Some years back I stumbled across The Open Space website, a creation of Perspectives of New Music stalwart Benjamin Boretz. PoNM was one of those forbidding obstacles every composition student of the 60s, 70s and 80s had to traverse and come to terms with; a journal more like a fair-sized paperback book, seemingly filled with discussions of Babbitt, Boulez, Webern, Carter, terrifyingly dense theories of pitch-class, set theory & etc. — many of us felt like we budding composers were suddenly expected to be quantum physicists rather than simply artists… Yet tucked into many issues might also be some nugget from the likes of Roger Reynolds or J.K. Randall, that read more like pure poetry; conceptual play that seemed light-years removed from the normal run of PoNM article.
Being up there on the masthead most of the journal’s life, Boretz’s name seemed to put him firmly in the “uptown theory” group. But what our young eyes couldn’t see for the forest was that his influence was one of the main reasons those other, more intuitive and free-form articles were studded amongst the hard theory. Boretz the artist has always nurtured a deep interest in a more purely “humanistic” brand of musical thinking and creation, which only became more pronounced as the years have passed.
As a more personal outlet for these interests Boretz, along with fellow composers J.K Randall and Elaine Barkin, in 1999 began The Open Space. Not only to get their own works to a wider audience, but to offer a diverse group of contributors a place and publication to run parallel or even counter to the standard PoNM fare. A glance through the contents of current and back issues of The Open Space Magazine will show a nicely bewildering variety of both contributors and subjects.
While The Open Space has had a web presence for ten years, it’s really been an afterthought to the physical magazine, CDs & etc. But that’s changing starting now: composer Dean Rosenthal is taking over the helm of the semi-languishing The Open Space Webmagazine, a fully online and independent branch of the larger Open Space. In Dean’s own words, the webmagazine will be “devoted to interaction and community that extends the breadth and reach of our print journal. The web magazine is a forum for actualizing content like interactive web art, experimental video, articles including audio, video, or other supplements, and related endeavors to encourage a multivalent culture that is possible only beyond print.”
The call for submissions is out; to learn more you only need to e-mail Dean (contact@deanrosenthal.org) with your idea or to receive more information.
While online culture increasingly favors a posture of transparent, even mundane personhood, Igor Ballereau and Jody Pou buck this trend with the enigmatic netlabel 
Being an all-volunteer gig, Sequenza 21 has always relied on a cast of characters — almost all musicians themselves — that lend a hand as they can, but often end up caught in a whirl of other demands. And because based in NYC, there are times when it gets just a little too easy to report on all the events happening around the city, and get a little sidetracked about keeping tabs on so many wonderful musicians and concerts elsewhere in this country and beyond. So every once in a while the call goes out to some of the many good aquaintances we’ve made, asking if this or that person might like to have a go at sharing what’s up in their neck of the metaphorical woods, both geographically and stylistically. I’d like to take a second to introduce, and thank, some of the new contributors that you’ll spot around here in the coming weeks:
To paraphrase a comment I spotted once on Myspace, “We would have got you a card or something but we spent all of our money on booze, speed, and hookers”… So let’s just do with this shout-out to 
Apropos this Wednesday’s Michael Gordon Trance performance 
Ed Lawes wants to remind every classical afficionado to take a gander at the 
And our favorite crusty uncle, Seth Gordon, has word on a new-music Oscar tie-in that you may not be aware of: Yeah, yeah, we all know that the 
Just imagine the impression you will leave with your guests, as you drop sparkling bon mots on combinatoriality, pitch accumulators, harmelodics, and gradual phase shifting!… If they haven’t fled for the door yet…
Lazy, hazy summer days… Not much really happening, unless you hoof it to some festival or other… Or, for the price of simply wearing out your finger clicking, you could spend the better part of the next couple weeks feasting on the treasure trove that is the 
Though Kalvos (Dennis Bathory-Kitsz) and Damian (David Gunn) last appeared in 2005, they more or less pick up just where they left off, with an fun interview of the muy importante left-coaster 
Tim Risher
What Tim has dreamed up in his own little patch of turf within Second Life, is a place called HD Artists (for you folks who already wander this alternate world, here’s a