Fickle Ears

As a college student, I lost track of how many times I heard or overheard classmates assailing professors for being smart, as in: "He...

Hip-hop is the area of popular music (lower case, broadly construed) that has always piqued my interest disproportionately from all the othe...

In college, I attended a masterclass by a very talented and increasingly well-known trumpet player not much older than I am now who had been...

Given a project rife with contradictions, it's fitting that this edition of it has both affirmed and negated the well-worn saying about ...

Recommended For You Q-Tip– Kamaal The Abstract Listeners Also Bought Witold Lutoslawski– Orchestral Music Albert Ayler– Spiritual Unity Be...

Readers could be forgiven for detecting a contradiction between something I wrote yesterday and a previous post on social networking and mus...

With all the talk about digital music services around here lately, it's important to remember that YouTube remains an incredible resourc...

In my rush to keep the dream alive, I omitted two important considerations from yesterday's discussion. The first is spontaneity. These ...

The art I posted yesterday is the fourth such piece I've created. It's a bit juvenile, and that's part of the point. When I was ...

I generally want complete albums, but in rare cases, I might be after a particular track. I often wonder if all of us aren't after those...

When it comes to digital music services, there's a pet peeve of mine that even Lala could stand to be scolded for: the social networking...

It occurred to me after writing last night's entry that this is the simplest way to sum up what was so great about Lala. I imagine that ...

As of last night, I am now an emusic subscriber. I've generally been dragging my feet in transitioning over to digital music acquisitio...

This month and next, I am and will be teaching more than I ever have before for any significant stretch of time. But what's more remarka...

Twins manager Ron Gardenhire has won Manager of the Year in the American League, some would say more for his managing in the early-to-mid 20...

I've always been of a mind that prescribing repertoire for competitions, grad school auditions and other such circumstances is short sig...

Earlier this month, I wrote briefly about an old tune of mine I was reworking on short notice. It was performed last night, and seemed to go...

This is the promised follow-up to yesterday's post In his lecture , Treasure asserts that compressed audio makes listeners tired and ir...

I'll follow up on this tomorrow, but for now, just let this TED talk soak in and see if it doesn't make your skin crawl just a littl...

This is one of those posts, of which there's sure to be at least one more yet this month, that I'm writing simply to keep the dream ...

There are musics that I myself utterly loathe, like those of Franz Schubert and the band Journey, that I wish I'd written, because they ...

Last month, the superintendent of the Minneapolis Public Schools recommended that North High School be phased out. I was on tour all month ...

When Google notifies you that your band's name has appeared in a new place on the the interweb, it looks like this: When the person who ...

I'm currently working on repurposing an old composition of mine to meet an unforeseen deadline. Early in this blog's reign, I wrote...

Kyle Gann is a really smart guy and a fine musician, but he can say the darndest things when issues of accessibility are raised. He has this...

This is the eighth post I've written this month. Earlier this year, I wrote eight posts total between March 3 and September 27.

According to last night's program, the ensemble Zeitgeist , a local new music group which hosted my ensemble C.o.S.T. as part of thei...

It seems to me that the benefits of any musical analysis tend to be rather exclusively available to the person who performed it, and more or...

Earlier today, I was surprised to discover that the University of Minnesota School of Music, from which I received my B.M. five years ago, n...

From whatever moment it was that I first became "serious" about music as a teen (too serious many would say) right up to the prese...