Once again, one of our regulars is responsible for adding some coolness to the world. 

“But I do believe the people who are the most immortal are the composers. The man on the street, he knows who Beethoven is, he knows who Mozart is. And I’d like to compose.”– Joshua Bell, from a CNN story on his win of the Avery Fisher Prize April 7th, 2011: Gerald called. Says if I don’t do Tchaik in Berlin this November I can kiss my contract goodbye. Sigh. My cello sonata needs the time. I just got the draft back from Yo-Yo who has reservations about the dead butterflies. But that’s the sound I want!! He’d do it,

Consider this: Christopher Rouse does not compose every day; he starts every piece in full score, on measure one; he doesn’t use a piano much, because he can hardly play; he finds the entire process of composition miserable from start to finish and perennially aspires to artistic levels he believes he cannot attain; he only hears the bad things when his pieces get performed, and he is waiting for the day when people wake up and realize he’s no good. Rouse is, as in his music, unafraid to air his honest thoughts. He can appear neurotic and contradictory one moment,

A good time is to be had this Saturday night at Zankel Hall.  Chris Thile and The Tensions Mountain Boys will premiere his bluegrass/classical suite “The Blind Leading the Blind.” As long as your sensibilities are broader than “Sator Arepo tenet opera rotas,” you should have no problem.  Still: let’s keep ’em honest.  If you will promise us a well-edited and not too long-winded review, Jerry and I will in turn throw our estimate clout around and get you in for free.  You know how to reach us. Speaking of bluegrass, how about a round of random and rapturous applause

Watching Olga Neuwirth’s opera Lost Highway is like watching a Harry Potter movie after having read the book: the material transfers all right, but one wishes the team behind the retelling had gone further in re-imagining the original work for a new medium. Lost Highway follows David Lynch’s movie more or less scene for scene: many images from the film get repeated on stage, and many lines from the screenplay find their way – sometimes awkwardly – into the libretto (written by Neuwirth and Elfriede Jelinek). Neuwirth’s principal musical conceit is to have Fred and Renee – the dull, troubled

One of the many pleasures of the brief (but free) all-Chinary Ung concert given earlier today at Juilliard by the Da Capo Chamber Players was the absence of any blathering about “East meets West.” I’m sure part of the reason for the absence was a simple lack of time for blathering altogether: the performance was given in conjunction with the school’s Composers’ Forum which apparently keeps to a pretty tight schedule. But whatever the reason, such cross-cultural discussion would have been out of place. Ung’s music does not sound eclectic; it does not sound as if it had some agenda

The Tablet PC-wielding piano-playing super-awesome Hugh Sung is celebrating one year as a blogger. He has a podcast here introducing his cool gear to musicians. Get with the program, folks, and give Hugh a click. Busy here chasing pentatonic collections in Debussy.  I think there goes one right now…   

Nice burble of activity going on here. Way to keep the fires burning, people. Robert Zimmerman’s learning how to take the heat over in the Composers Forum. Click on comments: some heavyweights are weighing in. A charming post from Jeffrey Biegel, who’s performing Lowell Liebermann in Germany. I wonder what all the Kool Kats in Deutschland think about our Lowell. Anthony Cornicello digs the five-octave marimba; Naxos’s hawking some Virgil Thomson; Jay Batzner’s uncovered a copy of the long suppressed video of Einstein on the Beach. Huzzah! Makes me long for a Lego Lohengrin. (Paging Robert Wilson!) And just below

Sometimes you don’t need to travel far to be where the hot stuff’s happening. We’ve got fresh action on a lot of fronts here at the ole dump. First stop: Composers Forum. Robert Zimmerman, a new voice here whose presence advances our already unstoppable progress through Dixie, finds the whole “I’ll be understood after I’m dead”-thing a bit ridiculous. But he knows a few famous folks these days who don’t. I think I’m going to go leave a comment . . . Back now. Moving on. Next: Lawrence Dillon has a reflection or two on Ned Rorem’s Our Town. And

I had never given a moment’s thought to music written for television until 1997. I was watching The Late Show with the great Peter Takács when he suddenly – in reference to Paul Shafer – said: “This guy’s a genius.” While there’s no reason the art of composing for television cannot be done ingeniously, I cannot at the moment think of a television composer who enjoys the status of “genius.” This is in stark contrast to film composers, a small gaggle of whom regularly get the G-word applied to them (Bernard Hermann, Toru Takemitsu, Ennio Morricone . . . ). But