Fickle Ears

The advent of personal computers, video games and the internet has not changed human beings on the genetic level. If these distractions seem...

The classical music people have been on about the aging audience issue for years. They've identified formality as the enemy, and hence, ...

If you keep up with what I write in this space, you know that I have quite a bit of trepidation about audience outreach, particularly the id...

One of the most pervasive fallacies about "modernist" or "atonal" music is the idea that the people who write it and lis...

The stigmatization of the autodidact may not be unique to the field of composition, but the field of composition certainly has a unique way ...

I'm not ashamed to admit that the primary reason I can't stand most popular music and opera is its supposed emotional content. It ac...

There's a reason that extremely loud music hurts your ears: hearing is a survival skill. If you can't hear the car speeding down a b...

Regular readers (if I have any left) know that there are few blogospheric phenomena for which I have more contempt than the "link and r...

There's nothing remarkable about prodigal talent. What's remarkable is when someone manages to recognize its existence.

This post is intended as an expansion of an earlier discussion of instrumentation in music education, first explored here (PDF format), wit...

The final installment in this trifecta of turn-offs deals with the idea of return on investment. In casually following the blogospheric reac...

Establishing universal health care in this country (the right thing to do anyway) would do more for art and artists of all stripes than $50 ...

Some would say that the primary importance of government funding of The Arts lies in freeing the artist from the constraints of the marketpl...

You can't make this stuff up... From the Department of Poorly Written Program Notes, co-presented with the Department of Inadvertently D...

This book review from The Nation touches, in a roundabout way, on a very important subject for musicians and artists of all stripes. Of aut...

For many musicians, the question of identifying what exactly got them "hooked" on music in the first place and subsequently attemp...

One of the most significant validations of my disinclination towards taking composition lessons came when I overheard two graduate comp stud...

(1) Louis Armstrong took his unconventional trumpet and vocal technique and figured out how to make great music with it, but Miles Davis ju...

The danger early on for me was being typecast as a percussion composer. I wrote a couple of little percussion pieces when I was still a stud...

When a work of mine is deemed by conservatives to be too far out, and also deemed by radicals as not far enough out, I'll know I've ...

Today, I finally feel up to confronting the fact that this space is by and large a place for the airing of negative feelings rather than pos...

One of my tuba students recently came to me for advice on how to convince his high school band director to let him play in the jazz band. Am...

Today is Halloween, which has always been my favorite holiday, but this year, while most of the rest of the country is busy donning their be...

It has been my opinion for some time that of all the boneheaded errors contained in the original (read: illegal) Real Books, Wayne Shorter s...

As yet another follow-up to the post on composing with notation programs, here are three more pages from my oeuvre that required some extra...

As a follow-up to the last post, it's worth mentioning that there are two interesting threads going on TubeNet right now about composers...