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I have been seriously remiss in not including a link to the very nice website dedicated to the work of the remarkable Guatemalan composer Joaquin Orellana.   This is it , and it's well worth a long visit.   While studying in Buenos Aires in the late 1960s, Orellana became familiar with a state-of-the-art electronic music studio, but on his return to Guatemala City, the then-conventional resources available to him for making electronic music were seriously limited, so Orellana devised acoustical instruments — utiles sonoros (sound utensils) — fashioned out of available local materials, including bamboo, hardwoods, and scrap metal, which he used in place of the banks of oscillators and filters and other modules that were then featured, elsewhere, in analog synthesis studios, as sound sources.  These utensils proved to be much more than simple tools for subsequent tape manipulation, and would frequently be featured as accompaniment instruments to increasingly lyrical melodic material....

To date, over the past almost-six years, I've written about 46 personal musical "landmarks" on this blog.  These are not exactly items in the usual "best of" list, but pieces that stand out, for one reason or another, as landmarks in a musical autobiography.  Most of the pieces I've lived with for a longer time, but some — the most recent of which is an orchestral work by Richard Ayres — are new discoveries, Eurekas! from first hearing.  With one exception (the Buckinx 1001 Sonates , of which I've only heard a fraction, as the whole lasts about 24 hours!), I've heard all the concert works live. Some I've performed myself, in most cases I've spent time with the scores, and with the electronic pieces, I've spent hours with the recordings.  Charles Shere recently reminded us on his blog of the traditional sense of the term "Discrimination has to do with specific choices, not categorical ones." And discriminatory the list is, inde...

In the study, published Friday in Science , they showed how they measured the effect on a scale of about one foot (33 centimeters) to demonstrate how people age faster when standing a couple of steps higher on the staircase. (Hat tip: here .)

For many composers, for centuries apparently, part of the primal ritual of establishing a composerly identity has been an obligatory period of conflict with one's teacher(s).  I was lucky in that I was spared that period of conflict.  I got along with my teachers and they (mostly) got along with me and we even continue to get along pretty well.  Now, some of my teachers — Lucier and Young, in particular — came out of their own obligatory periods of conflict with composerly identities employing an absolute minimum of means to achieve a particular maximum of musical quality.  For their perspective, it is probably the case that my music tends to do too much or have too much, but thankfully they have been consistently gracious about it.   On the other hand, there are certainly a large number of musicians for whom my music appears pretty minimal.  I just emailed a copy of a wind quintet to a friend in the Netherlands who got rather cross with me because the score, with plenty of notes, ...

Karel Goeyvaerts: Nummer 1 (1950) (Sonata for two pianos). The name of the Belgian composer Karel Goeyvaerts is probably encountered most in discussions over who did or didn't compose the earliest completely serialized work (a pissing contest that won't be entered here.) The handful of serial pieces Goeyvaerts composed in between 1950 and 1957, for instruments or magnetic tape, are each remarkable, on their own immediate musical terms, above and beyond their technical features. Nummer 2 , for thirteen instruments, for example, is a work that finds company well next to pieces like Babbitt's Composition for Twelve Instruments or Wolff's Nine , which are a pair of pieces you wouldn't ordinarily expect to encounter in the same neighborhood.   Nummer 1 , originally given the title Sonata for two pianos and also known as Opus 1 , is something of a strict process piece, and to some extent, this process-character makes the piece more like some experimental repertoire tha...

I was out about town today doing some field recordings.  I was focusing on public transportation, conversing passers-by, skateboarding, and water, especially public fountains.  (There are vague plans to make a piece incorporating such bits of acoustical realia.)  One of the most fascinating things about many continuous or repetitious sounds is that when listening, even idly, we all start grouping events into rhythmic, indeed metric, patterns, finding stress accents in stimulus that is essentially undifferentiated, vague, or random.  This phenomenon, usefully, has a name, pareidolia , and is familiar with visual as with auditory sensations, whether finding poodles in cloud formations or rhythmic grooves in streetcar clatter.  Pareidolia definitely has a downside, in that it can provide the stuff to feed some serious misapprehensions about the world (it may well be the root of half the conspiracy theories floating around), but the upside, as a composer, is obvious, as we're actually ...

The opera season here in Frankfurt has begun again, and I find myself once again chaperoning an eight-year-old supernumerary to rehearsals and performances of Don Carlo .  While waiting around, I've heard a lot of Don Carlo , and heard it now with several changes of cast.  Verdi is not the turf that experimental composers usually tread, but I've been honestly impressed, and especially by those elements of the music which are simply not to be found in the score.  These, mostly of micro-timing, of tempo, rhythm, and rubato, are constantly in flux at the smallest level, and the practice here is one that comes honestly out of a real aural tradition. It helps, here in Frankfurt, that the orchestra and the conductor have a long relationship of playing Verdi together — more than thirty years — but the key here, I think, is the conductor, Carlo Franci (83 years old, if Wikipedia has it right), who has every note of the score in solid memory and it seems that every nuance of timing and ...

