Starting a new blog…
I’m a composer and in this space I hope to talk about music mostly, including my own music. My old blog, The And of One, has been dormant for a few years but still exists and has over 200 blog entries. That site is a pretty good example of what to expect here. I’ve set up links to some of the more popular posts from that blog as entries on this blog—clicking on them will take to the original site.
Coming to terms with Blackstar
Blackstar (2016) was David Bowie’s last album, released just two days before he died after years of struggling with heart attacks and a cancer diagnosis. For a long time, listening to it was simply too painful. I would listen, but I wouldn’t hear, exactly – I couldn’t turn on my usual listening skills.
A friend told me once how weeks after a serious car crash, he went to the lot where his now totaled car was. Turned the key and the battery still activated – the cassette that had been playing when he crashed was still on, the same spot, and the whole, horrifying memory of accident came back to him with the sound of the music.
My experience with Blackstar was like that. Overwhelming. Too real.
Two years on, and I am listening again, attentively – and I get it. What was confusing to me then through that veil of grief is clear now.
Ives’ String Quartet No. 2
I have long had a casual relationship with Charles Ives’ String Quartet No. 2. I was introduced to his music as an undergraduate, using it as a springboard to find my way into contemporary repertoire after having grown up hearing precious little of anything written post-1913 that wasn’t Broadway, mainstream jazz or pop music.
Ives opened up a whole new way of looking at music for me, a child-like way of toying with the material until it satisfied both child and grown-up sensibilities. No matter how eccentric, the result always seemed rooted in simple “what if” questions: If music can modulate from one key to another, why can't it be it two or more keys at the same time?
Koyaanisqatsi
Screening and discussing aspects of “Koyaanisqatsi” with the two sections of my freshman seminar, “Music and the Natural World.” This unit of the course is dealing with the rise and influence of environmentalism and “Koyaanisqatsi,” a 1983 film without dialog and with music by Philip Glass, is the perfect foil for class discussion. In fact, it invites a good deal more intelligent conversation than a great many other environmentally inspired works – composers like John Luther Adams (who I love) have made careers of linking music and nature in beautiful, intelligent ways. But with its inherently conflicted intent – part radical engagement and part Buddhist detachment – “Koyaanisqatsi” is tense, mesmerizing and philosophically resonant.
Jimi Hendrix’s “Star Spangled Banner” at Woodstock
Apart from the context, Jimi Hendrix's "Star Spangle Banner" is completely straightforward, a cinch to interpret. The context alone is what gives it its emotional and social complexity. That complexity also gives the piece more power than it already has, and it has quite a bit.