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Since Lucky has found permanent day-lodging for himself underneath my composing desk,  I've finally begun to understand Gertrude Stein's famous counter to Descartes: " I am I because my little dog knows me, but perhaps he does not and if he did I would not be I."

A few years ago, having become frustrated with my own over-slow tempi and clumsy tone while reading through Stravinsky's Sonata , I just had to hear the piece played once well and at tempo.  I  forced myself to listen to one recording after another.  I was mostly disappointed by the performances, but one recording stood out, and — to me — it was a complete surprise.   It was that of pianist Earl Wild, who has just died at the age of 94.   I was surprised becaused Wild's name was not one that someone involved in new music would immediately think of, moreover it was a name that I associated with the showy virtuoso end of the big-name classical music establishment, not territory where musical sensitivity is always valued, but that association was a mistake on my part.  Sure, he was a flamboyant stage presence and sure, he was a Liszt specialist, but he was a Liszt specialist who could handle all of Liszt, which means not just the fireworks, but also the reveries, lugubrious gondol...

In some music, of a certain vintage — the precise vintage we'll leave to musicologists to fight out — the notational convention was that if one voice had eighth-note triplets, a simultaneous voice sounding quarter + eighth triplets could be written out as dotted-eighth + sixteenth.  At some point — again, musicologists: have at it, this is your job, not mine — this convention gave way to a more logically consistant — if less stylish — reading of both triplets and dotted note values, so that the same notated rhythmic ensemble would have the sixteenth following the dotted eighth played one twelfth of a quarter note later than the last note in the triplet.  As a piece of practical advice, consider this: Unless you specify the earlier convention in your scores, which may be musically useful , players will now expect the later reading.  Now a piece of aesthetic advice. As always, YMMV:  be careful when superimposing additive and divisive note values. While such combinations may be usefu...

A pair of sentences in a blog item by William Keckler stood out this morning: I find it interesting that today's literary movements don't even have to be formalistically inventive. It's all done through the miracle of social networking. With all the chatter about social networking among musicians these days, of course the first thing I did upon reading this passage was to substitute the word "musical" for "literary" and let it churn around in my brain a bit, to see if I end up with butter.   Yes , social networking promise greater opportunities for making contacts — let's not call them "friends", buckos, as that word can still be saved for something more special — and for sharing stuff (music in some form or another, pretty pictures, tech talk, news, recipes, gossip...) and even making real public musical events happen.  But when these networks actually go into operation, all of the delights and dangers of ordinary social interaction come...

... if you should see him once, you would forget what he looked like, but if you should see him twice you would forget to forget what he looked like, and that would be quite fatal. — from Tajar Tales by Jane Shaw Ward He thought he saw an Elephant, That practised on a fife: He looked again, and found it was A letter from his wife. "At length I realise," he said, "The bitterness of Life!" — from Lewis Carroll, The Mad Gardner's Song Combating insomnia (again) last night, I turned on the tube and watched a bad movie. It was about five men who wake up, in various states of physical injury and/or bondage, in an industrial building apparently sealed off from the external world. None of the men knows his own identity and no one can remember how they ended up there and in the particular configuration in which they woke. A tank of gas, with a verbose warning message on the side, mentioning a "loss of memory" risk, was the device used to explain this grou...

Here's another free idea for composers adapted from natural science:  it turns out that slime molds can discover efficient paths through complex networks, subway systems, for example (read here , in German).  How about using slime mold paths to design melodies?  Melodies have at least two dimensions of movement (in absolute pitch and in pitch relative to harmonic references), so there is some similarity to networks like subways.  How important an efficient path may be, however, may vary with your aesthetic purposes.

It seems that the sounds of spoken numerals affects the perception of price. (Read here .)  Morton Feldman talked about using instruments in a similar way, getting really expensive sounds out of really expensive instruments, by starting a vibrato on a cello, for example, before beginning to bow, or having a certain touch at the piano, and only on a certain class of piano.  The other side of the coin — as it were — was Feldman's disdain for instruments he considered "cheaper" in quality, the recorder for instance (a judgment I don't share).   I think it will be interesting to hear how well Feldman's instrumental value judgments hold up, if some of his preferences — for that vibrato, or the use of tuba, glockenspiel, or vibraphone with the motor on — acquire a dated quality.  In any case, this research is certainly compositionally suggestive for the composer who wants to lend her or his music a certain aura of value.   

The letters Q, W, and X are banned in Turkey .   

Voice-against-voice counterpoint is very much like tying knots, specifically like tying ties.  Like a bit of two-voice modal counterpoint, which can only begin with unison, octaves, or fifths, a tie knot can only begin with the two ends outside-out or inside-out, that is to say, in the sartorial equivalent of perfect consonance.   Thomas Fink's Encyclopedia of Tie Knots is a very cool and quite useful site, and Fink's work on designing tie knots by random walks comes uncannily close to using random walks to generate counterpoint.  

