While we’re all sitting around waiting for the big event (Can you guess what day tomorrow is, boys and girls?), let’s talk about movies.  I’ve only seen two of the Academy Award nominees–Letters From Iwo Jima, which is almost great and has some haunting, low-key music by Clint Eastwood’s son, Kyle and the alleged comedy Little Miss Sunshine, which is the single most depressing movie I have ever seen and that includes To Live, The Ballad of Narayama and the one about the Guatamalan kids crawling through the sewer across the Mexican border and being bitten by rats and one

Last night’s Los Angeles Master Chorale concert in the Walt Disney appeared to be sold out.  The only thing that might surprise outsiders was that the advertising had emphasized that the program would be two works that were actually written in the twenty-first century.  Oh, it was a good concert! The two works were by Steve Reich:  “You Are (Variations)” which the Chorale premiered in 2004 and performed in New York as part of the Reich birthday party, and the recent “Daniel Variations” for which this was the West Coast premiere.  Reich was at the sound controls handling the amplification.  “You

Sam Pottle’s theme song for “The Muppet Show;” the feeling of breaking the thousand measure mark in a piece (without repeats); Rodney Lister’s thoughts, voiced to me almost ten years ago, about humor, proportion, and Messiaen; music groups on Facebook (example: “If being a Music Major were easy, we’d call it Your Mom!”); how simultaneously essential and swept-under-the-rug ear training is and has become; the Met’s slightly obnoxious new policy for buying standing-room tickets (must buy day-of); goofy fictitious opera/composer pairings (example: “Pippy Longstocking” by Brian Ferneyhough); the injustice Oscar (in the pic) dealt “The Good Shepherd;” good and bad

. . . He looks around, full of secrets; His strange deep thoughts have brought, so far, no harm. Carefully, with fists and elbows, he prepares One dark, tremendous chord Never heard before–his own thunder! And strikes.           And the strings will quiver with it A long time before the held pedal Gives up the sound completely–this throbbing Of the piano’s great exposed heart. Then, soberly, he begins his scales. . . . – from “After-School Practice: A Short Story” by Donald Justice The Collected Poems of Donald Justice (1925-2004) were released in paperback last year. When the young Justice

John Adams is almost 60 (February 15), and the Los Angeles Philharmonic’s Green Umbrella concert last night had Adams as conductor of three of his works.  It appeared to me to be the largest audience in the series, with even some people up in the organ-loft seats facing the conductor.  The concert was a pleasure, a treat.  Only a curmudgeon could have been dissatisfied at the exuberance and joy of the evening, feeling that serious music shouldn’t have that much fun associated with it. The program opened with “China Gates” (1977), a work for piano solo in which Adams was

The Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center has announced their 2007-2008 season. Do you realize that in one year Elliott Carter will be 100 years old? Wowza. To mark the occasion, CMS will present his five string quartets in January of 2008.. The season will also include works by Jennifer Higdon, Mario Davidovsky, Joan Tower (who is in residence with CMS), and the Benjamin Franklin. Well some people think that old five-movement string quartet is by him . . . Read here. The following composers are up for Oscar next month: Gustavo Santaolalla (in the pic), Babel; Thomas Newman, The

The theoretically minded of you out there should be aware of the work of Dmitri Tymoczko. Tymoczko is a composer and teaches at Princeton. An active music theorist, his recent work develops geometric models for the mapping of musical space. His paper “The Geometry of Musical Chords” was published last fall in Science magazine; it was the first music theory paper the publication has accepted in its over one hundred years of existence.   In collaboration with colleagues in math and science, Tymoczko demonstrates in the paper the efficacy of orbifolds for mapping musical space. Orbifolds are multi-dimensional non-Euclidean shapes

Doubtless legions of Sequenza21 fans are crestfallen this morning. Being people of superior intellect, you were all hoping for a New England / New Orleans Super Bowl. Now we get the Bears and the Colts. In any case, Prince is the halftime show this year. Can you guess what young composer went on the record a few years ago saying “Nothing is better than Prince?” Well, Bach is better than Prince–but that’s just me . . .  Oh – something else that’s better than Prince: Ian Moss and his burly crew of choral composers are commandeering the Norwegian Seaman’s Church