In a pre­vi­ous post, I dis­cussed the dif­fer­ence in our reac­tions to music when we choose it (active selec­tion) ver­sus when some­one else chooses it for us (pas­sive selec­tion). I claimed that the end­less choice we expe­ri­ence thanks to Inter­net tech­nol­ogy was mak­ing it harder to enjoy pas­sive musi­cal selection.

Upon fur­ther reflec­tion, how­ever, I see that I am actu­ally mak­ing less active music choices nowa­days than I used to, and tech­nol­ogy is part of the rea­son why. So I’ve decided to con­duct an exper­i­ment: How long can I avoid mak­ing active lis­ten­ing choices, and what will that do to the way I hear music? Con­tinue read­ing “Exper­i­ment: Can I Com­pletely Stop Choos­ing What Music I Lis­ten To?” »

A recent arti­cle in Slate by Jan Swaf­ford got me think­ing about one of the major dis­tinc­tions between infor­ma­tion on the Inter­net and off the Inter­net. As I’ve been argu­ing for years, the way we inter­act with art has fun­da­men­tally changed. Swaf­ford looks at this from the per­spec­tive of a writer to argue “Why e-books will never replace real books”.

Basi­cally, it comes down to directed or active activ­ity ver­sus non-directed or pas­sive activ­ity. When you turn on the radio, the selec­tion is pas­sive. You can choose the sta­tion, but you can’t choose the pro­gram­ming. When you search for music on YouTube, how­ever, the selec­tion is always active. Con­tinue read­ing “Search­ing vs. Finding” »

The cul­mi­na­tion of a lot of plan­ning, eval­u­at­ing, and work, I’ve now got a new look for my web­site. There are still a few minor tweaks to be made, but the major­ity is there. Now that this project is com­pleted, stay tuned for updated con­tent that is on the way in the next month or so.

Com­poser Richard Zarou recently did a pod­cast inter­view with me, for his blog, No Extra Notes. No Extra Notes is a weekly pod­cast about up-and-coming com­posers. The inter­view deals with why I write music, some of the inspi­ra­tions behind my work, and a range of other top­ics. It also fea­tures two recent pieces of mine, Sen­sa­tional Rev­o­lu­tion in Med­i­cine and Kiss Around the World.

I was intrigued last month when I received a mes­sage from web­site AudioMi​cro​.com ask­ing if I was inter­ested in a link exchange. They seem to be an inter­est­ing mix of a vari­ety of dif­fer­ent musi­cal “ser­vices” rolled into one, and I thought they might serve as a good model for com­posers who, like myself, are inter­ested in cre­at­ing musi­cal value online. Con­tinue read­ing “AudioMi­cro: Musi­cal Value Online” »

I just wanted to draw atten­tion to col­league and friend Lisa Bielawa’s new blog, which I think is a good exam­ple of the kinds of things com­posers should be doing more to stay in the pub­lic eye. Lisa won the Amer­i­can Academy’s Rome Prize this year and has taken the oppor­tu­nity to write about some of her expe­ri­ences in Italy and else­where. Con­tinue read­ing “Lend Me Your Ears” »

For a genre that claims to be part of the cut­ting edge, the avant-garde/new clas­si­cal music has been rel­a­tively slow to adopt online tools. I won­der about some of the ways we might improve the sit­u­a­tion. As I’ve writ­ten about before, the major issue of art today is orga­ni­za­tion, not con­tent, so if we assume there is some­thing in what we do that oth­ers might be inter­ested in, we need to find ways to reach them. Con­tinue read­ing “New Music and Online Tools” »

Now that the Arditti res­i­dency is over and I have fin­ished the numer­ous grants/applications/papers that were due over the course of Feb, I have made some long-overdue updates. Cleaned up my MySpace page too. I’ll post some new record­ings there over the next cou­ple of months. More infor­ma­tion to come on var­i­ous projects in the works.

Things have been very busy, and I haven’t had the chance to do any site updates between teach­ing, tak­ing classes, and trav­el­ling for workshops/performances. I was recently in Mon­tréal for the Ensem­ble contemporain’s work­shop, and I leave next week for the pre­mière of The Enslave­ment and Lib­er­a­tion of Oksana G. with Tapes­try New Opera in Toronto. See the Per­for­mances sec­tion for details.

In addi­tion, one excit­ing piece of news: my first jury piece from UCSD was selected to com­pete in the 2006 Gaudea­mus Music Week in the cham­ber music cat­e­gory. So I’ll be in Ams­ter­dam in early Sep for that.

I have a cou­ple of upcom­ing per­for­mances of note, includ­ing the Tapes­try Opera To Go 2006 series, and my first com­po­si­tion jury at UCSD. I’ve also made some updates to my short bio, the pic­tures sec­tion, and my CV.