Despite the cliché of the genial composer slaving away alone in a lonely garret, many composers put their music together in more collaborative environments. Sometimes this can be a fairly egalitarian arrangement, as in the Cage/Harrison Double Music (see this item on co-composing); in other cases, a single composer is identified with the work to which other musicians contributed "work for hire." The advantages of working with such assistance can be great. Jean-Baptiste Lully was said to have composed the melody and bass line and then handed the materials on to a team of assistants who — in the manner of an assembly line — efficiently filled in the interior parts in the five-voiced string texture according to the master's specifications. Giacinto Scelsi recorded improvisations at the piano or an electronic ondioline and then hired musicians to "transcribe" the recordings into scores, work that was often highly imaginative in character. (In many traditional mus...

As a student of electronic music in Santa Cruz in the early 80s — that strange moment when analog technology was being eased out and the digital replacements (but not substitutes) were not quite on line — one of the most powerful devices in the studio was the Omnipressor , an audio compression device with some intriguing capacities, one of which was an extreme knob setting of infinite compression .  As you might imagine, we got a lot of mileage out of infinite compression, which could be used for the feedback equivalent of perpetual motion.  Too much mileage, actually, as within a brief period of time, the use of the Omnipresser to create continuities and saturated sound textures became a studio cliché.  As someone soon joked: the Omnipresser is your friend, but don't let it get too friendly. I've written about the dangers of the over-use of audio compression before (read here and here and here ).  Gordon Mumma has passed along a useful NPR report on the prevalent flattening...

The kids and I got a dog for Christmas, a handsome rescue dog from Hungary, a mix, but mostly Russell terrier. Now each day includes a couple of long walks with Lucky through fields or along the river, and when outside the dog really comes alive, with his hunting instinct very much intact. One quickly realises, especially out-of-doors, in the snowy landscapes of the moment, that what appears almost empty to our senses must, at times, be overwhelming to an animal so attuned to scent and sound and the slightest movements at a distance. Each time he locates a rabbit inside a mess of bushes or across a field, the human advantage in intellectual capacity is bested by his command of a set of perceptual cues that are totally lost to us. ***** I suspect, when we look (better: listen ) back to music of the 20th century, we will be increasingly struck by the dynamic of competing approaches to the synthesis of musical experiences, one designed to focus and the other to overwhelm both the sens...

My daughter has been enjoying The Composer is Dead , the narrator and orchestra piece by Lemony Snicket and composer Nathaniel Stookey (the book is illustrated by Carson Ellis and includes a recording by the San Francisco Symphony).  It's fun and a light but welcome addition to the dreaded childrens'-intro-to-the-orchestra genre, giving some long-needed competition to Saint-Saëns's Carnival (best with the Ogdon Nash rhymes), Prokofiev's ad for the NRA, the Poulenc/Francaix Babar , and, of course, Britten's Variations on a Tune from Abdelazar that was doing just fine before Ben got a hold of it .  

I've really been enjoying spending some lazy breakfasts pouring over the San Francisco Panorama edition of McSweeney's .   It is an encouraging affirmation of the potential for print media to be more that it has been, and to do so in times when electronic media increasingly dominate and most of the traditional newspapers are teetering on abysses, both financial and in content.  As a print enthusiast, this is great stuff, great reads by some good writers, a beautiful layout, and, personally, a chance to be nostalgic about one of my favorite cities* and definitely my favorite State (of mind as well as of the Union).   My own particular print commitments are to the musical score on paper (as a composer and a publisher), and to smart coverage of new music in print media.  Unfortunately, Volume 1, Number 1 of the Panorama doesn't cover new music, which isn't much of a surprise given, for example, the near-absence contemporary E-Musik in the German-language equivalent Die ...

Here 's a video (hat tip Ron Silliman) of David Antin "talking on Kathy Acker".  Acker was a writer whose work I could never read easily ( Blood and Guts in High School , for example, totally defeated me, and I'm a fairly robust reader).   Indeed, her raw materials were probably chosen as precisely the stuff to keep someone like me uneasy.  Nevertheless, Antin's talk is a small & useful general meditation on "found" materials, and the utility of formal rules for shaping them into new work.   I particularly like this passage — about 11 minutes in — which seems relevant to the question of how well a working artist should "know" other work, which points to a responsibility altogether different from that of a scholar: "All the works (...) I'm sure Kathy looked at.  Some, she looked at the spine; some she read thoroughly; some she encountered rather, rather glancingly.  But she encountered them in the way a real poet would: as usefully...

Cornelius Cardew: Autumn '60 for orchestra (1960).   Let's toss our notions about an "orchestra", a "score", an individual instrumental "part", as well as the division of labor between composers and performers (and, among performers, between players and conductors) up in the air and listen to what happens when they come down again in new configurations:   Autumn '60 is a delightful example of such an exercise.   Autumn '60 is "for orchestra", but the identity of that orchestra is variable.  Although most performances have probably been for chamber groups, the score is as usable, potentially, by a single soloist on a lonely woodblock as by an orchestra of late romantic scale and proportions.    The score, which all players receive, features a system with two staves, the upper consisting of one to seven conventional markings — clefs, notes (which are limited to f, gb, ab, bb, and db), articulations, ornaments, instrument names, dy...