Here’s something cool to mark on your calendar.  The Ojai Music Festival is launching  a free three-week online course next Wednesday, May 15,  leading up to the 2013 Festival which runs June 6-9.   The courses are designed to help audiences “listen smarter” and enable them to gain deeper insight into the music and programming that have made Ojai–now in its 67th year–one of America’s most durable and loved summer music festivals.     (FYI, this year’s Festival focuses mainly on the music of Lou Harrison, Terry Riley, John Cage and John Luther Adams). The OjaiU courses are led by Douglas McLennan, editor

We’re looking for a WordPress genius to help us update Sequenza21 by cleaning out the crawl space and attic, adding some new wiring and plumbing, attaching the garage to the main house, making the family room a more fun place to hang out and talk and to bring in a new Wolf oven and SubZero fridge.  Ok, my recent conversion to home mortageship has addled my brain a bit.  What we want to do is make S21 more social and interactive, clean out the spam and cut down the archives, combine what is now four separate WP instances (main, forum,

Who wants  a pair of tickets to coLABoratory: Playing It UNsafe at Zankel Hall on Friday night?  This is an ACO project described as the first and only professional research and development lab to support the creation of cutting-edge new American orchestral music through no-holds-barred experimentation.   The composers participating in coLABoratory this season are selected from a national search for their willingness to experiment and stretch their own musical sensibilities, and their ability to test the limits of the orchestra.  More info here. If you’ve already liked our Facebook page, leave your name and a contact e-mail here before noon on Thursday.

The world has reached a sad state when our individual and institutional  worth is measured by how many people like us on a social media web site.  But, alas, these are modern times and in the spirit of getting with the program, we have created a Sequenza 21 Facebook page where we are cheerfully posting and reposting daily the new music community’s responses to the relevant news and happenings of the day.  You might say that making Mark Zuckerberg richer and more devious on the slippery slope of privacy rights has become a passion of ours.  If they can now

At an early point in Yaron Zilberman’s new film A Late Quartet,  Peter Mitchell (Christopher Walken) the cellist and father figure of a world renowned string quartet, explains Beethoven’s Opus 131 to his students:  “It has seven movements and they’re all connected.  For us, it means playing without pause; no resting, no tuning. Our instruments must, in time, go out of tune–each in its own quite different way.  Was he trying to point some cohesion, some unity, between random acts of life?  What are we supposed to do?  Stop?  Or struggle to continuously adjust to each other until the end?”

Should you find yourself in the vicinity of Potsdam, NY on Tuesday night of this week, I highly recommend to you a concert of four recent works by Crane composer David Heinick, which will be performed by members of the Crane School of Music faculty, beginning at 7:30 p.m. in the Sara M. Snell Music Theater on the SUNY Potsdam campus.  Alas, I don’t know Professor Heinick or his music (although I’d like to) but I do know the librettist of one of the three world premieres on the program. “Chiaroscuro,” a setting of four poems from il Dilemma of Orfeo, 

David T. Little is stepping down as MATA executive director this fall to focus more fully on his compositional life and to pursue other professional endeavors.  MATA is looking for a new ED. Says David: “It can be a really rewarding position, with excellent colleagues, and can provide a one of a kind opportunity for a composer or performer to really learn the ins and outs of arts administration, while still being very connected to composition and new music, or for an arts administrator with a passion for new music and love of composers.” The position application deadline is August

Spotted at Keen’s Steakhouse:  New Music evangelist and all-round wild-and-crazy guy Frank J. Oteri hovering with music industry macher Marc Ostrow.  Is there a game-changing new website where classical, jazz and theatrical composers can easily publish and promote their work in the works?  Can you spell ScoreStreet, boys and girls? Frank wrote two massive pieces recently that you should read if you haven’t already. One is a 8,000 word essay on Beach Boy founder Brian Wilson’s Smile and the other is on John Cage. That’s frank, brother.

Hilary Hahn has a really cool new album called  Silfra out today.  Recorded in Iceland with the Düsseldorf-based composer and pianist Volker Bertelmann, who goes by the name Hauschka, the album’s producer is Valgeir Sigurðsson, who normally works with people like Björk and Feist. The big surprise  is that when Hahn and Hauschka entered the studio for their 10-day session, they hadn’t prepared a note. Almost all of Silfra is the product of improvisation.  If you hurry, you can listen to it free today at NPR. Hahn and Hauschka recently interviewed each other about the project.  Here’s part 1: Part