“Inherent vice,” says Wikipedia, “is the tendency in physical objects to deteriorate because of the fundamental instability of the components of which they are made, as opposed to deterioration caused by external forces.” As a property of physical objects, this is why certain papers and films last longer than others. It also is why materials […]
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The Musical History of “O Savior, Thou Who Wearest”
This week a friend asked me to write an arrangement of “O Savior, Thou Who Wearest a Crown” for vocal duet with piano accompaniment. Dealing with Bach can be a little daunting, so I decided to look at the where the music came from for the LDS version of that hymn.
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Have You Heard?: Summer Has Ten Thousand Stars
My first performed orchestra piece was inspired in part by Walt Whitman poem “When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer.” The piece captures some of the wonder of staring into the star-filled sky on a dark summer night.
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James Horner on Film Music
I was sad to hear that James Horner died this week in an aviation accident. His music has been an inspiration to me. I was browsing YouTube listening to his old scores when I found this interview he gave a few years back. Several parts of it stood out to me.
Continue readingMore TagMovement is the soul of music
Of all my artistic influences, musical and otherwise, the most impactful has been Yoko Kanno’s soundtrack for the anime series “Cowboy Bebop.” At first listen, Kanno’s music is striking for its stylistic variety. Although jazz forms the core of the music, it branches out to blues, country, rock, heavy metal, and even late Romantic opera. […]
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Stumbled across the following in an article about teaching jazz within an historical context: A musician, even a great one, has far less control over the general course of his art than we might think. The broad outlines of a style, it seems clear, are shaped by ideas in society. Thus, a player like (Marion) […]
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I’ve written in the past about James Tenney’s Meta-Hodos, on this blog and for school. (Fast summary: According to Tenney, just as we usually divide time into years, months, days, and so on, music can be divided hierarchically. This hierarchies arise in music because of musical differences from moment to moment (and phrase to phrase, section to […]
Continue readingMore TagMy Favorite Piano Concerti
. . . prompted by discovering I had a recording of Schumann’s Piano Concerto, op. 54, on my computer. In chronological order.
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Thank goodness nothing literally. I like to have “reference” music while composing. It usually has nothing to do with the music I’m writing. In fact, I’m actually not quite show what relationship it has to what I end up writing, except that I like having some consistency to what I listen to. Here’re some highlights […]
Continue readingMore TagThe World’s Ugliest Music? Nice Try . . .
So Dr. Scott Rickard thinks he’s composed the world’s ugliest music using fancy math. I’m not convinced, but you can hear for yourself: the piece, written for piano, starts at 7’48. Rickard is not the only one to use fancy math to write music. Most notably, Iannis Xenakis beat him to the punch nearly sixty […]
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