Steve Reich Wins 2009 Pulitzer Prize for Music.

It's.

About.

(expletive)

Time.

It's a shame that he didn't win it for one of his landmark earlier works.  Music For 18 Musicians is probably the strongest work, and Different Trains, though not my favorite Reich piece, would have been a perfect candidate from a marketing standpoint alone (and it's a really good piece to boot).

Oh well.  We'll take the victories where we can.  Ornette Coleman, David Lang, and now Reich.  Anyone care to propose the next logical winner?  Philip Glass?  John Luther Adams?  Can they give a posthumous one to Feldman, or Cage, or Miles Davis, or John Coltrane, or...

Craftiness

One thing I find very helpful is having a resource where I can quickly go and get a small but pertinent piece of advice about art and creativity. While the advice is generally not as good as the advice I'd receive from a live human, this resource would be available 24/7, whereas people sometimes need to sleep.

My favorite is the aphorisms page at Guitar Craft. Guitar Craft was started in the mid-1980s by King Crimson guitarist Robert Fripp, and what started as a course in guitar technique broadened to become applicable in almost any way you choose to use it. The aphorisms touch on truth with speed and precision, and they've been very helpful to me. If you want another one, you can just refresh the page.

It's worth checking them out. (The one that came up just now was, "Sometimes no answer is an answer, especially when the answer is no." Not always sunshine and smiling bunnies, but useful.)

The Approach of Sleep

In anticipation of Sommeil, Tanner Menard is running a great series of interviews over at his blog this week. The first interview is with experimental media artist and Creative Commons mover-and-shaker Jon Phillips. Check it out!

Tech Rehearsal: grain of sand

Teched Alicia's piece tonight, and got to run it twice. Everything went great-- can't wait to perform it! (Performance info is over in the right-hand margin.)

My rig, all lit up and such (I'll have to clean up those cables for the show):



It's hard to see the kick drum behind the bongos, but it's not hard to hear it. Mwahahaha.

Come out to the show this weekend!

Go read it now

The new post at Rands in Repose is amazing.

1969

Last night, I went to the Cleveland Museum of Natural History to see Alarm Will Sound's concert/multimedia presentation 1969.  It uses music, drama, and film to re-create/interrogate/investigate the interactions between experimental music, politics, and society in the titular year.  It particularly focuses on the music and activity of John Lennon (largely via Unfinished Music and Revolution 9), Leonard Bernstein (mostly via his Mass), and Karlheinz Stockhausen (mostly via Hymnen and Aus die Sieben Tagen).  The musical performances by the group were excellent, and Alan Pierson's conducting was awesome-- clear, concise, inspiring without flailing, and (perhaps because I came almost directly from a dance conference) engaging as movement in and of itself.  Further thoughts:

1) The members of Alarm Will Sound who also arranged the works for the ensemble did a wonderful job, especially the arrangements of Revolution 9 and Luciano Berio's O King.  It's one of the most engaging things about the group-- when I first heard their acoustic performances of Aphex Twin (!) on the album Acoustica, I had to keep checking that there weren't any electronics being used.  That having been said...

2) You had to arrange O King?!  It's a Pierrot-ensemble piece.  You've got the people onstage to do the original as it stands.  Why arrange?

3) I was surprised by how different the two halves of the program felt.  Both worked, but the first half felt a little expository and just shy of cheesy-- probably unavoidable, but at intermission I was thinking, "I hope that this all gets tied together somehow."  Happily, it did, and then some.

4) There really isn't any good way to handle the Berio character, is there?  He needs to be there because of O King and Sinfonia, but many of his interjections felt extraneous or interruptive.  You could cut out his pieces, but the whole show suffers badly without O King, and if the piece stays in, then we need to find out about the person who wrote it.  Basically, it's the least awkward solution, and not-awkward might be as good as it gets.

5) Percussionist Payton MacDonald (as stuffy NY Times music critic Harold Schonberg) was hilarious, and played an awesome show.

6) I got to see the show with my good friend and fellow Banglewood alum Laura Sinclair, who's wrapping up her MM at the Cleveland Institute of Music-- it was great to see her and catch up on the last couple years.

I'm in Phoenix all week for spring break, and the coffee (at Cartel Coffee Lab) and weather are wonderful.  Cheers.

If you don't know about Kutiman, you need to check him out...

...here.

Resourceful.  Well-executed.  Smile-inducing.  Killin'.