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I don't do review recordings here, but will, as an exception, make a recommendation: Devisadero , music by Christopher Shultis (various artists, 2011, Navona Records ). This is music for wind ensemble, large and small, a set of songs, and a sequence of piano pieces. This is music about the New Mexican desert, but especially about walking through that desert, and I take it here that walking is not hiking with its suggestion of sport, but something more like Wandern , in which the environment provides deep accompaniment and encouragement to thinking and here, thinking-through-music. The album (can we use that word again, in the spirit of those 19th century sheet music collections?) is also a beautifully made whole, with the texts (not just prose) and images closely connected to the music.

Here's a new thesis about Mozart's death : that he died of too little sunlight, and thus, too little vitamin D. Here's a 2007 post meditating on the nocturnal life of composers: The working habits of the wild composer are as diverse as the music. Some, especially those pedagogically engaged, are early risers and writers, often finding their muse well before a proper breakfast has been hunted and/or gathered. Others keep strict bankers' hours and, when fortunate, their muses are equally punctual. But concerts and theatrical events in the western tradition are generally evening events (any doubt? is there anything worse than a concert in Darmstadt on a Summer's afternoon?) and many composers, like their concertizing colleagues, shift their timeclocks appropriately, four or more hours forward. After a concert, often the first item of discussion among the empty stomached participants is locating a local restaurant with late hours. (The comedian Don Novello once did a ...

Although I'm a GEMA member, and in general appreciate the fact that GEMA does about as good a job as any organization in collecting licenses fees for performances, broadcasts, and recordings, I have to admit to taking some pleasure in Anonymous's take-down of the GEMA website today, if just as a reminder of GEMA's inability to deal — technically, legally, economically — with the internet and as yet another marker of the screwed-up state of musical rights (protection, longevity & orphaning, compensaton). ***** I was recently astonished to learn that someone had written a blog item identifying pieces from this blog's Landmarks list available in recorded form on Spotify . While I appreciate the research effort here, the compensation model for anyone involved in the production of recorded music at Spotify is just not a good one and if you respect musicians, please don't use Spotify. I realize that more and more people simply expect to get recorded music for free (...

The factoid that Haydn and Mozart were members of Masonic Lodges suggests something about their liberal/enlightenment/secular associations in Josephine Vienna but probably doesn't influence the social lives of many composers nowadays. However, it might, in fact, suggest an interesting solution to the problem of finding a venue for performing your work. Many of the traditional "fraternal" societies, like the Masons, Foresters, Odd Fellows, Moose, Elks, Raccoons, Haymakers, Sons & Daughters of Lichtenstein etc., have been in continuous decline in membership for many years ( here 's a table for US Masonic lodges). Indeed, in many localities, they verge on extinction for lack of membership. But some of these groups have substantial lodge buildings, often with theatre-like facilities, and often in very convenient locations. And, as a bonus, they usually have their tax-exempt status all worked out, sometimes offer decent insurance policies, and may even have some en...

As a follow-up to my last post, which touched on open forms, let me mention two interesting items well worth reading. Among many other things, these items made it clear that my casual appeal for open forms was really an appeal for a field of possibilities, including flexible forms situated between the poles of the closed and finite and the open and potentially infinite, as well as the fact that these qualities need not apply to all parameters in the same way. First, Renewable Music commenter Scott pointed to a fascinating article on "game mechanics" and the relationship of players to those mechanics, a nice parallel to musical questions of the relationship of the player or listener to musical structures and perhaps of special interest to composers concerned with sustaining interest over large-scale forms. Second, the new issue of MusikTexte just arrived and, among many good things, there is a German translation of an article, originally published in Perspectives of Ne...

Since I've spent a good part of the summer working with pieces from the 1960s in "open" forms — modular, with multiple and/or flexible orderings of the component parts — I've been puzzling over how little current music takes advantage of such features. I also find it particularly surprising in that similarly open forms are abundant in contemporary game playing, whether narrative, competitive or constructive in character. But then again, I know next to nothing about games not played with a poker deck, a croquet mallet, a pocket knife, or a pony. I do, however, have contemporary role-play gaming to thank for the widespread availability of non-cubical dice: although my favored instrument for chance operations remains a deck of card, these dice are very useful for chance operations on the fly.

Here are three of my recent scores, downloadable for your perusal or playing pleasure: — Field & Stream , for five computers. — Among the Wires, an Illusion Space , piano solo for Alvin Lucier on his 80th. — A Map Drawn from Memory, portrait of Nanne Meyer in two parts , a small piano piece. These are small pieces, two of them occasional, so I won't say much about them, but that Field & Stream came out of work with some young people, writing for an increasingly common ensemble (i.e. laptops) but not to be in the business of writing software or patches or collecting samples, but rather to compose a structure (another Beckett-Gray code piece BTW) for musicians who do all of those things well and not to get in the way of their individual approaches. And it's about sounds of water: rain, river, ocean, drippage & drainage. Among the Wires, an Illusion Space , is a study in acoustical beating and microtones for an unprepared piano, featuring near-unison harmonics, an...

The new anthology SOURCE: Music of the Avant-garde, 1966-1973 , edited by Larry Austin and Douglas Kahn has arrived (UC Press, 2011*) and a revisit to that eponymous journal is well worth it, if only for a bit of time travel into that lively era**. The anthology has a good smattering of the content of the eleven published issues, including scores, articles, questionnaires, photo-documentation, and transcribed interviews/conversations. It is not as visually striking as the orginal multi-colored, multi-textured spiral bound original volumes, but I suppose that's just another example of how all the advantages of current technology and publishing don't necessarily add up to affordable production at the quality and variety of times past. But, all-in-all, the book is delightful and it is constantly striking how prescient Austin and his editorial brethren were in identifying music to which attention ought be paid, from Cage and Feldman to Steve Reich and Daniel Lentz to Harry Partc...

Barney Childs, Keet Seel (1970) for mixed chorus (ACA). I knew Childs (1926-2000) slightly, as he taught in Redlands, not so far as the crow flies from where I lived in Southern California but a bit out of the way for a teenager limited to bicycle transport, and in retrospect I wish that I could have known him better, as he was the more experimental and interesting of the local composers (who included Gail Kubik and Karl Kohn.) Childs's academic background — via Deep Springs College, Oxford (as a Rhodes scholar) and Stanford — was in English literature and it seems his initial ambitions were mostly as a poet. He was largely self-taught as a composer, but could count Aaron Copland and Leonard Ratner among his teachers and kept an open ear out from the useful distance of the desert, to whatever was going on at the moment in new music. Childs is probably best known for his solo instrumental works (especially the Sonatas for Trombone and Bass alone and Mr T., His Fancy for bass,...

I just reread Charles Shere's fine book Thinking Sound Music: The Life and Works of Robert Erickson . His final paragraph, on Erickson's final, enigmatic composition, Music for Trumpet, Strings, and Timpani is wonderful writing and absolutely on point: Music for Trumpet, Strings, and Timpani is cheerful and outgoing. It makes no attempt to investigate new territory; it is unconcerned with introspection or dark contemplations; it makes few demands of its performers (trumpet part aside). It is engaging and straightforward, as if to close a distinguished , inventive , and finally profound catalogue of over seventy compositions on a note of modest triumph. Music can be complex or simple, expressive or neutral, eventful or calm. It can contemplate things dark or transcendental. It can grieve or rejoice. It is profound solitude or communal cooperativeness. It is everything to its composer, at work on it; to the audience, it might mean anything. In the end — in Music for Trumpet, ...