Jacob, coiled and cooped up in a dream job (oxymoron, right?) for 8 months, decides at last to organize a recital of pieces he commissioned and arranged for the instrument he invented. He includes me in the list. We all know what this means in relation to me: the process of responding in good faith bursts through all good-faith temporary deadlines ( Read more... )

We took our DIY educational-compositional-activist gryphon for a 2.5 month residency at an alternative college in the pacific northwest. Some of what we normally make from scratch every session, this time was to be done for us, this was supposed to be easier. Ha. More like jumping to Conclusions, the island in the Phantom Tollbooth. The mixedness ( Read more... )

splurged to see Pat Metheny and the orchestrion in Olympia: wall of drumset, two disklaviers, mechanical glockenspiel, marimba, vibes, mechanical bass & rhythm guitars suspended on the wall like int a store, two banks of I-dont-know-what robot slider tubes, and R2D2-ish hi-hat center stage, all lit like Pandoran bioluminescence. Impressive, then ( Read more... )

House Theater no. 41 (in a particular 23-year-old Urbana tradition of experimental political cabaret in a home-turned-public-venue, different from a project with the same name in Chicago) turned out to have more music pieces in the mix than usual -- a "gesture collider" for clarinets, a stark duo for basso profundo trumpet blats live & recorded, a ( Read more... )

A composition manifests the intentional putting together of elements that had not been put together before, in such a way that the elements together do something that none of the elements would do apart. Compositions are created by composers. A composer thus explicitly thinks and acts from desire: "to bring about that which without the composer and ( Read more... )

... ni el corazon que tiembla arrinconado como un caballito de mar ...

My 'conferencia' in the visions of transdisciplinarity simposio was 'composition between disciplines: statements and stories from a social change school'. Not wanting to be all me, I offered not only Sonata Quijada & the Ground Whereon, but also Rob's knit-covered trash ball he'd left at G!I - one week of trash in a 7"-diameter spheroid - which I ( Read more... )

august: difficulties and compensations ( Read more... )

Education takes place in a wide open role-space, with frequent change, combination and invention of roles ( Read more... )

A year ago today a performance night in wv where I offered an intergalactic rendering of a particular mood in honor of and tonight alex on modbit is being flummoxed by a luc ferrari collage, so he plays it twice. Sun cheer eased the few events of today--hci email list sent, chapter on border-blur edited, imc open house then tent city open house ( Read more... )