Blog
Tag: compositional practice
26 March 2026
I’m jotting down thoghts for my next talk at the Berlin Academy of American Music’s Composers Workshop, June 29 to July 5.
Without thinking, often even without overthinking, US music stays with what works.
Those working in an uptown head …
14 March 2026
Mario Davidovsky was an honored guest at FICA21, a new music festival and seminar at the Universiad Veracruzana. He later convinced FICA212’s founder and Director Emil Awad to bring me to Xalapa 15 or 20 years ago.
Emil Awad finished high school …
24 February 2026
Froberger & Buxtehude to Bach
Bach clearly admired the bizarre in the works of Buxtehude and Froberger, and he composed all his own craziness into his revolutionary cosmic order wherein details of the A section that the work of modulating to V are …
23 February 2026
Image–pianist Kees Wieringa, Simeon ten Holt’s great champion.
Kees Wieringa’s Simeon ten Holt Playlist
Kees Wierinng, at the YXIE Festival in Villebelevin, 2024, organized a performance a performance of ten Holt’s Canto …
20 February 2026
In diatonic music, the complement, the tritone transposition of the diatonic hexachord, emerges as the shadow, the unconscious of the diatonic hexachord that is held, that *governs* the surface. This is now an ancient 20th Century habit of thinking. No, …
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 …
3 September 2025
—->The Village Trip’s Wolpe-Albers-Brouwer-Feldman Weekend<—-
With Thomas Flippin, David Glaser, Ben Verdery, Kentner Anderson, Robert Morris and much more.
The performance will feature Leo Brouwer’s Cuban Landscape With …
