A few words about “model composition.”

September 11, 2016

Music copying by hand = Zen (just add time pressure).

September 9, 2016

One of the highest compliments I have received was from my first important mentor, William T. Appling (1932-2008). He once said that, upon looking over some music I’d sent him about fifteen years after finishing my studies with him, the short pieces I’d written for students and friends showed just as much care and resolve as larger works composed for professional ensembles. To achieve such a consistency and honesty of utterance is a primary creative aspiration as I move forward.

September 2, 2016

Over time, could a “larger style” veer in cycles toward and away from, back away from and back toward, the abstract?

August 31, 2016

“…Speech is preferable to writing [attr. Socrates]; writing by hand is second best: informal and quirky, sometimes messy, but straight from one heart and mind to another’s.”

• from Ellen Handler Spitz in New York Times Letters, August 30, 2016

August 25, 2016

Try to do things you can live with and live by. I.e., contribute as you can.

July 4, 2016

Notation software monetizes and commercializes the personal act of writing music; pencil/pen and paper technology do not compromise the writing for me.

June 26, 2016

“For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business.”

• T.S. Eliot, Four Quartets: East Coker, 1940

May 3, 2016

Just because you are not careerist or suitably prizewinning, don’t assume that your work is somehow inadequate. Keep doing your thing, hearing and committing to your sounds (could be talking to myself or to any number of others).

May 26, 2013

My favorite music-tech triumvirate: pencil, music paper, piano. Developing handwriting (manuscript) allows personal physical contact (literally drawing/shaping/directing the materials, using the piano or an instrument to try out/check the sounds as they form), attention to standards (notational conventions), and more. And working by hand requires comprehensive skills that are different from computer-interface requirements. Hand manuscript can pick up where music notation software leaves off. So I say: why not start and end there anyway?