kimberlyyeo010198

For all my engagement with formal experiments in my music, usually involving extensive planning, research, development, design, calculation etc., as often I just compose from brute force, drawing a continuous thread of music which starts someplace and goes wherever it (through that mysterious combination of habit, taste, caprice, and imagination) happens to lead.  But such unplanned excursions carry more of a particular risk than the planned journeys, as they depend — at least for me — on having a great deal of continuity in the compositional time and environment. When that continuity is broken, the thread can get lost and sometimes irretrievably so. Then you're left with fragments (which could be useful), outright abruptions (which could be useful), or fragile, tentative, questionable, or even broken continuities (which could be useful as well: think exquisite corpses .) (But could be useful is not necessarily useful .) A broken heating pipe is never expected and the pipe (yes, i...

I was in marching band for exactly one summer, the summer before I started high school.  Although I began with high expectations for marching, as a trombonist, in the front row of the Montclair, CA High School Marching Cavaliers in their smartly tacky Columbia Blue and Black uniforms, I quickly found out that I didn't like marching and marching didn't much like me. Not yet 14 and already over six feet tall,  I was at precisely that awkward moment in pubescent motor development when control over my limbs was more a matter of random nervous system activity than the control required for marching, enough so that I was, honestly, very bad at it (once obliviously and famously marching several complete rounds of the parking lot with each sides' arm and leg in complete synchrony, just the opposite of how it's naturally — and supposed to be — done), but I probably could have gone along with the program had I actually liked the music. For each morning spent that hellish summer ma...

I'm from Southern California, east of L.A. and grew up in in environment where film, no, movies had a deep presence.  I loved (and love, though parental responsibilities have slowed down the pace) going to the movies and watching old favorites or new discoveries on late night TV (for which German TV can be good.) Sometime in high school, something clicked and I suddenly had a revelation that movies could be more than just entertainment, they could intersect with the real world in unexpected ways and use the manipulation of time, sound, and image to tell me things about the world, sometimes shocking things, that I didn't know before.  The could help make the world more interesting and lively, creating opportunities for reflection and action.  Movies became almost as exciting as music.  What I liked, and like, most about watching film was/is paying close attention to details:  a line of dialogue written and executed supremely well, an uncannily timed cut, secret ...

This is a nice informal video of composer Kraig Grady talking about his studies with music theorist Erv Wilson.  I'm also a student of Wilson's, having my first lesson with him while I was still in high school.  He lived (and still lives) in one of the oldest houses in the Highland Park area of Los Angeles, a wooden place (the stone chimney fell in an earthquake a couple of decades ago) high above Arroyo Seco, now the oldest section of the the west's oldest freeway.  The terraced garden in front of the house was planted with corn seedlings (later to be joined by chenopods) which, I would learn, he bred from wild plants and old cultivars he had gathered, to plant on his family's ranch in the mountains of Chihuahua, where he had been born. (Wilson speaks English with a slight trace of Chihuahuan Spanish.)  The inside of his house was full of guitars fretted in unusual ways, not one of them with twelve equal steps to the octave, bamboo and wooden flutes from South Ameri...

Here are a few blogs and sites that have turned up recently: Sound Expanse , composer Jennie Gottschalk Detemporalizing , composer & poet Samuel Vriezen, now blogging in English Desiring Progress , pianist & musicologist Ian Pace Composer Daniel Goode New Musical Resources ,  trumpet player & musicologist Peter Gillette Classical Music is Boring , photo funnies Well-Weathered Music , composer Miguel Frasconi The Great (un)Learning , composer Christopher Shultis Helen Bledsoe, Flutist , exactly that Essays & Endnotes , theorist Stephen Soderberg Divergence Press , a new web magazine