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While writing a wind quintet this week, the necessary downtime was spent finishing a pair of wonderful and wonderfully idiosyncratic books:  Thomas Pynchon's new novel, Inherent Vice , which arrived on Monday and not only read as quickly and smoothly as a Wild Turkey chaser but also carried the same emotional after-burn, and Henry Brant's orchestration handbook, Textures and Timbres .    I'll probably have more to say about the Pynchon later, but for now: damn! between it and Mieville's The City & The City , this has been the year for the weird-boiled detective novel.  As for the Brant, he is refreshingly modest and upfront in explaining the goal of the project in hand, which is achieving homogenous orchestral textures from mixtures of instruments. His method, through defining broad timbral categories, is a sound one and always based on years of empirical study.  Nevertheless, the real substance in the book comes in a number of verbal suggestions and in many of the ...

Why walk when one can leap?                                                              Move as if you've forgotten everything you thought you ever knew about how to pass, kick, fall and run;                                        Break everything down into independent constituent parts, recombine, overlay (simultaneous unisons that are not in unisons, duos that are not together, etc.);                                                                                                           Prowling.                     Count like a dancer, steps neither in clock-time nor in musical time;  The dance is distributed among the spines of the dancers, the dancers distributed throughout the entire available space, "front" is wherever in space each individual dancer faces;                                                                  Aquire movement everywhere: from animals, pedestrians, the computer, stepdance, ballet;                                                        ...

A day or two ago, the German novelist Daniel Kehlmann delivered a speech for the opening of the Salzburg Festival , where he is this year's poet in residence and director of the literature program.  He decided, in an unusually personal way, to talk about contemporary theatre, in particular the established "director's theatre."  The talk was personal because Kehlmann spoke of his father, the late director Michael Kehlmann, who he describes as "a man who, before all else, saw in the director a servant of the author," yet whose career ebbed from early successes in the face of a theatre world that increasingly expected the director to place his or her ever-larger own imprint upon productions.  Kehlmann Sr. became "old fashioned" and had frustratingly fewer opportunities to do his work.   (Kehlmann describes his own decision to keep a distance from the theatre and write novels as a choice for a career field in which no one could keep him from his work)....

Orchestration is a form of personel management: who plays what, when they play it, and sometime even where they play it. Composers don't always think of orchestration this way,  and it might be useful to look at other art forms in which this aspect is more explicit:  the best playwrights and choreographers, for example, manage the exits and entrances of their players supremely well. One of my pieces-in-progress is a wind quintet, a tricky genre due in large part to the fact that continuity has to be provided by players who have to breath every once in a while, thus inviting lots of entering and exiting in a continuous stream of changing scoring patterns.  But how might those patterns be sensibly organized, in a piece, for example, in which every combination of instruments is used only once?  I recently stumbled onto a nice solution to this suggested by a stage work by Samuel Beckett, Quad , a "frantic mime" for four players, lights, and percussion.  Beckett wanted to orga...

Writer Michael Chabon makes the case for the place of wilderness in young peoples' lives ( here ). Unfortunately, Chabon (or, one supposes, the editor who titled his piece) identifies this as a male phenomena, but otherwise I agree.  Growing up near open desert, mountain spaces, gravel pits, vacant yards, abandoned houses, and even cemeteries always meant preserves for adventure and learning empirically to deal with a measure of danger.  Building rock forts at the desert/mountain edge of Cathedral City or tree forts in Mt Baldy oak trees were probably the first unsupervised creative acts of any consequence in my life, and there's a direct line in my mind from these rough constructions to any music I've ever made.  It's a real pity that kids today are increasingly kept away from similar opportunities.  I suppose the trend to protect children from childhood misadventure is unavoidable (even in the first of the Great Brain books, set in Utah in the last decade of the 19th...

I'm just back from a short trip to London.  Pleasure, no business, and tourism pure were the orders of the days.  I heard a concert in the Music We'd Like to Hear series, a perfect example of composerly initiative, self-reliance, and the pooling of resources, in which three composers — John Lely, Tim Parkinson, and my friend Markus Trunk (all roughly on the experimental side of the new music community) —  each program an evening of music.  I happened to be in town for the third and final even in this year's program, John Lely's evening, which was a portrait of Tom Johnson.  It was great to see and hear Tom and his music again  ( Formulas for String Quartet , in particular, should be taken up by more groups) and also to hear a work of Lely's, The Parson's Code for Melodic Contours, which was a charming (and, in its way, post-Johnsonian) demonstration of the complexity of a simple melodic curve when projected simultaneously onto multiple pitch metrics.   The oth...

Sorting through some paperwork, I recently located an article from 1979, "Spatial music progress report" written by Henry Brant for the Bennington College Alumni magazine, Quadrille ; I've recopied the text and scanned the images and this is now online at David Jaffe's Henry Brant homepage .