This new routine is tough! Getting up an hour earlier every morning isn’t like an on/off switch – it is taking lots of discipline but you know what? I’m getting a lot of work and reading done. But that’s just …
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Until I heard Alarm Will Sound perform scenes from The Hunger, your work-in-progress about the Great Irish Famine of 1845-1852, my idea of traditional Irish music was the Clancy Brothers! The sean-nós (“old style”) recordings you incorporate are at once uplifting and haunting, but Rachel Calloway’s rendition of Annals of the Famine had me a [...]
Movie composer John Williams turned 81 in February, and no orchestra stepped up to celebrate the passing of his perfect nine square birthday. Perhaps they were all exhausted by the Tanglewood celebration of his 80th last year. Williams may be America’s most successful movie composer; his music revels in the film’s narrative, loudly commenting on [...]
As a musician, you always try to improve your practice routines and become more efficient. In fact, we are actually lazy to a point that we constantly try to find ways to practice less and do more. When I was teaching I used to say to my students they have to picture pianists as the laziest people in the world: we try to spend as less time as possible practicing and one of our basic goal is to
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From the November/December issue of American Record Guide Buy here from MDT UK Buy here from Arkiv USA Buy here from Amazon UK Buy here from Amazon USA “Ensemble Epomeo play with finesse and sensitivity, nicely capturing Krasa’s manic grotesqueries as …
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From Pythagoras’ hammers and Boethius’ musica mundana to Beethoven’s Pastoral and Strauss’ Alpensinfonie, composers, philosophers, and theorists have long mused on the relationship between the natural world and organized sound. Yet it was only beginning in the 1990s – and particularly since An Inconvenient Truth helped make climate change front page news – that pressing [...]
You probably know that I am writing a lot these days. The cool thing with long writings is that you have to tidy up your thoughts and make them (at least look) coherent. It involves digging into my past and understanding whatever positions I could have taken in the last 15 years to properly connect the dots between my ideas. And this is the point where I am supposed to give you the lecture about me changing over the years and being a better person and artist. Guess what? I’m not going to give you this lecture at all.
Let’s start from the beginning. I’ve always loved Radiohead. I discovered them just before they recorded OK Computer. I was a teenager, Oasis’ Wonderwall had just been released and was on played on a ...
Born in Seattle in 1938, Paul Chihara’s first musical experiences were in popular music forms. He has also worked extensively in film and theatre. But in the late 1960s and on to the 1970s, Chihara looked to be the heir or even rival to Toru Takemitsu and his style of Messiaen inspired Asian/Western fusion. A [...]
A Night at The Museum: ETHEL Plays at The Met
