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The first good visualization of shock waves — faster than the speed of sound — produced by a trombone, here . The visual is subtle (use the fullscreen view), but rest assured that the effect is great enough to explain at least part of the discomfort woodwind players may feel when seated directly before the low brass.

A video chat, with physicist Geoffrey West of the Santa Fe Institute, Why Cities Keep Growing, Corporations and People Always Die, and Life Gets Faster . West's observed connections between growth rates and the mortality or open-ended growth of an entity, is fascinating and I strongly suspect that it might also apply to music and musical institutions. If we begin to see orchestras, opera houses, and conservatories as corporate in their growth and innovation patterns, then their inherent mortality as individual organisms ought to be better recognized and, indeed, seized upon as a structural opportunity for innovative alternatives to replace them, for the problem is not that the community around an institution can no longer sustain musical institutions or that music itself lacks in attractive, compelling and novel content, but that the institutions themselves are, through lack of innovation (i.e. programming, performance and presentation style) and unsustainable growth (particularl...

It was also at Thones-les-Bains that Virgil Thomson, in a hotel room, lying on a down quilt he had placed on the floor for sun bath purposes, received the revelation that "Music makes no sense." He had, of course, been preparing himself for such a revelation in all his previous work. For, if one can break the rules given by a strict teacher and receive, nevertheless, the teacher's congratulations, obviously music makes no sense. Passage deleted by Virgil Thomson from John Cage's manuscript, eventually published in the Cage/Hoover Virgil Thomson: His Life and Music . (Source: Tommasini: Virgil Thomson: Composer on the Aisle .)

Most readers of books and articles about music are probably more interested in context and biography and in an impressionistic rather than deeply technical approach to describing the music itself, perhaps focused on the "meaning" of a work in extra-musical terms. (Interestingly, it's writing about popular musics that shies away most from technical description.) But — and perhaps it's the bias of a practicing musician, and a composer at that — I honestly prefer more technical descriptions and am eager to have some better ideas about how a piece was put together. I'm not embarrassed at all about discussions of materials and systems and processes and plans. I like lists and counts and charts and diagrams and lots of notated examples. And however provisional the relevance of a particular method may be to the madness of the music which ensues, I'm all in for the ride, because my intention is to learn, copy (which is composers' polite-talk for steal ) and ad...

Some composer colleagues are nicely represented online of late: A nice article about Larry Polansky, here . (Nice line: "Like most countries with sufficient access to leisure, America has its classical music, but we're so confused about whether we ought to resent or admire the broader world (esp. Europe) regarding matters of class and taste that we often have trouble perceiving it with anything like confidence.") Christopher Fox, in a quartet of soloists caught performing Kurt Schwitters' Ursonate , here . Has anyone else had the feeling that the Ursonate still refuses to resolve itself as music? And that that fact would be a sign of its continuing success? Statistically seen, Schwitter's peculiar economy of vocal sounds is definitely not linguistic in its character, but — attempts at conventional musical-formal analysis all defeated — neither is it musical in any familiar way. (In contrast, the works of Varese long ago asserted their musicality, in terms of ...

Clarity, focus, classicism. Alvin began as a neo-classical composer. "I like my music clean, like gin." A reduction to essences, distractions eliminated, the original minimal impulse. Pulses, stutters, beats, swarms. Alvin was once a drummer, playing trap set in dance bands or drumming for the Yale Marching Band. Music for Solo Performer is the piece Ionisation ought to have been, composing directly for percussion ensemble without the mediation of fixed notation, specialized players, rehearsal. The composer listens: Bird and Person Dyning . Breaking down parameters: Pitches becoming rhythms becoming timbres becoming pitches again. Navigations for Strings, Septet . Subverting cause and effect: Music for Pure Waves, Bass Drums, and Acoustic Pendulums or — through a massive increase in physical scale, going far beyond simple classical effects to the non-linear, the chaotic and catastrophic — Music on a Long Thin Wire . Sounds articulating spaces: "I'm not i...

Aren't the obbligati for bassett clarinet (in Parto, parto, ma tu, ben mio ) and bassett horn ( Non più di fiori) in La Clemenza di Tito just about the greatest things in the world?

"If I were only in it for the money, I think I'd hook myself up with one of those gigs on the fast-growing and lucrative death-of-classical-music circuit, jaunting off to foundations and conservatories and sunny island conventions and well-catered, bubbly-lubricated board meetings, lecturing and consulting and prognosticating and doing the shake-down rounds in hotel bars, just me and my expense account doing our very best to help drain those rapidly-depleting coffers that otherwise be spent on, well, music."

An animated introduction to French-style functional harmonic notation, here via the Lacrymosa from the Mozart Requiem , K626. (Hat tip: Walter Zimmermann)

What an incredible season for reading! David Foster Wallace's posthumous "unfinished novel" The Pale King has some of his finest writing, and some of his funniest, but it also makes one of the best case for the novel as moral instance, with his argument for the dignity of ordinary lives right up there with Pynchon's "keep cool but care." And then there's China Miéville's Embassytown , which I read in a non-stop, non-sleep frenzy and immediately — that is, now — started rereading just to get a better conceptual grasp on a book that is both the author's long-awaited space opera and a deep turn into some startling and compelling exolinguistics. But there's more — the last Paul Auster, Sunset Park (almost up there with Leviathan and The Book of Illusions ) is not to be missed... But this perfect storm of wonderful reads is a season spent with all my old favorites — all that is missing for me this season is a new Pynchon or a Harry Mathews —...

While May Day — in any of its forms — has faded as a public holiday, turned more into an extra day of personal or family vacating rather than mass public celebration, marking the day still seems worthy, whether as a pseudo-(or not-so-pseudo)-pagan celebration of the arrival of spring, with garlands and dances around the maypole and other such minor bacchanalia, or as a day honoring labor. I grew up in a place where neither was much celebrated: California had, arguably, too much Springtime and too brief a Winter to make celebration necessary and, although both my parents and 3-out-of-4 grandparents were union members, my lifetime has been one in which organized labor has moved from concentration on blue collar and private industry jobs to white collar and public employees, with all those years we weren't supposed to buy table grapes or iceberg lettuce so as to support Caesar Chavez's Farm Workers Union now just a childhood memory of another noble battle not-quite-won. So I...