Greg Oh and friends pre­mièred Halo Bal­let in Toronto on the X AVANT fes­ti­val in Oct 2010, but the video record­ing of the piece mys­te­ri­ously dis­ap­peared. Now it’s been found, posted below.

I’ve been thor­oughly enjoy­ing Hans Abbing’s Why Are Artists Poor?, which formed an impor­tant source in my last two arti­cles. Abbing is an econ­o­mist and a visual artist, and he tack­les the broad ques­tion of artist poverty from the per­spec­tive of both dis­ci­plines, try­ing to fil­ter out the biases and myths that color tra­di­tional interpretations.

As a part of his dis­cus­sion, Abbing brings up the ques­tion of what con­sti­tutes a pro­fes­sional artist. Accord­ing to econ­o­mists, pro­fes­sion­als are peo­ple who earn some non-negligible por­tion of their liv­ing via their pro­fes­sional activ­i­ties. This def­i­n­i­tion works for a lot of the activ­i­ties humans do, but it’s prob­lem­atic in the arts. Con­tinue read­ing “Is There Such Thing As A Pro­fes­sional Composer?” »

A self-help guide to becom­ing a composer

In the first part of this arti­cle, I talked about some of the prob­lems with study­ing com­po­si­tion in acad­e­mia, and I offered some alter­na­tive ways that com­posers might cul­ti­vate their craft more effec­tively (and prob­a­bly less expen­sively too). Here, I’m pro­vid­ing a sort of Top 10 list of life lessons for com­posers. Real­iz­ing that you have no rea­son what­so­ever to lis­ten to my advice, I’m try­ing to couch this in terms of wis­dom I have received from oth­ers or that I can back up some­how, with attri­bu­tion when pos­si­ble. This is by no means com­pre­hen­sive, but these are def­i­nitely issues that I think every com­poser needs to inter­nal­ize for them­selves in one way or the other. Con­tinue read­ing “Why Com­posers Should Drop Out of Uni­ver­sity (and What They Should Be Learn­ing), Part 2” »

Just quick note to let you know that Taukay has added Sen­sa­tional Rev­o­lu­tion in Med­i­cine to its cur­rent web radio rota­tion, to play every 30 hours for the next month. Their cur­rent playlist also fea­tures many of the other com­posers on the AMP roster.

The chal­lenges of learn­ing com­po­si­tion in academia

I’ve always said that I learned despite my edu­ca­tion and not because of it, and after my master’s degree I decided to put my money where my mouth was and not pur­sue a PhD—much to my relief, the com­mis­sions and com­pos­ing con­tin­ued any­way. A few months ago I read a great arti­cle in Slate by William Pan­na­packer that really struck home for me. The basic premise was not that new: uni­ver­si­ties are mak­ing them­selves irrel­e­vant in the human­i­ties, arts, and sci­ences. What was refresh­ing, how­ever, was that this wasn’t an anti-intellectual rant, it was just an hon­est exam­i­na­tion of what higher edu­ca­tion as an insti­tu­tion is try­ing to do and how it thinks it should fit into soci­ety. So what if your goal is to be the best com­poser pos­si­ble and to have your music heard by other peo­ple who are inter­ested in sim­i­lar types of music? Should you get a degree in com­po­si­tion? Con­tinue read­ing “Why Com­posers Should Drop Out of Uni­ver­sity (and What They Should Be Learn­ing), Part 1” »

Like most com­posers, I absorbed cer­tain widely accepted musi­cal axioms from my uni­ver­sity stud­ies, but they’ve never been entirely sat­is­fy­ing. As a con­se­quence, I con­stantly search for bet­ter expla­na­tions, in the process hope­fully becom­ing a bet­ter artist. One of the issues I’m increas­ingly focus­ing on is how music his­tory is inter­preted. Although I have pre­vi­ously argued for an enhanced role for music his­tory in com­poser edu­ca­tion, I also think we need to re-examine how we use (and abuse) that his­tory. In my own prac­tice, let­ting go of false history-based causative asso­ci­a­tions, what I see as a kind of com­po­si­tional his­tori­cism, has paid cre­ative div­i­dends. Con­tinue read­ing “Let­ting Go of 20th-Century Historicism” »

A photo from the pre­mière in late May, at the annual Dag in de Brand­ing fes­ti­val; click for a larger ver­sion. More per­for­mances in the Nether­lands are sched­uled for later this year, and I will post details as soon as they are available.

I hope even­tu­ally to have video footage to post as well, so con­sider this a teaser for now.

Photo by Dani­jel Miha­jlivoc. You can also check out addi­tional pho­tos from the con­cert on the photographer’s Web gallery.

Ensem­ble Klang pro­duced a trailer for the upcom­ing pre­mière of Schizo Psy­cho, as part of their Music for Motion Pic­tures show at Dag in de Branding:

More info on the con­cert in the per­for­mances section.

I recently decided to try to encap­su­late major lessons I learned from other com­posers’ music over the years into short one-liners. Sort of like the per­son­al­ity sur­veys that go around Face­book, but more about the musi­cal per­son­al­ity of com­posers (per­haps my per­son­al­ity more than the peo­ple listed here). Any­way, this is what I came up with, in no par­tic­u­lar order: Con­tinue read­ing “What Com­posers Taught Me” »

In early Feb­ru­ary, I inter­viewed Donato Cabr­era, Res­i­dent Con­duc­tor at the SF Sym­phony and guest con­duc­tor for the Feb­ru­ary 28 SFCMP con­cert. In the inter­view, Cabr­era dis­cusses the dif­fer­ences between the Amer­i­can and Euro­pean con­duct­ing tra­di­tions, the dan­gers of over­spe­cial­iza­tion, chal­lenges fac­ing the new music com­mu­nity in the United States, and how he thinks works by liv­ing com­posers should be pro­grammed. You can read the inter­view on SFCMP’s blog.