Grab your priestly garb and enjoy this terrific live recording of De Profundis, for massed winds, from the recent performance at Indiana University, conducted by the awesome Jeff Gershman. It’s a fantastic rendering, prefaced by the plainchant incipit intoned from a balcony just before beat 1. Very slick, and if you happened to be wondering [...]
Category Archives: commentary
Profound Hoosiers
12-Apr-10Reason
15-Mar-10Composer Alex Shapiro is a class act. Grab a drink, take a deep breath, and read to the bottom.
Comics and Copyright
12-Mar-10My guest blogger post is up at The Comics Journal group blog, The Hooded Utilitarian. The entry is part of a roundtable discussion on issues surrounding copyright and free culture. The centerpiece of the week was an interview with animator, filmmaker, and free culture activist Nina Paley. I refer to Paley’s work and the interview [...]
Steal this notebook
08-Mar-10This week I’ll be a guest blogger on The Hooded Utilitarian, a blog on The Comics Journal written by old family friend and comics/culture critic Noah Berlatsky. The topic this week is free-culture, and even though Noah is calling this a “roundtable”, I’m seeing the table as virtually square, with me set up to sit [...]
Pride
22-Feb-10Better Half just designed a set of operas up at Bard College. Two of them are new pieces, by David Little and Missy Mazzoli respectively … both of whom are incredibly nice people and total superstars right now. It goes up at Bard’s spectacular new Gehry-designed hall — a breathtaker that, what with the idyllic [...]
DRAM
16-Feb-10If you’re at a college or university right now (and I suspect most of you are), check out this list and see if your institution is on it. If it is, it looks like you have access to DRAM, a “not-for-profit resource” offering “on-demand streaming access to CD-quality audio” of all kinds of contemporary and [...]
LGA-ORD-SAT
10-Feb-10Tomorrow I travel to the 2010 Texas Music Educators Association Convention in San Antonio. If The Snowpocalypse allows me leave at all, that is. It’s been a few years since I’ve been to TMEA; in 2007 I went to simply see for myself what I’d been only hearing about: The massive attendance. The gloriously huge [...]
Two for two
07-Feb-10If you’re like me (Lordy I hope not) you turn through the Sunday Arts & Leisure section with a pace that slows significantly as you move toward classical (reading a physical paper, you’ll find it after theater, film, television, and sometimes dance–but always before architecture). The dread has a lot of sources, but mostly it’s [...]
Best … album notes?
01-Feb-10So very many categories. It takes me something like 5 complete minutes to scroll down the list of winners (“Best Zydeco Album”? Really?) to see if LA-ex-pat Aussie and big band rock star Tim Davies won for his track Counting to Infinity off his recent Dialmentia album. Nope. Not surprised. Way too interesting. But the [...]
April List
28-Apr-101) Look! A new piece. Premieres next month at the 2010 International Tuba-Euphonium Association Conference in Tucson. 2) How cool is this program?! See, they think they’re cool (like we all do) in Eugene, but the difference is, thanks to Bob Ponto, they actually are. 3) Recently saw Gary Winter‘s new play, Cooler, at The [...]