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I spent part of the morning of this last day of 2010 recording sounds from the San Antonio Creek, which flows down the south side of Southern California's Mt San Antonio (usually called Mt Baldy.) There's been enough rain and snowfall so far this year that the creek is full enough to get a decent roar from the falls down to the modest rapids below where white water pours over granite. This little stream is probably the body of water I know best, having lived for some time up in Baldy village as a kid and then moving down the mountain to a house on the San Bernadino/Los Angeles County line which was actually set along the old creekbed of the San Antonio which had long been diverted, first as water was drawn for citrus groves in the late 19th and early 20th century, and then, finally, as a concrete flood control channel was dug some half a mile to the East. The rivers and creeks of Southern California have been almost erased, and its almost spooky to consider that in the mid-19...

Symmetry in music is most interesting, I suspect, when it allows us to focus on the given asymmetries in our perception.  Time — for our purposes here, at least — can't go backward and our sense of pitch is radically asymmetrical.  Cage once quipped, in a bit of self-criticism of an early palindromic work that it suffered from its symmetry and that, for him, "symmetry indicates the absence of an idea."  And he was certainly right, in the sense that just writing out a palindrome or pitch-symmetric passage was, at its worst, just an automatism (and one quite typical of student composers venturing into the serial), generating more volume out of the source material, but the stuff generated was not necessarily going to be interesting, let alone musically useful.  But that's the worst case and, in the better and best cases, in which the composer is using symmetries — whether notational, or exact (as is possible with electronic media) — in ways that allow the material to art...

The Ear Reader is a new web magazine from the Netherlands.   The first issue includes items from Louis Andriessen, Samuel Vriezen and Anne La Berge, so it's definitely on the right track.  Let's hope it continues, as a namesake, in the spirit of its bifurcated pair of North American forerunners, the Ear Magazine West & Ear Magazine East . In any case, the ear is a favorite organ, so there's no reason The Ear Reader not to become a favorite organ on its own terms. 

Language Log comes up with another item for my little notebook about repetition, and yet more evidence that the minimal impulse is anything but simple: It is well known that if a familiar word be stared at for a time, or repeated aloud over and over again, the meaning drops away.  Read the whole thing, here .

In the middle of one of the recent drive-bys of the death-of-classical music trope, someone smartly observed that a good portion of the youth (and no-longer-so-youthful)  who would otherwise have been deeply engaged by music — whether as performers or listeners — had probably had their time and attentions and pocket monies siphoned off by some form of gaming, electronic or otherwise.   I think this observation is a smart one because gaming done well does more than resemble the kind of immersion in pseudo-encyclopedic synthetic worlds that thoroughly absorbed generations past and the raw numbers plotting the growth in the gaming market against the simultaneous decline in recorded music sales are quite convincing. Richard Wagner's success, for one, was in turning a mix of complex and ambiguous myth and fiction into musical stage works which worked simultaneously at broad narrative and local detail levels, and at both literary and musical streams, allowing for multiple paths to their ...

This article , comparing the WikiLeaks strategy with that of the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets is one of the strangest and more compelling items I've read of late. Composers have secrets, too.  There is a lot of debate over whether a piece of music should be explainable, down to the smallest single glyph of notation, according to a formal plan.  I simply don't know if that is even an interesting question, let alone criterion with which to evaluate a piece of music.  For one, any piece can be described by an indefinite number of algorithms and I am unaware of any convincing means for determining which algorithm is most efficient, relevant, meaningful etc., thus whether it is necessary to know the particular plan followed by the composer in order to understand how the piece works (let alone what it means)  is pretty much up in the air. For another, I am pretty much convinced that composers, whether formally or informally, negotiate between calculation (the plan), chance (or circumstance ...

Drones and harmonic sweeps. At one point in time, I think I was prepared to have all my music made of nothing more than long sustained sounds, as long as breaths would hold, maybe even as long as the electricity stayed on. Sustaining sounds created an opportunity to — as my teacher La Monte Young put it — get inside them, to hear how they develop over time, to attend to individual components, partials, of these sounds. (This interest was naturally connected to my work in just intonation.) This was indulgent — and I was particularly indulgent of harmonic spectra & finding ways to sweep through them — but that was California around 1980, a rather indulgent time. The fashion was clearly for harmonic singing, for tamburas and didgeridoos and Tibetan long trumpets and alphorns, composers from Erickson to Stockhausen to Tenney made beautiful drone- and harmonic-series based pieces and, of course, a cottage industry of new age-y offshoots developed. That time, for me at least, has lo...

