Blog
Category: On the Beat
29 October 2026
The video from your performance last month is now up on YouTube –
Chester Biscardi’s performance guide–
Luca Marenzio - Solo e pensoso i piú deserti campi
1. Les Thimmig’s “Mother Chord” from Arrhythmia contains …
17 October 2026
A Small Music Festival
Above: composer David Amram, with flutist Mindy Kaufmann, left; pianist Molly Morkoski, right, at The Village Trip 26, held at St. John’s in the Village, where the piano and the audience are both on the same level.
To step away …
18 September 2026
Cults of the small:
Jean Paul Richter’s small is humorous. More specifically it is picaresque. In his Vorschule für Ästhetik he assembles a vocabulary that examines how the picaresque works.
Wit and Acumen:
Witz discovers the disguised priest …
31 August 2026
The album *Bed of Creeks and Coils* is now released on New Focus Records.
Kyle Miller one of the rare composers who takes on the formidable task of negotiating the powerful redolences of the famililar. I take that as a noble challenge. He shares this …
25 August 2026
depicted: Ted Hughes. Harold Meltzer set him. Check out his Shakespeare book.
Fallout from the Death of Tragedy
–Armida, and what the tragic economy required–
TLDR: First corollary to the death of tragedy is that essentializing is not …
25 August 2026
More Fallout from the Death of Tragedy
TLDR: The second corollary to the death of tragedy is that strong men appear ridiculous and attract not the brightest lights, post-tragedy. Stifter was motivated negatively by Napoleon. Beethoven did the right …
24 August 2026
The Death of Tragedy
My readings of Stifter and Jean Paul, my hearings of Brahms and Schumann, these clashed last night with Schiller’s essays on tragedy, the sublime, and the pathetic. The death of tragedy fell quickly out of that …
22 August 2026
“It follows from the lawless, capricious spirit of the present age, which would egotistically annihilate the world and the universe in order to clear a space merely for free play in the void, and which tears off at the bandage of its wounds as a …
