In just over a week minimalist musicians, scholars, and fans will descend on Kansas City, Missouri for the Second International Conference on Minimalist Music, which runs from September 2 to 6.  I’ll be there–I’m giving a paper on Saturday–and I’ll be blogging regularly to give you a participant’s view of the proceedings–papers, concerts, lunchtime conversations, drunken rants, or whatever else is happening that seems noteworthy.  I’ll also be Twittering (@galenbrown), and the conference has its own Twitter account (@2ndminimalism). We’ll be encouraging other Twitter users to post their own thoughts with the hashtag #minconf. Our pal Kyle Gann is one

In celebration of Louis Andriessen’s seventieth birthday, the first UK performance of his The Hague Hacking was scheduled for the Prom concert on August 17.  The piece was commissioned by the Los Angeles Philharmonic and first performed with that orchestra by the pianists Katia and Marielle Labèque and Esa-Pekka Salonen, who were the performers for the Proms, playing this time with the Philharmonia Orchestra.   There were several sources, or perhaps references embedded in The Hague Hacking: the piano parts make use at the beginning and subsequently in the piece of the notes of the beginning of the Lizst Hungarian Rhapsody

At the suggestion of an admirer of Sequenza21, I filled out and submitted an application last night to A National Summit on Arts Journalism, a project of the USC Annenberg School for Communication and the National Arts Journalism Program, which will feature five competitively-chosen projects at its annual conference on October 2. It would be great if S21 were one of them. I hope the judges don’t take away too many points for typos. The form was one of those where you paste your stuff in but you can’t see it all while you’re working or fix it later and

HDTracks.com Over the years since the advent of the MP3 file format, every now and then some misinformed or luddite journalist writes an article about how MP3 and digital downloads are killing music because MP3 has lower fidelity than CDs.  I always maintained that MP3 encoding wasn’t nearly as bad as the doomsayers claimed, and that in a few years when file storage got cheaper and internet bandwidth got broader digital downloads would outstrip CDs in quality.  My rationale was that 44.1kHz recording makes CDs high enough in fidelity that there isn’t enough demand for higher quality to make a

On Saturday at 2:30, Tanglewood’s Festival of Contemporary Music continued with its second concert. The FCM performances contain generous helpings of music. While established composers such as George Benjamin, David Rakowski, and John Corigliano were included Saturday, curator Augusta Read Thomas programmed a great deal of music by the “emerging” generation and by composers underrepresented on US concerts. Some highlights: Jacob Bancks’ Rapid Transit, for mixed chamber ensemble, received its premiere. A TMC commission, the piece started out slowly, alternating nervous percussion flurries with chorale-like pan-modal verticals. Eventually, the winds picked up the percussion’s rhythmic ideas, and the ensemble was

The opening concert on Tanglewood’s 2009 Festival of Contemporary Music on Friday featured several works by established composers and a TMC commission. This year’s festival is curated by Augusta Read Thomas. Rather than creating a unified theme for the five days of performances, Thomas has put together a varied group of offerings. In her opening remarks in the TFCM program booklet, she emphasizes,”This is not a festival with a house style.” Instead, what has thus far unified the proceedings are well-prepared, dedicated performances by youthful yet artistically focused musicians. Christopher Rouse‘s percussion ensemble piece Ku-Ka-Illimoku is a great curtain-raiser: splashy,