Passacaglia from FIGURE & GROUND (1994-5)

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Unbearable Languidness of Institutions

If we had been limited to mainstream media this weekend, with the exception of BBC's Persian service , we'd have almost completely missed news of the events in Iran.  Traditional media institutions — aside from the fact that they never perform well on weekends — simply don't have the agility and networks of witnesses to cover stories that are not lead by releases from official sources and move faster than hourly deadlines. Internet reporting, on the other hand, while often — and wisely — having to carry caveats about verifiability, have proven themselves to have both considerable agility and a astonishing breadth of networked resources, many of them appearing nearly spontaneously.   (I'm personally amazed that two of the best sources have been diaries at the (left) Daily Kos and (conservative) Andrew Sullivan's page; new pages of photodocumentation from inside Iran and translations of twitter messages have also been very informative.)  I have no doubt that, with th...
Read more

Music for Merce (1952- 2009)

I just noticed this: New World Records has just released a 10-disk set documenting music used by the Merce Cunningham Dance Company with Works by JOHN CAGE, DAVID TUDOR, TAKEHISA KOSUGI, MARYANNE AMACHER, DAVID BEHRMAN, EARLE BROWN, STUART DEMPSTER, MORTON FELDMAN, JON GIBSON, TOSHI ICHIYANAGI, JOHN KING, ANNEA LOCKWOOD, GORDON MUMMA, BO NILSSON, PAULINE OLIVEROS, MICHAEL PUGLIESE, YASUNAO TONE, CHRISTIAN WOLFF AND OTHERS. Cunningham was a choreographer who used the music of his time with an acuity for the extraordinary ranking alongside only Diaghilev, Balanchine, and Graham and the great variety of composers represented here is only sample, missing works by composers including Gottschalk, Satie, Harrison, Hovhaness, Chou Wen-Chung, Bowles, Boulez, Nancarrow, Young, Lucier, Ashley, Walter Zimmermann and many others. As a student composer, going to a Cunningham concert or even and seeing the company musicians in the pit was — and is — an exciting model of how two (or more) art forms...
Read more

Enduring Optimism

Composer Gordon Mumma (my teacher, so I'm partisan here) has a new blog, here , and an updated webpage, here .   The greybox images on his site are particularly elegant; definitely a new trick this old dog will have to learn. I'm delighted, also, to learn about the music of composer Jukka-Pekka Kervinen, who has a website full of scores and sound files, here .    
Read more