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From the safe distance of a composer with an armchair appreciation for science, I'm something of a fan of the neuroscience of music. It's really exciting stuff and my impression is that we're only beginning to learn about it. Here are some aspects of music that I'd like — as a composer — neuroscience to tell us more about; as music if the temporal art par excellence, it's not surprising that they have everything to do with how we process events in time: 1. The two irreversible arrows of music: in pitch and in time. Inverting a sequence of pitches creates only a weak equivalence, indeed an equivalence which deteriorates as one moves towards extremes. And in time, a reversal of a sequence, last-on-first-out, is also only weakly equivalent. 2. The perceptual "borderlands" between parameters: between pitch and timbre or between form and rhythm or rhythm and pitch, including such phenomena as interference beating*. 3. The "chunking" of musical m...

A nice column by Kevin Drum on the dangers of multi-tasking, here . It's no surprise to learn that most people, when attempting to perform multiple tasks simultaneously, don't perform those tasks very well. This can be an annoyance — I don't enjoy conversing with someone in person who is social-media-ing away at the same time via one or more electronic devices —, or unfortunate — for the student who is expected to know the stuff on the lecture he missed because he was busy checking his email —, or downright dangerous (cell phone, autobahn.) It's too bad that more people haven't picked up on something that musicians have known for a long while: mastery of counterpoint is wonderful, but rare, and most of us spend our entire lives as musicians working at hearing more. The great contrapuntal virtuosi (say Bach, Berlioz, and Ives, to mention three of the best, but stylistically and formally very different composers) form a preciously small company, and as wild as ea...

This study of Shakespeare's linguistic innovations — neologisms, unorthodox syntax, etc. — and the brain is exciting stuff and has, AFAIC, everything to do with compositional innovation and experiment in music. As with Shakespeare, I strongly suspect that every major innovator in music has done things with sounds or their context that make the brain work more than usual and it is precisely that stimulation that keeps this music worth returning to again and again. I also think that many of the methods, often game-like, of the Oulipo in literature, the surrealists in literature and the visual arts, and many composers, particularly experimentalists, are designed as efficient means for getting right into that more-stimulated zone, often enstranging the familiar through even the slightest shifts in the selection or character of materials or their order in time or space.

Tutankhamun's trumpet was lifted from the Cairo Museum and recovered days later in the Cairo Metro. Be sure to listen to the sound sample of the old BBC broadcast.

As the last hardware form of commodified recorded music, that optical medium known as the audio compact disk (forward: "cd"), makes its slow exit from the marketplace, it's probably appropriate to take a moment to consider the fact that this creates a serious hole in the list of reliable gift object. Even a notorious recording skeptic like myself has been known to give and receive — and gladly, always gladly — too many of those little plastic discs in their plastic boxes (or, later, cardboard covers). And said cd does have some real advantages over the traditional alternatives: not everyone wears ties, drinks scotch, appreciates a good wine, cigars are out of style, none of my acquaintances is yet old enough to golf, let alone have a tangible use for golf balls, and let's face it, when uncertain about the recipient's tastes, choosing a piece of music seems less risk-prone than a book. While I have never become particularly adept at rescuing a suffocating cd fr...

Composers, as craftspeople, tend to overemphasize the professional, the formal, the finished, and the perfected. However, a lot of useful and valuable music-making is not professional and not yet formal or finished, let alone perfected, and this emphasis can often be a distraction from opportunities for music-making — indeed most music-making — in situations, environments and on occasions which may well be informal, provisional, and yes, (cheerfully) far-from-perfect. New music, in order to thrive, has got to go wide and deep into our musical culture, an established if dynamic presence, emphasizing not only the most prestigious occasions and institutions and requiring only the most virtuoso musicians. This means music for amateurs, music for children, music for pedagogy, and music for private use as well as civic and institutional functions. Fortunately, we have some very good models of composers writing pieces designed to reach wider sets of players and audiences which are nevert...