A video portrait on the occasion of Pak Cokro's 100th birthday. Pak Cokro (also known as KPH Notoprojo, KRT Wasitodiningrat, KRT Wasitodipuro), was one of the most important musicians of the 20th century, born into the royal house of Pakualaman, the minor court in Yogyakarta, Java, Pak Cokro eventually became music director of the Pakualaman and of the Yogyanese radio station. He was central to a movement to combine the classical gamelan styles of the two Central Javanese kingdoms, Surakarta and Yogyakarta, and became known in the west first through the Nonesuch recording produced by Robert E. Brown, and then directly, through many years of teaching in California. In California, his many students included the composer Lou Harrison. A performance of the Pakualaman's traditional royal entry piece, Puspawarna, under Pak Cokro's leadership was included in the recording which accompanied the Voyager spacecraft, a perfect example of human music-making at its very best.  This inf...

Charles Olson reads 'Maximus to Gloucester, Letter 27 [withheld]' (Mar 1966) (Hat tip: Silliman's Blog )

A list I subscribe to recently had a small item about Francis Poulenc's Dialogues of the Carmelites (1957), which is not exactly the kind of thing I write about here.   Dialogues may well be the most-performed opera of the second half of the 20th century.  It's a lush piece, requires limited stage resources, has forgiving vocal writing and is not overly long.  But it's not really a work which pushes any boundaries.   But this item did mention an interesting feature in the work: two players from the percussion section are assigned the responsibility for the sound of the (off-stage) guillotine, "one producing a crescendo-glissando with a metal object on the edge of a tam-tam(laid flat in order to create a dry scraping sound) as a grace-note to a hammer-stroke on a large wooden box produced by the other player." This happens to be a superb illustration of musical representation:  Poulenc, writing in 1957, could well have used a recording of real guillotine, or even ...

At the end of his recent blogged series, The Anosognosic’s Dilemma , Errol Morris quotes Noam Chomsky on the limits of human cognition:  “We are after all biological organisms not angels . . . If humans are part of the natural world, not supernatural beings, then human intelligence has its scope and limits, determined by initial design. We can thus anticipate certain questions will not fall within [our] cognitive reach, just as rats are unable to run mazes with numerical properties, lacking the appropriate concepts. Such questions, we might call ‘mysteries-for-humans’ just as some questions pose ‘mysteries-for-rats.’ Among these mysteries may be questions we raise, and others we do not know how to formulate properly or at all.”  It strikes me that musical experiment, the radical music, is always going to tease out such questions, such mysteries, sometimes with success but often courting failure (i.e. music which doesn't "work" or makes no "sense").  In doing ...

It took eight years to go from the Leif Inge's 9 Beet Stretch to the Justin Bieber stretch-out, and from there, I reckon that it's taken about two weeks to officially become a audio production cliché, which is probably a typical rate of idea consumption and exhaustion in the transition from art to commercial music. In the past week, I've received links to about a half-dozen new stretched pieces, all made, one assumes, in the wake of the Bieber.  Now, as an experimentalist, I have nothing against the use of clichés — there still being plenty (to paraphrase Schoenberg) of good music to be made from stretched out bubble gum — but the music can't stand alone on its slow motion.  Stretching is now just additional material, and a work of music using it will have to have other compelling qualities to sustain that material. 

There's a new website documenting the new music duo of Ed Harkins and Philip Larson, otherwise known as [The], here .  (Hat tip from the composer Steed Cowart.)  Based in the Music Department at UC San Diego since the early 1970s, Harkins (a virtuoso trumpeter and a specialist in complex rhythm) & Larson (a fine bass-baritone) are definitely not your typical academics, academic musicians, or just plain musicians (or are they dancers?)  [The] grew out of the now-legendary Extended Vocal Techniques Ensemble resident at UCSD from 1973 to 1983 and rapidly became a favorite on the new music circuit, with fans including John Cage and George Carlin.  New music is not necessarily a sombre affair.   (The video above is an excerpt from [The]'s signature piece, "for trumpet and dancer," a piece with perhaps the drollest page turn of all time.)

Run-on and runaway sentences; hanging sentence fragments; needling repetition; odd punctuation; obscurities and neologisms;  abrupt shifts of register, both up and down; anacoluthons; non-sequitors; too much stuffed away between ellipses, brackets, braces, or parentheses (when not hidden in footnotes below); seemingly arbitrary settings of text in italic or boldface character; metaphors mixed and mashed; knowingly faulty logic; opinions presented as facts; abused rhetoric (all 38 of Schopenhauer's Art s of Being Right on display and then-some)...  Guilty as charged!  All I can ask is that you, dear reader, bear with me even if these aspects of Renewable Music 's house style book grate like so many fingernails on blackboards or even more ants in a bento box on a Saturday picnic turned to thunder, lightning, rain, gentle rain, then too much rain... The idea — and there really is one, here — is that the webblog is still a new medium, and one which has not yet found its exte...