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In the recent post about China Miéville's new novel, Kraken , I neglected to note one small but truly cool passing reference, and one which actually has something to do — if via a filial tangent — with experimental music.  It is a reference to John Cage's father.  Yes, the composer's father.  I suspect that this is the first appearance of the senior Cage, an engineer and inventor, in a work of fiction.   In the passage in question, Miéville appears to be referring to John M. Cage Sr.'s work in the design of submarines. Addendum:  Gordon Mumma wrote: re John Cage Sr.'s inventions, his work went far beyond the early submarine projects. Cage Sr. held patents on many devices and concepts, all the way through the 2nd World War. And (composer) Cage Jr. assisted his father with some of that research, even when it was "classified war-work." That activity was one of several reasons the composer Cage was not conscripted into military service. All that above is ...

To the composer out there who is considering TOP KILL as the title for a new piece of music:  Please don't.

John Gruber cites a BBC interview with Mick Jagger: But I have a take on that — people only made money out of records for a very, very small time. When The Rolling Stones started out, we didn’t make any money out of records because record companies wouldn’t pay you! They didn’t pay anyone! Then, there was a small period from 1970 to 1997, where people did get paid, and they got paid very handsomely and everyone made money. But now that period has gone. So if you look at the history of recorded music from 1900 to now, there was a 25 year period where artists did very well, but the rest of the time they didn’t. That date in the late 90's coincides rather precisely with the mass introduction of cheap digital recording equipment and media as well as the widespread use of portable digital players.  The old model of radio advertising paying royalties for recorded music which were licensed cheaply for broadcast with the idea that randomly-heard broadcasts of songs were advertisements for...

A couple of years ago, I drafted a libretto loosely based on reports of palace life in the People's Republic of Korea.  The effort soon convinced me that I was not a librettist (and that Alaisdair Gray's novella Five Letters from an Eastern Empire had treated a similar theme much better than I ever could) but I don't regret having learned a lot about that strange and — for its own people, and potentially its neighbors — tragic country.  (If you're interested in the topic, I recommend Bradley K. Martin's book, Under the Loving Care of the Fatherly Leader and the blog North Korea Leadership Watch ;  I am also fascinated by the Pyongyang Metro webpage .)   I have tried to keep up with news from North Korea and was fascinated by a recent item describing the country's National Defense Commission Reconnaissance Bureau which included this: The general bureau now consists of six bureaus for operations (Bureau 1), reconnaissance (Bureau 2), overseas intelligence (Bure...

I like to keep track of new notation/engraving programs, and here's an interesting new one: Nihavent .  It's designed immediately for notating Turkish maqam and microtonal music with appropriate accidentals and accurate playback, but the structure of the program, as a whole, even in this beta version, is very promising for general use.   Among other things, it may well have the easiest learning curve for any notation program available, with the seven page users' guide all you really need to get started; I was able to compose a small piece on screen immediately after opening the program for the first time.  [As a bonus, AFAIC, I was able to enter time signatures with non-powers of two denominators — 2/3 or 6/5, for example — and not only to space and print correctly but playback without a hitch.  Henry Cowell would have been very happy about this!] This is a beta version and a number of additional features will be required to make it competitive with well-known general-pur...

In the past week, chaperoning a young supernumary, I've heard a rehearsals and two performances of Don Carlo , which has been ample reminder that, in the 19th century, opera was the principal genre for innovation in orchestration and that, among opera composers, Verdi was an orchestrator with only one major competitor, Berlioz.  (Yeah, Berlioz, I've been wanting to add Les Troyens to my list of landmarks for long, long time but have been more than a little frightened by the prospect of writing something, even something very brief, about the grandest of the grand operas; the piece, as a whole, and in so many details, is more than remarkable.) In any case: Verdi, orchestration. Pay attention to these things: the economy of his ensemble writing, allowing for the most potent use of the entire range of scoring patterns, from solo instrument (in Don Carlo, exquisite writing for clarinet and cello in particular) to chamber-scale groupings all the way up to full orchestra, choir and ...

