19 January 2007

I’ll begin with a few words about this blog My intent is to use this to document several of my ongoing projects. First, the composition of my latest work, a piece for large ensemble to be played by the Columbia Sinfonietta under Jeff Milarsky on April 23rd at Merkin Concert Hall in New York. This piece will also be the focus of my dissertation and I thought it would be helpful if I were to write down some of my compositional decisions and the reasons behind them in preparation for writing them up in dissertation format.

Second, I will use this space to store my listening notes. I keep a rather strict listening regimen in which I sit with new pieces – recordings and scores – and listen to them each morning. I have been doing this for about ten years on and off. Originaly it was to acquaint myself with the major works of the Western tradition. Later, I began to get more comprehensive setting out to study particular composers in depth. In this regard, I found the best way to do this was to listen to everything they wrote in the chronological order that it was written. Now this becomes problematic when we reach works that have never been recorded. In this case, I am usually able to obtain a score and can have a look at the piece. To date, I have looked at the music of Schutz (ongoing – many works have been dfficult to obtain); Schumann, Berlioz, Messiaen, Ligeti, Carter (this ran into serious problems when I was unable to get scores and recordings of the music from much of the 90s onward) and Stravinsky. I have also been engaged currently with the music of Xenakis, Lutoslawski, Debussy, Schoenberg, Scelsi, Crawford Seeger, Copland, Brahms, Crumb, Vivier, Grisey, Ockeghem and Nono and to a lesser extent Ives, Britten, Ruggles, Ferneyhough, Boulez and Berg. I expanded the list exponentially when I got tired of listening to the same composers everyday. Lately, I have been listening to a lot of Xenakis for a variety of rather dull reasons. At a certain point, I realized that I would benefit more from this activity if I were to keep notes about the pieces I heard. These I will post here as well. I don’t claim that these notes are authoritative, nor that they are even interesting (I have my good moments and bad moments and some pieces provoke a better reaction), but perhaps someone might be interested. In many cases, I imagine they will be among the few things written about these pieces.

Third, I will use this to reflect on the process of getting an academic job in music composition, a daunting process to say the least, as well as discussing various other standard blog issues – performances, food and so forth. It will likely take some time for me to get the multimedia aspect of the whole thing down, so (if anyone is reading this) bear with me.

With that in mind….

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