Blog
Category: How to Talk about Music
14 September 2026
I defend 12EDO these days becasue it gets a bad rap. It is a quasicrystal, and creates the frictionless behavior within that is structurally the same as the frictionless – superconducting! property of some quasicrystals.
Quasicrystals do appear in …
1 August 2026
What Happened to the Cult of the Small?
or
Who Cares if You Sell Magazines?
Wm. Kentner Anderson
There remains a cult of the small in the US, and its predicament is a limpid encapsulation of the pathologies or our time, the pathologies of the …
30 June 2026
Holding and Letting Go
Chapter 1 of The Illusions of Postmodernism (1996) opens by inviting the reader to imagine a world where the Left had suffered a crippling political defeat. Eagleton’s argument is that postmodernism’s signature moves …
9 April 2026
This is mostly aimed at topical connections to some questions the arise from TE Hulme’s essay, “A Tory Philosophy” –
–can humans change?
–whither *the identity of man*?
These became right wing pieties to push back …
10 January 2026
Dear AM,
Like Fanny Doolie we like passing tones, but neighboring tones are merely for “shits and giggles”.
I keep learning from your value judgement. I go back to it again and again. I agree in principle with it, but I cannot think of a …
1 January 2026
Glossary of Musical Terms
This is a glossary of terms in and around tricks of the trade, tricks that go back many centuries and are now mostly eclipsed. This is normal. There are always modalities that are in fashion, relegating other modalities to the …
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, …
