January 31, 2018

Musical compositions as assertions—positive statements shaped in rarely positive conditions; resistances; positing possibilities otherwise unseen or unheard.

January 29, 2018

Go out on a limb and hang there for a time. Experience a little creative danger.

January 24-25, 2019

Questions:

1. What does/should a composer do when performers disappoint them?

2. How does a composer align intended expression with stylistic choices? What happened when intended expression and daily life are apparently incongruous?

January 22, 2018

Suddenly I hear Blake Stern (1917-1987) singing Wolf. A memory like a bolt or flash; the realization that something formative and fundamental happened to me in 1987 when Blake performed Hugo Wolf songs at his Yale retirement concert. All the more poignant when he died six months later. This was a voice that stuck to the bones, a fiber that continues to thread itself into my composing, only now with my full realization of its presence.

January 21, 2018

Freshness and originality most likely depend on how well you cook up leftovers.

January 19, 2019

If you take all of your irrational tendencies and harness them into forms of musical expression on a daily basis, do you end up more rational as a result?

January 7, 2018

Creative kiss of death: a formula that works.

January 6, 2018

Too technical. Too philosophical. Too dry. Too unbridled. Too broad. Too precise. Too repetitive. Too sweeping. Change too small; small change. Too ambitious. Too short. Too inward. Too testy… …Put too and too together, and you might have something. (Pore, Sri Lanka).

December 28, 2017

Composing can be a refuge, and a hiding place. Yet one must be clear on what to hide from/what constitutes a musical refuge. How one emerges from the hiding place—realizing there is no actual refuge, but having manufactured a workable/working “peace”—makes the difference. The re-emergence with music written that was previously ‘unreachable’ is what listeners and performers wait for from you. Come back after hiding. Hide again, come back again.

December 20, 2017

In composing, as in political and social thinking, things we assume have changed for the better with time haven’t. Have they? The composer’s ever-renewable role is to address this stasis by moving—by tinkering tirelessly with sonic languages, by seeking new strains, by making clear first-time statements. Put this work in the service of healing the future for listeners, performers, and for all involved.

December 18, 2017

Automacy and intuition (working “by ear”), in a particular balance, promise to yield strong expression.

Contradiction/Negation 1:  Green building drive-thru.

December 17, 2017

To develop, composers would do well to understand the importance of what they don’t know.

December 11, 2017

To a group of composers:

Why are you all so selfish? Paying attention just to yourselves and your sounds like that so much of the time. Why aren’t you out buying? Conspicuously ‘saving the world?’ Why are you in a room practicing instead, trying to process what you observe by forging a new premise every time you exercise your urge to start over and write a new piece? What gives you the right to make blueprints in sound for how your life and others’ lives might revise themselves emphatically for the better? Why are you so selfish? Why do you put on the oxygen mask first? Who said that rehearsing what you and you alone hear each day is a worthy pursuit?

December 6, 2017

Keep grasping at those slivers of time to do your composing.

How important is it to identify each piece as an entity, an item to be heard, digested, admired, or remembered as a “sonic object?”

December 4, 2017

Resist thinking about the masterpiece. Free the mind to consider the tiniest, slightest musical Notions as complete, presentable thoughts while reserving the right to write large if needed. Why should one even think about making monuments? A breath, a breeze, a wave– all are taken, felt, experienced; but none stay. Same with phrases of music, visual materials, these words…

What can you make from debris?

December 1, 2017

How do sensation and listening work cooperatively to refine the making of sound in piano playing? Can one listen in the act of playing if hearing is compromised? How is accurate “aim” accomplished in various ways of playing? If one can’t hear or can’t hear well, are there compensatory ways to listen and probe music that can be profitably developed? What about “the imagined” and “the heard?” What about physical hearing? Can you hear with your hands, arms, spine? Can you feel with your ears?

November 12, 2017.

Hearing what one hasn’t yet heard is difficult. But soon it’s the only thing you want to do.

November 11, 2017

How does a three-minute gem turn into an eight-minute turd?

October 12, 2017.

Use what we have; notice what you like.

March 4, 2017.

There are no people anymore—only credentials.

February 16, 2017.

Regarding time (1): If a substantial musical statement can be made in under eight minutes, aren’t we all better off? (I think here of interminable string quartets)

Regarding time (2): On the other hand, patience may be required (long hauls CAN be rewarding).

February 9, 2017

What goes wrong with the big thing can’t be fixed if the small thing doesn’t work; if the big thing doesn’t work, try to fix the small thing. Conceiving of music happening in limited, malleable spaces is all one can do to envision the big picture.

January 20, 2017.

Most feelings are mixed.