We take so much for granted – the sun will go down , the sun will come up – that we never seem to realize that some day it won’t be there or we won’t be here to see it.  Same thing is true of friends you could always count on. So when I got an e-mail from my composer-conductor friend Gerhard Samuel’s companion, Achim Nicklis, that Gerhard had passed away a few weeks ago, I was shocked.  Sure, I sensed he wasn’t well – repeated e-mails saying he’d changed his address indicated as much. – but the sad fact remains.

Sequenza21 is pleased to scoop the rest of the world wide web and announce the most exciting news of the day in the world of new music. On December 4 and 5, the Lost Dog Ensemble, in residence with the Astoria Music Society, will be playing a concert of . . . works by Sequenza21 composers!! The December 4 concert will be in Astoria at the very hip Waltz-Astoria Café, and the following night we’ll be at the Good Shepherd Presbyterian Church on Manhattan’s Upper West Side (right by Lincoln Center –– an institution that will certainly be feeling a

Anthony Braxton has released a nine-CD anthology of his piano music on Leo Records. Performed by Geneviève Foccroulle, the boxed set includes all of the prolific composer’s piano music written from 1968-2000. The set includes detailed liner notes by Stuart Broomer, featuring an interview with Braxton, and a separate booklet with the libretto and performing directions for his Composition 171, a lengthy work for pianist, actors, prompters, and “constructed environment.” Ranging from Braxton’s Composition 1, a modernist offering in the post-Webernian vein, to Composition171’s complex narrative and theatricality, this is an excellent overview of Braxton’s evolving aesthetic and questing character, presented

Eliot was wrong; May is the cruelest month, at least here in the Center of Universe this particular year.  Lingering winter infirmities, a miserable San Francisco spring and, of course, the mixed blessing of having passed that peculiar threshold where one becomes officially old.  I am now a card carrying member of the Medicare set; I am invisible to young women; the next fishing license I buy will not expire until I do.  When I was younger–which seems about 20 minutes ago–I subscribed to that great philosopher Neil Young’s credo:  “It’s better to burn out than it is to rust.”  Now,

 I was at the Matrix Music Collaborators’ season finale concert on May 5th, and while the whole concert was good the highlight was the last piece on the program: “Girltalk” by young South African composer Braam du Toit. It’s a lush, gorgeous, and sometimes surprising postminimalist meditation/groove which manages to be still and restrained while simultaneously pregnant with occasionally relieved dramatic tension. It was one of the best new pieces I’ve heard in months. The piece was composed for two pianos, two string quartets, and bass—the pianists were South African duo pianists Cara Hesse and Laura Pauna (friends of du

Ralph van Raat’s wonderul Naxos recording of The People United Will Never Be Defeated! (Naxos 8559360) has been getting some great press lately but (you know how cranky you folks are) some people have complained that the CD didn’t contain the timings for the variations.   Take heart, gentle listener, all is revealed here.

My dear late best friend Danny Cariaga, classical music critic extraordinaire of the Los Angeles Times, once observed that people went to Wagner’s operas when they were new because they had more time. But now, with the onslaught of e-mails, IMs, cells with text messaging, to say nothing of headsets, call waiting, call forwarding, numeric pagers and the like, time seems fractured beyond repair. Are we really that far gone? And if so how can we get back to the unalterable truths of life, like love and death? These questions came to mind when I caught The Met’s penultimate performance