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Two names recently surfaced on my monitor belonging to figures who were well-represented early on in recorded electronic music, but who were not particularly close to the world of professional composers and have slipped into some obscurity. The first name, Ilhan Mimaroglu, appeared, sadly, in an obituary ( here ) had academic compositional credentials but was best-know professionally for his work as a jazz producer (primarily with Charles Mingus) for Atlantic records, which distributed his own music label, Finnadar, which provided Mimaroglu the opportunity to curate a series including his own electronic and acoustic music alongside work, much of it experimental, from Cowell and Varese to Cage, Rzewski and Hays. The second name is that of Tod Dockstader who is still alive, but no longer able to be active and to whom a new blog has been dedicated, here .  Dockstader did not have formal musical credentials, but was a professional sound engineer, a career he had entered via animation, ...

Heinrich Ignaz Franz Biber:   15 Sonatas for violin and continuo with a closing Passacaglia for solo violin, known as the "Mystery", "Rosary" or "Copper-Engraving" Sonatas (ca 1676). With a single manuscript source, rediscovered in 1905, we do not know the composer's intended title for the sequence of sonatas other than a prefacing remark that  he had "consecrated the whole to the honour of the XV Sacred Mysteries"; we know next to nothing about the circumstances of the composition of the individual sonatas and do not know if they had been composed together as a set or had been gathered together later by the composer.  In any case, the manuscript gathers them in a sequence mirroring a sequence of devotional prayers to the rosary, here in three sets of five sonatas, each of the fifteen sonatas in a different scordatura (the first sonata and the closing passacaglia use the standard tuning in fifths.) These pieces are famous for this uniquely ...

I'm a hard critic of my own work.  Over the past few weeks I wrote a solo viola piece, in three movements, sonata-is, even.  It's workmanlike, crafty , even, in the Hindemithian sense, but not much more. (Part of the problem may have come from composing directly into a notation program, which can encourage making music that behaves like known music.) I like the second (slow, to a mutating ground*) and third movements (fast, in square-root form) well enough and have some substantial doubts about the first, and while the whole might be useful for teaching purposes, to be honest, the piece doesn't add up to a compelling and memorable concert piece.  The question is does it not yet add up, or will it never add up?  And: is the amount of work required to make it work worth it?   My sense is that I didn't go into the piece with a distinct and clear enough idea to make a compelling piece, and what turned out instead was more a piece of habit than of invention, just mo...

Logistics. Spent the last week painting a room and laying a parquet floor in it. Had the vague and hopelessly optimistic idea that patterns of interlocking oak might inspire me much as Anatolian rugs inspired Feldman and all those Feldmanistas.  But not to be: this particular room had to be painted and this particular floor had to be cleared of its old covering and set with the new flooring while all of the major pieces of furniture were still in the room; they could be moved about within the room, but they could not exit, for there was no external space available in which to exile them, or, in the case of a large wrought iron bed frame, there was no way to physically remove the frame from the room except out the balcony window, through which it had once entered.  Not having a crane available, the bed frame had to stay, but somewhat more compactly, on its side, amply padded so that it might be rotated.  Flooring is not supposed to be done this way, it needs to settle in a...

David Antin: "the problem of architecture is not how to make it, but how to get rid of it. ”   Consider the qualities of permanence, ephemerality, decay (and/or metamorphosis), sustainability, and renewal as potential fields of creative activity.  That old saw about "architecture as frozen music" misses on both counts: music doesn't move (except in some psychological sense), but is itself movement, just molecules of air pushed about and dissipating, ephemera (sound → echo → memory forgetting); architecture, on the other hand, while slow-moving, is never frozen, it is planned and built over time, and when "finished", it is never done with decay and renovation, wrecking and restoration,  ruins and excavations etc., if they are "machines for living" (Le Corbusier), they cannot be immobile.  People, things, critters, water, energy, waste, gas, information, dust, memories: they constantly move in and out, some small or large part of the building cons...

Horizontal, nursing a summer cold, I've plowed my way through Daniel Heartz's Music in European Capitals: The Galant Style, 1720-1780 .  It has a lot of contextual data (especially of the who-met-whom-and-when-and-where-they-met variety) and usefully covers repertoire and composers and locales that have been slighted by the standard classical musical history survey course (which tends to jump straight from Sebastian Bach to Haydn).  Useful, but jeez, it is anything but a pleasure to read, with too little analysis of the music itself and an organization by capital cities and then by composers which often requires the author to do some awkward jumping.  (Fortunately, we have Robert Gjerdingen's delightful Music in the Galant Style to make up for some of the theoretical deficits.) Moreover, it's in a graceless writing style that refuses to invite the reader into repertoire that is often, very much inviting, especially when one considers a cast of composers including Vival...

A summer's evening of thunder and lightning is appropriate accompaniment to my current musical sketching. I'm considering a music-theatre piece and before I commit myself, I want to see if I'm able to compose a storm.  Some models are obvious:  Monteverdi's concitato style, Haydn's Chaos , the former more for the internal, personal, mental agitation of strong weather, the latter for the external qualities.  Some may be less so, for example, Berlioz's "intermittent sounds" which gets at the essential aperiodicity of a storm.  Storms have defeated composers:  Cage was never able to finish his "Atlas Borealis with Ten Thunderclaps" setting of those 100-letter words (once 101 letters) in Finnegans Wake, but some of the ideas went into the Thoreauvian Lecture on the Weather , with recorded weather sounds by Maryanne Amacher, a mixed success at best.  Ligeti abandoned his plans to write an opera out of The Tempest, apparently stuck on the storm, f...

Norman Lebrecht is raising alarms about the future of Sibelius music engraving software. Sibelius's parent company, Avid is, indeed, reorganizing and selling off other portions of its business, but, I've been in contact with the public relations office at Avid and they indicated they are committed to retaining the product  with aspects of the Sibelius unit being reorganized.  The full statement is: "Yes, Sibelius is staying with Avid and is an important part of our business going forward. We are happy with Sibelius' business. We're not commenting yet on details of the reorg out of respect to affected employees."   As I learn more about the reorganization — the questions are obvious: does this mean moving development or service outside of the UK? first among them) — I'll try to post what I learn here. ***** I've been using computers to notate music for about 25 years. From time to time on this blog, I've given updates on my notation software practi...