Once again, from the lattice of coincidence:  My daughter and I are in the kitchen planning a rainy day baking project and listening to the radio.  We settle on an oatmeal cookie recipe, on an old 3"x 5" card in my grandmother's handwriting, but attributed to one of her neighbors in Sacramento. The recipe, conspicuously, includes butter as half the fat in the recipe with the other half assigned to lard, yep rendered pig fat, an ingredient that almost shocks with its out-of-stylishness.  As we discussed whether to double the butter or even to use a substitute vegetable shortening for the lard, with a long detour into the pros and cons of rendered pig fat*, Emma began to giggle at the music coming from the radio.  It's an old recording with plenty of wobble and rhythmic surface noise and the solo violinist is using a lot of shockingly out-of-style portamento.   The more I listened to the soloist, the more I became convinced that his portamento had been exactly right for...

Here's a guilty pleasure: China Miéville's latest novel, Kraken .  Among many other things, it's the big squid book that someone one "i" and an accent more than the famous author of a famous book about a big whale was bound to write and it's the author's long-overdue take on the whole cult'n'conspiracy-thriller genre, from Dan Brown on down, adapting an appropriately brisk diction to rush from a recognizable London by a serious of ever-more startling leaps of imagination and suspensions of disbelief to an ever-weirder revision of the city.  It begins in the preserved specimen jar collection of the Darwin Center at the left end of the Museum of Natural History (which is the closest thing to a cathedral for non-believers as the city has, and frames the story nicely for its dynamic between science and religion) and rapidly moves into parts of town more reminiscent of Miéville's UnLunDun or even the parallel cities of The City & The City or t...

At a concert last week featuring works by a handful of younger composers, a phalanx composed of friends-of-composer-X positioned themselves across the last row with the intention of providing the loudest possible acoustical approbation for the performance of a new work by amigo X. No problem there: bringing an ample number of claqueurs to a concert is an old and even semi-honorable tradition. Unfortunately, the members of this claque also decided to use their forces to provide the loudest possible acoustical dis approbations for works by composers Y & Z. This was not good form. Further, they were unrestrained in audible comments during the performances of pieces by Y & Z. This was even worse form. The pieces on the concert complemented, even amplified one another, so there was was no competition among them, no zero sum to be protected for the net bonus of composer X, and no one would have been in the least insulted had the entire team entered only for X's piece a...

Guillaume de Machaut: Ma fin est mon commencement .   I'm going to cheat here and let this little rondeau — with all of its play of multiple symmetries and self-similar constructive wit uniting text and tunes — stand in for the whole corpus of Machaut's music, because I came to know the whole surviving catalogue more or less at once and I'm attached to all of it, secular and sacred, monophonic and polyphonic, and must refuse leaving anything out.   It may be fairly argued that Machaut's musical style is not sufficiently distinct from the surviving music of his contemporaries, but none of his contemporaries, nor his immediate successors left a body of work comparable either in size or variety to Machaut's, and none, to my ear, was his match for the shape of his tunes or sensitivity of his ensemble textures. (And, of course, his musical work was a complement to his poetry.)       The Machaut celebratory year of 1977 was an important one for me, as discovering Machaut...

The New in The New Music immediately suggests an element of the unfamiliar, unusual, strange, foreign, or alien.  Sometimes this may indicate wholly novel materials, but mostly the novelty is in the deployment or arrangement of the materials (John Cage/N.O. Brown once again: syntax is the arrangement of the army ).  Sometimes a rage for the new (Morse Peckham: Man's rage for chaos; biology, behavior, and the arts ) is a form of criticism, a more-or-less explicit expression of dissatisfaction with existing states of affairs.  Sometimes this is an ethical judgment, other times this is simply fulfilling a need for variety.  We all have some need for variety: in music, in food, in clothing, in landscapes, in the arrangement of furniture in our living rooms. And, most likely, we have some need to manage a balance between variety and stability, between the unexpected and the predictable. ( In his later years, Cage always wore the same kind of clothes, French worker's denim, so that...

News comes that the composer Johannes Fritsch has died at 68 after a long illness.  His name is probably most familiar for his days as a member, usually playing viola, of Stockhausen's touring ensemble, but should be better known for his work as a composer, publisher, and teacher, succeeding Stockhausen at the Musikhochschule in Cologne and serving for decades, with his students including Volker Staub and Caspar Johannes Walter, two very good composers.  Fritsch was the founder of the Feedback Studio and Verlag, always billed as a cooperative but basically a one-man-show.  Initially focused on sharing resources for making electronic music (very much in the spirit of Ann Arbor's Cooperative Studio or the San Francisco Tape Music Center) and some concert presenting, the focus became publishing, both of performance materials and of a journal, the Feedback Papers, all produced in a cheerfully informal manner.   Fritsch focused on issues of acoustics and tuning (via Kayser and Part...