kimberlyyeo010198

The business of downloading music made plain by David Lowery (him of Camper Van Beethoven and Cracker fame). Bottom line: money is being made, just not by the people who made the music, and you're paying for it on all sorts of ways, just not to the people who made the music.

I've quickly become very fond of these two sets of songs by Charles Shere, to texts by Carl Rakosi ( here ) and Lou Harrison ( here ).  The Rakosi-text'd pair are for mezzo accompanied by violin and percussion, the Harrison set of four for tenor and accordion.  (It's always useful to have some art song repertoire accompanied by instruments other than the piano!)  Both sets are recognizably within that uncanny valley in which Mr Shere's music seems to reside, composed intuitively in that space where the modern and anti-modern as well as the plain and the artful are superimposed.  Playing through Shere's music, as I am like to do (his Sonata ii: Compositio ut explicatio is another long-term tenant of my piano top), I've often had both (a)  the sensation of being unsure whether it belongs more to the 'teens and twenties of Stein and Duchamp and both the musical ultramodernists and Virgil Thomson (at his naughtiest) or to a somewhat more recent — and distinctiv...

Are you composing?  What are you up to?  In principal, yes, but there are all these loose ends... There are always several projects on my desk, in various stages of progress.  Some are compositional projects, others pre-compositional or even theoretical.  One compositional project is, in principle, finished, a piece with a very large number of possible realizations through combinatorial excess, but I've decided not to let it go until I've played through a number of those realizations to my own satisfaction, which has meant picking up the clarinet for the first time in decades and seeing if the music lies under the fingers well.  One "theoretical" project was a fictional reconstruction of tonality in which, depending upon the number of active voices, everything depended upon minimal voice leadings from the three perfectly even divisions of the octave.  My constraints turned out not to be limiting enough and the whole system fell apart under the sheer number...

The future just ain't what it used to be, and when older visions of the future are more attractive then the present reality, our choice is either disappointed resignation or to do the hard labor of imagining an alternative. (Personally, I'm always disappointed when I go to an orchestral concert because the orchestra, in many ways, stopped developing technologically just before the suggestive bits of preposterous steam age technology could flourish as instrumental designs...  in my heart of hearts, with my own future of music being somewhat more retro and steampunkish than, say Stockhausen's or Varese's, I really want orchestral instruments to look like Ophicleides and Marxophones and Dr. Seuss's most preposterous horns and fiddles and harps. I expect David Graeber new article in The Baffler , "Of Flying Cars and the Declining Rate of Profit ", is going to get a lot of attention and it should, not as a finished argument but rather as the beginning of an urg...

THE ESTIMABLE Tim Rutherford-Johnson (aka The Rambler) reviews a performance by the Jack Quartet and writes of John Cage's String Quartet in Four Parts : "The JACKs’ version has a more sing-song, almost folky quality that highlights the Appalachian pastoral thread that runs through Cage’s music..." While that "Appalachian pastoral" phrase will probably be grocked without much of a second thought by readers familiar with the Cage quartet and some of the more famous items in the American mid-20th century repertoire as referring to a certain style of writing, mostly diatonic, sometimes pentatonic, and occasionally jerked about by some tactical chromaticism,  friendly to open fifths and milder clusters (those vertical structures just on either side of a simpler triadic harmony), with some emphasis on writing for strings (and for those strings some preferences for open strings, natural harmonics, and reduced or no vibrato), and featuring a lot of shared attacks in...

A moment, on her birthday, to recognize the breadth of Pauline Oliveros's work and the seriousness of her challenges to the received practice of composition: from the early work in the studio, in particular that extraordinary series of works realized in real time to the life-long advocacy for the appropriate uses of technologies, both archaic and new, a composer as comfortable with the latest digital sound enhancers as with a conch shell; the theatre pieces, which range from the vaudevillian to the ritual (and often making no distinction between the two: usefully reminding us that many clowns are sacred and many rituals are, usefully, hilarious); the use of physical spaces as instruments and the exploration of those spaces as a composed task to performers ( In Memoriam Nikola Tesla, Cosmic Engineer );  the ease of her negotiation between composition and improvisation, working with trained musicians and with heretofore non-musicians, as well as an ease with the format of a performan...

The new production of The Rake's Progress at the Frankfurt Opera is very good, the level of music-making superb.  The Rakewell/Shadow team of Paul Appleby and Simon Bailey just plain own s the wager scene in Act III, and the conductor, Constantinos Carydis, kept the pace just right, giving the evening a musical and dramatic shape that put the required focus to the two big arias that really count, Anne's (Brenda Rae) and Tom's, and that amazing wager scene, using an appropriately scaled-down orchestra that reflected well on the Frankfurter Opera and Museum orchestra's ease with both earlier and contemporary repertoire.  The decision to use the composer's authorized alternative of a piano instead of the preferred (mid-20th century "modern") harpsichord for the recitative accompaniment might be argued with, but with the aging of the HIP that's increasingly ambiguous territory.  The production was sharp, the sets modest, and presented a compellingly twis...