A Little Housekeeping

NaBloPoMo Day 27!
I found out recently that the audio hosting site I had been using isn’t working anymore. It might come back at some point, but for the moment there are licensing issues to deal with. It’s too bad, because I was hosting my own music with them, so licensing really wasn’t an issue for [...]

A Musical Interlude

NaBloPoMo Day 15!
The conclusion to my little series on criticism continues to brew, so I thought in the meantime I’d post some Actual Music. Have you ever heard the quote, “Writing about music is like dancing about architecture”? I think I had first heard it attributed to Laurie Anderson, but apparently it’s one of those [...]

Criticism: It Sucks! (part the third)

NaBloPoMo Day 13!
I left off yesterday discussing my utopian vision for a better world. Or, at least my fervent hope that human interaction isn’t by definition doomed to devolve into nitpicking one-upmanship, and that we just might be capable of more. I have just a few more thoughts on the topic for now.
If we [...]

Criticism: It Sucks! (part 2)

NaBloPoMo Day 12!
Meeemmmm’ries!

When I was a fresh-faced, eager young grad student in the first term of my Ph.D. composition program, I took a seminar in the Critical Studies division of my university’s music department. (That’s an updated term for an updated type of musicology, btw.) Even though I wasn’t a musicologist myself, I [...]

My Musical Conversion, Part 2

NaBloPoMo Day 7!
Yesterday I recounted the story of a defining moment in my musical education, when I learned that classical composition didn’t end with the dawn of the 20th century. (I wonder what my life would’ve been like if I’d learned this earlier — then again, I was enough of a geek in high school [...]

My Musical Conversion, Part 1

NaBloPoMo Day 6!
In yesterday’s post, I mentioned a few of the seminal composers and musical movements that developed during the 20th century, and that, depending on your point of view, either a) advanced the field of music in exciting ways, casting off the shackles of outmoded 19th-century Romanticism and opening up whole new worlds of [...]

Piccolo’s Collected Works, vol. 1!

NaBloPoMo Day 5! (Happy Cinco de Mayo! )
It probably won’t come as a surprise that I have a musical cat. His name is Piccolo, after all, and he was raised in a musical household. I knew someone once who claimed that she could not practice her guitar or recorder because her kitties couldn’t tolerate [...]

Keyboards of the World, vol. 3!

NaBloPoMo Day 4!
A couple of pianos from my San Diego whirlwind Theremin Concerto première tour didn’t make it into my previous KOTW post, because I shot them with my cell phone camera and hadn’t yet transferred them to the computer.
Here they are in all their lo-res glory — 2 shots of the piano at the [...]

New Tabs for your Clicking Pleasure!

I direct your attention to the top of the page, where you’ll find two new tabs to click on!
Listen to This! is a collection of the original pieces that I’ve posted on the blog (or elsewhere on these vast wide internets) before, conveniently corralled so you can listen to them anytime.

The Fascinating Life of a [...]

Theremin Concerto Media Wrap-up!

Well, here I am back home in Michigan, but I’m still basking in the glow of last week’s excitement. The three performances of the Theremin Concerto went very well, and the audience response was fantastic! So many people came up to me afterwards and told me how much they enjoyed it — a few even [...]