Tonight, PBS is showing Donizetti’s L’elisir d’amore on Great Performances. I really like this opera. It is fun, light, and tuneful. I’ve seen it before and had it on VHS for a few years (probably from another Great Performances broadcast). Instead of blogging about it, I’m going to live-tweet the event. You can follow if [...]
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Not As I Say
I’m teaching Advanced Counterpoint this semester and couldn’t be happier about it. My love of counterpoint is well documented in this blog and essentially I love doling out puzzles for younger composers to solve. What makes this particular counterpoint class “advanced” is relative. The regular Counterpoint class here at CMU is required for all performance [...]
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My Year of Opera: #2 Company
Last night I pulled up Company on Netflix. This production was made for Great Performances in 2007 and starred Raúl Esparza as Bobby. John Doyle was the director. The set was rather claustrophobic and the staging was very lean but well used. And if I wasn’t mistaken, the entire cast also performed on various instruments too, [...]
My Year of Opera: #1 Les Troyens
In an attempt to become more versed in vocal music and music drama, I’m attempting to watch an opera/musical/music drama each week for 2013. Yesterday I plunged in with the MET HD broadcast of Les Troyens by Berlioz. Why this opera? While I am not a huge “opera buff” and I don’t really enjoy Romanticism, [...]
Challenges
I’m not really a fan of New Year’s Resolutions but I do like the general sense of optimism that comes with new beginnings. Here are a few challenges I’m setting up for myself for 2013. I don’t expect success on all accounts. I will welcome a certain sense of failure here (because what option do [...]
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Authority
I listen to the Alan Watts podcast and this week the talk was on spiritual authority. The main idea is that authority is given to people by the very ones who believe that person is an authority. In other words, the only reason the Pope has authority over the Catholic faith is because all the [...]
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RuPaul and Composition Pedagogy
I’ve been watching Drag Race recently (the drag version of America’s Next Top Model + Project Runway) and enjoying it. Seasons 2 and 3 are available on Netflix and I find myself drawn into a world of “people being creativite in a realm I do not fully comprehend.” I watched Project Runway for the same [...]
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Shelf Life
When is “new music” no longer new? I’m not necessarily asking it in a global sense (Puccini isn’t “new” just because he made it to the 20th century). I’m asking in more a “when is your work too old to submit to a festival” sense. I try to submit to several festivals each month and, [...]
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To Professionalism!
I’ve been traveling a bit. While I was at a music festival, there was a composer who was frustrated that things weren’t working as he wanted. Efforts were being made to accomodate him but obviously not enough was being done to appease him. He made some rather rude comments, loudly, in the concert hall in [...]
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Katherine Crawford @ NYC this weekend
Totally shameless plug here, folks. Mezzo-soprano Katherine Crawford is giving a concert of contemporary music as a part of the Vox Novus Composers’ Voice series this weekend. The concert is Sunday, October 28 at 1 PM in Jan Hus Church (map and details are at that link back there). I mention this because Katherine is [...]
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