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.
Aaron Gervais, composer
music | news | events | critical thought
Recent Updates
- Schizo Psycho, commissioned by Ensemble Klang
- Is "professional" a useful label for composers?
- Excerpts from Oksana G. in development
- Life lessons all composers should learn
- Performance of Schizo Psycho
Quick Listen
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.





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