From a review of the new television adaptation of George R.R. Martin's Game of Thrones : At points, the soundtrack departs from its strongest mode—cool semi-serialism, a hybrid of Milton Babbitt and Hey, is that my phone? —and the presence of dusky tribal drums signal that people are doing it doggie style.

Here' s a very good essay by political scientist Henry Farrell on China Miéville's The City & The City . Without giving away the plot, while Miéville is known as writer of fantastic or weird (his preferred term) fiction, Farrell's essay addresses the fact that the most distinctive characteristic of the setting of The City & The City is one which is not fantastic but actually quite real, indeed completely ordinary, the social construction of our environment, what we learn to see and not to see. (One of the great trajectories for the reader involves the gradual realization that the book is not, as a genre, fantasy, but rather more properly police procedural. ) My own personal revelation about seeing and not seeing came first during one of those teenage summer jobs, bussing tables and washing dishes in a restaurant for minimum wage when I discovered, after a week or two, that it had become possible — if not necessary, to both coordinate our ensemble work and to p...

The remarkable Indonesian composer I Wayan Sadra has died at 57. The balance between experiment — and his experiments were often radical, combining voices, gamelan, western instruments and new resources (once even throwing eggs at a large vertical hotplate) — and tradition — he was also a virtuoso "classical" Balinese musician, specializing gender in wayang — was at the center of his work: “Regardless of the form, I always base my work on local music, especially gamelan. This can’t change.”

How is it that I can make ten minutes of orchestral music in an afternoon, but spend a week worrying over a single cross relation in a tiny piano piece? As far as I can tell, when it comes to getting a musical idea right, the compositional labor involved bears no reliable economic relationship to the scale and density of the music produced.

I'm quite fond of the series of novels (four, to date) by the (pseudonymous) James Church featuring the Pyongyang-based Inspector O. On the surface, they are detective novels with an exotic setting, but just below that surface they're something rather more, with proper resolution of the police procedural seldom on offer (the North Korean system inevitably makes that impossible) yet carried by the real mystery in the motivation and character of the central figure, O, and actually quite a lot of beautiful prose, much of it so tangential to the plot that the books sometimes seem like experimental literature. Indeed, in the third of the novels, Bamboo and Blood , there is one of strangest formal moves I've encountered in a work of fiction. At the end of a chapter, just about in the middle of the novel, O is sent to New York City. Naturally, from the perspective of a western reader, this very unusual trip for a North Korean police inspector ought to be something very impor...

It was the end of the 1950's and a promising young composer from Akron had been awarded a traveling scholarship to Europe for the Summer between the two years of his studies for his Master's degree, then the terminal academic degree in the US for composers. He had a grand time, dropping in at music festivals throughout the continent, getting to know some of the famous avant-garde music written by composers who had only been names to him before going across the pond. As his scholarship was in dollars, then a very strong currency, he had the fortune to be able to use very good exchange rates and some arbitrage in order to stretch his stay well beyond the summer. Indeed, he only began to worry about money sometime in March of the following year, when he was able to cash in his return ship ticket, which gave him an extra month, when, considering the possibility of taking a job locally, he was surprised to learn that he had "come into" (as they say) a small inheritance fr...

A very good lecture, Improvisation as a Way of Life: Reflections on Human Interaction by George Lewis is online here . While I was a student and as a journeyman composer, improvisation was an urgent topic, with status in the new music world at some loggerheads over whether one was an improviser or (a) not(ator), with no small amount of macho swagger on either side of the argument. This argument seems to have lost intensity within a musical community that has become at once more comfortable with diversity and more settled into routines of niche activity with far less acute competition for attention and resources between the niches. Personally, I started out somewhat combative towards the hard-core improvisers. I improvised myself with bliss in the privacy of my own atelier but was unconvinced by much of what I heard when improvisers went public and, honestly, I saw them as direct competitors for presentation turf and fees. I've long since become considerably more relaxed about...