosen's small Schoenberg book and Andriessen and Schönberger's wonderful Stravinsky book, The Apollonian Clockwork .  Shawn discounts his analyses in advance, but his treatment of the Six Small Pieces , Die Glückliche Hand and the String Trio are quite fine, clearly the work of a musician listening closely to music he loves and comfortable with the words needed to share what he has heard.  In his discussion of Schoenberg's life and personality, he is always interesting and musically relevant, whether writing of Schoenberg's complext relationship to religion, his passion for games and crafts, or even giving an entire chapter over to the topic of "On Being Short...

While free-reed instruments have enormous prestige in East Asian and Southeast Asian musics, they have often been a bit undervalued in the west, more associated with popular and pedagogical repertoire.  Occasionally, however, individual free-reed instruments have proven themselves to be valuable in art music as well -- just think of the harmonium in Rossini's Petite Messe Solemnelle , the accordion in Ives' Second Orchestral Set , Thomson's Four Saints in Three Acts , and many pieces by Oliveros and Skempton, or the bandoneon in Mumma's Pontpoint , Tudor's Bandoneon! or Kagel's Tango Alemán .  (Not to mention the original orchestration of Die Dreigroschenoper or Oliveros' See-Saw (a duo for Accordion and Bandoneon with Possible Mynah Bird Obbligato).   The number of composers who have written for the harmonic is long ( here's one list ), so I'll only note concertos by Cowell and Hovhaness.   There has, however, been too little written for the frie...

I should be a short-term futurologist*: Steve Hicken is getting serious about twittered scores, here . I've added some prose scores of my own manufacture to join the good works of the hard-working folk at Upload .. Download .. Perform , here . _____ *I've always been amused by that term.  You would think, wouldn't you, that if a "futurologist" was any good, he or she'd be rich from their predictions about the future, and not reduced to peddling books and lectures?

I keep getting asked if I twitter.  I don't and I probably won't, but I do have one prediction: we're sure to soon see a number of twittered prose scores.   It strikes me that the constraints of the form lend themselves to prose scores based around images or tasks.  For example: THREE TRIANGLES THRICE or SO FAST THAT IT SOUNDS SLOW or ALL TUNES ALL THE TIME or CLOUDS BECOME RAIN or SOUNDS WITHOUT EDGES or EACH TONE CONNECTS TO THE LAST TONE or PLAY WITH EACH AND EVERYONE IN THE ROOM ONCE or REPEAT EVERYTHING AT LEAST THREE TIMES. 

A recent post here about all-white note pieces sent me looking for a copy of Virgil Thomson's Sonata No. 3 for piano (1930), written for Gertrude Stein who like to improvise only on the white keys.  As might be expected from Thomson, it's brief, witty, and wise, alternating between playing the naif and the wiseguy.  The disfunctional harmonies and athematicism keep the (third, of four short movements) waltz, in particular, safe from any out-of-place sentimentality.  That athematicism and all the right wrong notes make this very easy-to-play piece suitable for children and others with very short or very long attention spans.  

I had a nice first performance this weekend in Saarbrücken of a quartet for flute, clarinet, guitar & percussion, Neglected Topiary , a commission by Saarländischer Rundfunk for the Ensemble L'Art Pour L'Art.    How does a listener make sense of a new piece of music? In traditional repertoires of music, "making sense" of a piece in specific or general terms is highly dependent upon a broader familiarity with the repertoire. But The New Music doesn't necessarily come to us embedded in a repertoire of conventional forms, styles, or figures, and if it does, the relationship to existing repertoire is often more of negation than affirmation.   Neglected Topiary is a book of music including 17 pieces played without pause for flute, clarinet, guitar and percussion, each about a minute long and each sharing the same rhythmic structure, which is often articulated by the percussion in the manner of Asian ensemble musics, but here using a battery mostly North America...