If, like me, you’re a San Franciscan who’d rather have your mind blown than numbed on a Monday night, Other Minds is hoping you’ll turn out for a benefit movie screening this coming Monday, June 15th. The film, which bears the politicially-incorrect title The Revenge of the Dead Indians: In Memoriam John Cage, is neither a documentary nor a feature, but it’s scored with John Cage’s music, plus found audio landscapes.  Encounters with market vendors and street cleaners mix in with Cage tributes from Frank Zappa, Noam Chomsky, Yoko Ono, Frank Gehry, Ellsworth Kelly,  and Merce Cunningham, directed by Henning

David Lang’s The Little Match Girl Passion, which won the Pulitzer last year, was released today on a  Harmonia Mundi recording.  Paul Hillier’s Theatre of Voices, who co-commissioned the piece with Carnegie Hall, perform the piece beautifully, and there are nice details in this studio recording that were only hinted at in the live recording which Carnegie Hall made available after the premiere.  You can hear streaming audio here, buy through Amazon here, or support the evil iTunes empire here. My most devoted fans (hi Mom!) will remember that I interviewed David about Match Girl, the Pulitzer, and other things

On June 9, 2009 the prestigious Finnish classical recording label Ondine announced a change in ownership to Naxos International. Additionally, the label will be distributed in the U.S. and in Canada by Naxos of America beginning on July 1. Ondine was founded 1985 by Reijo Kiilunen in Helsinki, where the Finnish classical label is still based and today offers an extremely eclectic catalogue of both Finnish contemporary music and recordings with major Finnish and international artists. “I’m extremely excited that Naxos was keen to become our owner,” said Reijo Kiilunen, Managing Director of Ondine. “Naxos shares our solid commitment to

I was saddened to learn today that John Kreckler passed away earlier this week. John was probably best known to composers, performers, and new music audiences as the co-director of the Locrian Chamber Players, a New York-based ensemble that performs exclusively music less than a decade old. I’d just seen John at the Locrian concert last week. Diva Goodfriend-Koven was performing two of my solo flute pieces. The atmosphere was light and friendly. He sat with me at the dress rehearsal, and joked that I should have given Diva more corrections after the run through (I hadn’t had much to say –

Composer Nolan Stoltz and New Music Hartford are running an interesting project in early August, which they are calling 60/60:  At 3:00 PM (EDT) on August 2nd, instrumentation for a call for scores will be announced at www.nolanstolz.com/nmh.html.  The deadline for submission is one hour later–interested composers have 60 minutes to compose a piece for the presented instrumentation, which will then be considered for inclusion on a concert on August 30, 2009 at 3PM at Art Space, (555 Asylum Avenue in Hartford, CT).  Each selected piece will be rehearsed for 60 minutes. There are of course some interesting strategic considerations. 

Seriously nasty review of the Bang on a Can Marathon over on the Huffington Post (HuffPo, to its friends) by somebody I don’t know named Jan Herman. The review is faint enough but the killer is the tacked on comment at the end: “Look at these photos,” a friend writes, “and think of a bunch of dipshits making music with coffee grinders or Volan’s arty little piece appropriating South African tunes to make another of the limp-spined Left’s innocuous, feel-good, PC statements (and written about 30 years ago which makes its status as new music rather questionable). Beehive music is

On June 5, 2003, SF Bay Area musician Matthew Sperry was killed by an inattentive driver while riding his bicycle to work.  Grieving friends in the Bay Area music community gathered spontaneously at 21 Grand at that time to play together in his memory, and every year since then, there’s been a Festival in honor of Matthew.  It’s grown to include national and international artists drawn from Matthew’s wide circle of inspiration and collaboration — Tom Waits, M.C. Schmidt, Johannes Bergmark, Sean Meehan, Ellen Fullman, and many others have contributed to SperryFest in past years.  I was first invited to