Modified from rosefox, it's ten ways you can tell that you are listening to or playing one of my compositions ( Read more... )

I finished a new piece today. It's only the second piece I've fully finished since my thesis. It took me four days, and while I've occasionally had complete sketches come together in a matter of hours, this is the fastest that I've gone from brainwave to the printed product ( Read more... )

I've been writing an awful lot of stuff in the key of D lately. Not necessarily D major; in fact, it's usually a blending of major and minor. Unless I'm overlooking something in my notebook, all but two of the pieces I've worked on since March -- that is, from my M.A. thesis forward -- have been in D, and one of the two counterexamples is a ( Read more... )

Recently (okay, it was a couple of months ago and I haven't gotten around to writing about it) I was thinking about the perception and reception of music, paticularly new music. ( How do you define music? )

( Things I have recently discovered... )

I am a rather strong-willed individual, at times almost perversely so. In particular, I can't stand to hear someone tell me "I'm right and you're wrong," even when that is indeed the case. For example, when Zanmi and I taught THEO back in '04, we ran into some pedagogical conflicts. To me, it seemed that on these occasions she would inevitably ( Read more... )

What? No CTY geekery this time? ( Music geekery instead )

Man...it's tough balancing creativity and responsibility. Well, I guess responsibility is hard for me whether or not I have to balance it with anything else. But creativity makes the whole thing fall apart. ( Why you shouldn't be creative. )

Measures in my thesis composition, Give Me an I: 426
Notes in Give Me an I: 8,422
Words in my thesis paper: 7,530

Instances of the word "Klangfarbenmelodie" in my paper: 1
Instances of the word "Bonehead" in my paper: 2
Instances of the syllable "NI!" (musically transformed) in Give Me an I: 5 or 6

Pages (11"x17") in the full score to Give Me an ( Read more... )

Though my incredibly vast (well, half-vast) readership mostly hails from faraway lands, I figure I might as well make an announcement here.

Give Me an I, my thesis composition, will be performed a week hence -- Thursday, April 21, at Tufts University. A hastily thrown together group of ten winds and percussion will be playing, and I get to wave ( Read more... )