Our Buddhist friends like to remind us that the idea that we are separate is an illusion and not a fact but try telling that to anybody anywhere these days desperately trying to “connect” by every mobile device known to man. And if that doesn’t spell separation/alienation we might need a new word for this state of mind. Leave it to French poet-artist-playwright-novelist-filmmaker Jean Cocteau (1889-1963 ) to set things right because the characters in his work are often desperately trying to connect as in his lyric tragedy with composer Francis Poulenc La Voix Humaine (1958 ) where the speaker

It’s never good to live in the past, but sometimes we have to, even though as our latest catch phrase would have it “it is what it is.” These are some of the thoughts which came to mind when I caught the last performance of San Francisco Opera’s revival of its 2010 production of Leos Janacek’s “The Makropulos Case ” (1923-26) which received its American premiere at this house in 1966. German soprano Nadja Michael, who as the over three-hundred-year-old opera diva Emilia Marty has traveled with more aliases than you could count on several hands, was its star. But

It used to be that you could pick up the phone and call someone, and they would answer. And so it was perhaps a decade ago that I called Gunther Schuller’s Manhattan publicist John Gingrich innumerable times to see if Schuller was available for a date with the San Francisco branch of The Duke Ellington Society, which I headed at that time. John was forever patient–he told me he’d noted all the times I’d called– as he went over Gunther’s schedule to see when he’d be free, and after many calls we arrived at a date when Gunther could talk

We like to think that chamber music is an acquired taste but what is chamber music but music played in a room by a few people for a few people or for thousands? So it’s not just the Mexico- founded Cuarteto Latinoamerico, or the American Patricia Barber and her band, or the American quartet Brooklyn Rider, and the Australian Dead Can Dance, or the late lamented Beatles, because all of these groups are playing chamber music. Syrian clarinetist-composer Kinan Azmeh was the headliner on the last installment of Lenore Davis’ St Urban’s poets cum musicians series at Subculture’s handsome downstairs

Meeting someone out of cyberspace can be fun. After a flurry of e-mails discussing various online slots sites, San Francisco Opera and San Francisco Ballet double bassist and composer Shinji Eshima and I met on a brisk April Sunday just before his 2pm curtain for its Balanchine Masterworks Program. We talked about his SFB commission RAkU, which the company tours to Hamburg–26-27 June, London’s Sadler’s Wells–19,20,23 Sept–and DC’s Kennedy Center 13-18 December. Integrating insights from the digital entertainment landscape, including trends from online slots sites, enriched our conversation and provided new perspectives on how traditional performances can engage broader audiences

The gulf between pop music and “serious” or “new music” can be a big one, and the first concert of the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players 2014-15 season TenFourteen set this in high relief. Put another way, the pleasure principle tends to be the guiding light in pop music which isn’t always the case with new music which often tries to be dark or “profound”, or as my late friend Virgil Thomson once observed ” composers look at the history of music as leading up to them,” so it may as well be “heavy.” George Crumb is an obviously gifted

Sometimes a phone interview is the way to go, even if you live in the same town. And so it was on a rainy Friday afternoon this past December that San Francisco-based composer and cellist Joan Jeanrenaud and I “sat down” for a chat about her latest music theatre collaboration Your Body Is Not A Shark, which ran 7 11-13 January in San Francisco, and 17-20 January in Santa Cruz The celebrated and much sought after musician was the Kronos Quartet cellist from 1978 until 1999, when she “retired ” due to having been diagnosed with MS, which she’s been

What becomes a legend most? Well, in the case of two legends–director/designer Robert Wilson and composer Philip Glass, an international tour of their first and most famous of their five collaborations, EINSTEIN ON THE BEACH (1975-76 ), which began in Ann Arbor, Michigan in January ’12, goes on to  Amsterdam in Jan’ 13., and ends in Hong Kong in Mar’13. But there’s an irony. The piece “that broke all the rules of opera “– there’s no story, and certainly no star-crossed lovers, murder, or even betrayal — is an endeavor on a par with the scale, ambition, and wor force

Meeting someone out of cyberspace can be fun. And so it was after a flurry of e- mails that San Francisco  Opera and San Francisco Ballet double bassist and composer Shinji Eshima and I met on a brisk April Sunday just before his 2 pm curtain for its Balanchine Masterworks Program, to talk about his SFB commission RAkU which the company tours to Hamburg, 26-27 June, and to London’s Sadler’s Wells on 19, 20, 23 September, and to DC’s Kennedy Center 13-18 December. Eshima is immediately cordial–“you’re on time”–and leads us through the underground maze of The War Memorial Opera

Life is competitive and composers are as competitive as anyone else–sometimes even more so. This thought came forcibly to mind when I heard two of the three composers–Stefan Cwik and Neil Rolnick (the third, Philip Glass, wasn’t even mentioned)–discussing their pieces with New Music Ensemble artistic director and conductor Nicole Paiment minutes before she and her musicians played three of their pieces as the concluding event of the BluePrint Transcending Senses Series at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music. When it comes to cattiness, composers often make the Beverly Hills Housewives look like fluffy little kittens. Which is not to