Fickle Ears

Whenever I return to the Complete Plugged Nickel recordings of Miles Davis' 1960s quintet, I find myself compelled to share something I...

It seems like about once a year, I receive an e-mail from another tuba player wondering which instrument, mouthpiece, etc. I use, as well as...

Returning again to the theme of musical training changing modes of perception, it occurred to me tonight* that there's a logical and str...

(the address is 3506 Nicollet Avenue in Minneapolis)

Readers of this blog might be surprised to learn that there were few times in either high school or college when I struggled to get a paper ...

There are plenty of things I'll never understand about events that took place before I was born, but I'm having an exceptionally har...

Blog Month 2009 ends today, bringing to a close my somewhat more successful yet still slightly disappointing second effort at impersonating ...

I went to a concert last night and it was really good. The thing is, I almost didn't go. I had no obligations of any kind yesterday, a r...

The holiday season in the U.S. has long since become more trouble than it's worth, and almost no one seems to be shy about saying that a...

I soon realized that in the course of the previous discussion on pop, I omitted an important predilection of mine that happens to come from ...

Someone named Clara at a place called Wikio has contacted me twice within the past couple of weeks to inform me that this blog has attained ...

Thanks for the comments y'all. Christmas came early today.

Getting a comment on something I've written here is like opening an unexpected birthday present, even if the comment is critical. Perhap...

I have a student, an unusually talented student in fact, who's involved in equal parts classical and pop. We got into a conversation rec...

The Adam Mickiewicz Institute's culture.pl website has a nice biography of Lutoslawski. The final paragraph is an excellent jumping of...

I just found Lutoslawski's fan page on Facebook and joined up. Seeing that some downright obscure musicians flash across my screen virtu...

One thing I plan to do more of on this blog as time goes on is share recordings and scores of my compositions. It seems to be de rigeur on b...

Today's entry is hidden among the archives in the form of a response to a comment I received on the post that I consider to by the magnu...

I'm not ashamed to admit that part of what gets me so worked up about the blogospheric trendiness I referred to in the previous post is ...

The more time I invest in my blogospheric activities, the clearer it becomes to me that I must be the most uncool blogger in the world. I...

In addition to the general excitement of working towards something new, my piano adventure presents the opportunity to explore two very inte...

When I first started composing as a teen, the medium I worked in exclusively for the first several years was essentially the school band med...