Composers Forum is a daily web log that allows invited contemporary composers to share their thoughts and ideas on any topic that interests them--from the ethereal, like how new music gets created, music history, theory, performance, other composers, alive or dead, to the mundane, like getting works played and recorded and the joys of teaching. If you're a professional composer and would like to participate, send us an e-mail.
Record companies, artists and publicists are invited to submit CDs to be considered for review. Send to: Jerry Bowles, Editor, Sequenza 21, 340 W. 57th Street, 12B, New York, NY 10019
Jerry says it's quiet, but I left on the 13th to visit family, drive over a lot of Alabama, and spend a morning at the Library of Congress xeroxing music by Marc Blitzstein (the vocal scores of I've Got the Tune and Nightshift) and Earl Robinson (a Soviet edition of songs with texts in Russian and English--If you've ever wanted to know where you can get the lyrics to Joe Hill in Russian...) and more stuff happened since then than I can keep up with--wiki and all.
Anyway, I just want to register the fact that I have, as of Tuesday, read all of the Taruskin Oxford History of Western Music. (Sometimes I think about a blurb that Virgil Thomson wrote about some book: "I read it. Every word of it. I could have put it down, but I didn't.") I read it to review for Tempo, so at some point there will be something there about it. It's in many ways infuriating, but I have to say that reading it is in many ways an equivalent experience to reading Proust or hearing The Ring.
posted by Rodney Lister
9:24 PM
