Blog
Category: composers
18 March 2024
Wuorinen’s Brokeback Mountain
I come back to Brokeback Mountain from time to time. There are elusive mysteries lurking in Wuorinen’s great work and in Proulx’s short story. I’ve taken this dive before and each time I hope to get …
16 March 2024
depicted: Adalbert Stifter
Intro to Stifter’s *Many Colored Stones*
A Tale of Two Synecdoches
I met Louis Andriessen when I played De Staadt with NY Phil under Gunther Schuller. David Starobin was the other guitarist and Scott Kuney played bass. …
11 February 2024
The brilliant and enterprising composer Emil Awad is the founder and director of the Festival Camarata 21 at the Universidad Veracruzana in Xalapa, Vera Cruz, Mexico. Many of us have participated – Mario Davidovsky, Robert Pollock, Suzanne Farrin, …
19 December 2023
In a modern building, like a Frank Gehry building, the joinery is often custom joinery designed specifically for the needs of one building. The angles might not be 90 degrees.
So also in music. I am so accustomed to customized joinery that I find …
26 October 2023
In progress…
Yesterday at Oktaven Studios in Mount Vernon, New York, Cygnus recorded Martin Boykan’s “Diptych” and Richard Festinger’s “Hidden Spring”.
Some notes on Boykan, HERE. Those comments mostly about …
20 July 2023
Composer Frank Brickle shares his thoughts about Scott Johnson
Frank Brickle was always less pig-headed than I was. Frank was an early advocate for Morton Feldman within certain cirlces in which and at a time when Feldman was a hard sell. He advocated …
22 May 2023
Dina Koston, founder of the RSF, complained about neo-romantic music. The phrase I remember her using was “warmed-over Schumann”. But that was directed at other names, not at Del Tredici.
I was surprised to learn that she programmed the music of …
22 May 2023
Trickters Picaros and Del Tredici’s Herrick
Some picaresque resources
Access to the Picaresque, roughly from more probable to less probable —
Bugs Bunny
Rocky and Bullwinkle
Barry Lyndon
Gulliver’s Travels
Moll Flanders
The Reivers
Pynchon
Til …
