Robert Irwin

The work of artist Robert Irwin is essential; I find that the way he talks about his work is essential, too: a model of radical clarity. 

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Ignoring the Music In Our Own Backyard

Mark Swed gets it absolutely right . Music Festivals in California have been doing a terrible job of paying attention to music from California and the West. I have previously complained here specifically about the Cabrillo Festival, founded by Lou Harrison, Robert Hughes, and friends, which had a long history of taking local composers seriously. While the present directorship has, to its credit, put the focus on contemporary music right up in the name of the festival, it has largely focused on the same set of middle-of-the-road names that can regularly be found in East Coast regular season orchestral programs. Indeed one gets the impression that the music director uses Cabrillo as a try-out for her own regular season repertoire. The complaint that West Coast Experimentalists are not welcome at Cabrillo has been met with the line that these composers don't have enough experience working with orchestras. I call BS and I call this a bad bit of vicious circularity: They don'...
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Discipline and Belief

So, I've initiated a project — the details of which will be hush-hush until the end of January — which involves at least 18 composers and an equal number of ground basses.  For my own contribution, I decided to compose first and notate later, getting the music I wanted in my ear, mind, hands, and tongue (it's wind music) before committing it to paper or monitor, as a way of increasing discipline in a musical environment that is, for me, both so rich and so familiar that going on auto pilot and just writing something out was simply too easy. (Sounding easy, which I might want, is not the same as composed easy, which I don't necessarily want.)  At the same time, knowing that I was going to commit some notes to paper put a powerful  — and powerfully useful — constraint on my paper- and screenless composing, in that I was not going to accept just some more noodling-around-out-of-habit improvisation.  When it came time to notate, this discipline had turned into a serious ...
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Full Cage

There has been so much material about John Cage online of late that it is difficult to sort through it all. Let me just point to two very smart items, this , by conductor and percussionist Steven Schick, and this , by composer and critic Matthew Guerrieri. I'm singling these two out because they both focus on Cage's work in perhaps its most critical moment.  There is a tendency — due more to later Newmusicland politics than to the music itself in its own era — to disassociate Cage's project from the larger avant-garde musical project of the time, in particular accentuating the differences and distances from both the post-Schoenbergian American 12-toners and the European serialists.  Recovering those connections does not mean ignoring the differences (indeed, those differences — Cage and Eastern thought*, Babbitt and positivism, Boulez and French literature, Nono and romantic Marxism, Stockhausen and Hesse's Magister Ludi... — are the spice rack in the compositional kitc...
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