A distant horn. Curious how so many favorite sounds have as much to do with their embedding in space, often particular spaces.  Christian Wolff said that he wrote his Groundspace specifically because he wanted to hear Gordon Mumma's horn in the distance.  The association of the horn with the hunt, as in hunt to kill , I can do without, but there is something about the chase as a ritual event in a particular space, with an acoustic element, and the unique, if brutal, clarity of the relationships between the participating animals (wild, domesticated, and people) that goes deep into some part of our consciousness.  The horn, the horn, the lusty horn/‘Tis not a thing to laugh to scorn.  Posthorns, a form of communication ancillary to the delivery of other media; the image of the posthorn (as every reader of Pynchon knows well) still adorn the post offices of many countries.  Ives remembered, beautifully, his father's horn (in his case, a cornet, descended from the smaller, 4...

The doppler-shifted sound of a passing freight train.  Fixed in memory are the sounds heard in the early morning in my parents' old house in California, just a few blocks below the AT&SF tracks; especially when the air was thick, shaping, focusing the sound like an acoustic prism. Many composers have been fond of or inspired by railroads and railroadianna: Honegger, Partch, Toch, Krenek, Reich, probably too many others to mention.   In the early sixties, my father was fond of showing off his stereo to guests with the demo lp of railroad sounds, from steam to diesel and electric, that came with the set.  Later, I loved to put an ear close to my model railroad and listen to the miniature approximation of the big iron stock, feeding oil and aspirin tablets into the chimney of the engine to make it steam, whistle, and smoke.   But already, it was clear that those sounds, once emblematic of modernity, were increasingly the stuff of nostalgia.  Doppler shifted sounds, whether concret...

Sul ponticello.  Playing at the bridge of a bowed string instrument makes the relative amplitudes of the partial tones unstable, discontinuous, unpredictable.  It is very useful in contrapuntal environments in which the register of the individual instruments should be ambiguous (see the third and fifth movements of my string trio, Figure & Ground .) 

This story , about a public conversation between Steve Martin and the art critic and journalist Deborah Solomon is a telling slice of our times.   The promoter and some slice of the audience apparently expected a series of funny take-home lines and some celebrity-grade gossip and insider talk but were disappointed to instead hear a serious chat about modern art, for which the promoter is now offering full refunds.   While there is perhaps something to be said here about truth in advertising, as the expectations of the audience, when offered a public conversation with Mr Martin, were probably reasonable when given no explicit indication that the theme of the evening would be modern art (a topic both participants know well) rather than mass media entertainment.  On the other hand, however, it's a bit disappointing that no one (the promoter in particular) has made the case for the value of the topic chosen, whether advertised beforehand, or — and more refreshingly so — delivered to th...

Bowed metal, of all sorts.  Sustaining complex sounds with non-harmonic spectra with unpredictable developments, yet sounds which are intensely gratifying to the ear for their internal proportions, the way they fit together and create musically coherent continuities.  Pride of place belongs to the saw, of course, and not just for its haunting melodic capacity (isn't their something deeply compelling about metallic sounds with clear pitches that slide?), but its harmonic dimensions as well, both from high pressure multiphonics from a single bow stroke and for the ability to sustain overlapping tones produced at more than one position along that s-curve which places the metal in exactly the right tension.  Then comes the bowed flexatone, a useful and portable auxiliary to both the saw and the hammered flexatone (use lots of rosin).  Bowed vibraphone and marimba come next, best in a careful choreography between notes produced at front and back, with some possibility for producing harm...

There was a time when I had had an obsession with kites, in particular with the use of kite strings to convey and wind to power assorted noise makers (in three categories: clackers, whistlers, things that go buzz). The intention of my research was to eventually put these sounds together into a composition for an ensemble of kite-fliers in a meadow on a windy hilltop, or perhaps a beach.  It would have been very much a Santa Cruz-kind-of-piece.   The materials (seven kites, each with its own set of wind-driven noise-makers) and the variables (distance, timing) were clear, but, not wanting to make a recorded work, a concert was problematic, contingent upon weather.  Abandoned project, but now realize (following Cage and DeMaria) the usefulness and beauty of a contingent situation; there is really no necessity that each performance be "effective" thus this piece might be usefully revisited.   (Image: the composers David Cope (trumpet), Steed Cowart (umbrella), and Daniel Wolf (k...