Blog
Category: How to Talk about Music
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
I am looking for the edge of what you can hear. I can just about hear it but I can’t quite. That’s the thing I want. How do you get there? It’s a travel because it’s way on the horizon. And sometimes you find it to …
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, …
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 …
24 September 2023
Taking up Bowery Haunt again with Oren Fader has led to a continual stream of quiddities emerging from the experience of the music. Talking about them makes them seem abstract, but these are visceral. I am only interested in the visceral – what …
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 …
