I was on February vacation last week, and though I didn't have a chance to escape our cold winter weather, I did have some time to take walks, listen to music, see some movies, and muse to myself about connections among these experiences. Early in the week, I already knew I'd be hearing acclaimed pianists Yuja Wang and Víkingur Ólafsson in a Friday duo-piano recital which would feature Schubert's remarkable Fantasy in F Minor for two pianists at one piano - so I chose to listen to that on a cold, gloomy, colorless Thursday afternoon walk. The piano is such a generally self-sufficien ..read more

It's been a good year on the blog, though the last month has been quiet due to a very busy work schedule. For Christmas Eve this year, here's a brand new work I wrote for our church's Lessons and Carols service as sung by the choir on Sunday. I only wrote this over Thanksgiving weekend, so they had less than a month to learn it, and we had only one and a half run-throughs with the strings. Christina Rossetti is quite well-known for a couple of other poems which have become well-known Christmas hymns: In the bleak midwinter (set by Holst, and even better by Darke) and Love came down at Chr ..read more

November is off to a busy start, so I'll express my nostalgia for the bygone days of September and October (when I had a lighter teaching schedule and was a little younger) with this recording I made late one October night after a recital. This wistful little waltz by Dick Hyman was written for the soundtrack of Woody Allen's 1985 The Purple Rose of Cairo - which is, perhaps, my favorite movie of all time. It is an almost perfect film, lighthearted and clever but also touching and sad. Set in 1935, there's plenty of fun music from the era, but Hyman's Carousel Memories is the music that s ..read more

A couple of months ago, a friend shared an unusual radio station tribute to the great Austrian composer Anton Bruckner on the occasion of his 200th birthday. I believe you may still view it here - and be sure to unmute the sound! And what sound do you hear paired with a picture of the composer and some basic biographical background. Aching strings? A richly scored brass chorale? A sublime motet? Hyperpop party music with Chipmunk-style vocals and a heavy backbeat? Yes, it was something closest to the latter. Everything about this choice is fairly incomprehensible aside from the fact that I'm ..read more

This new entry in my "Emptying Out the Desk Drawer" series, meant to preserve random little things I created for social media, is actually a cheat because, far from gathering dust in a corner, this ghastly creation is bursting with country-fresh flavor. I just made it a few hours ago in as little time as possible - which was part of the point. Think of it as Transcription Tartare. Quick backstory. I have an ongoing Facebook group chat about many things musical. The subject of my general lack of interest in (and, ok, outright dissing of) Haydn's music had come up. Oh, right, it came up because ..read more

A couple of weeks ago, I mentioned that I might start posting some ephemeral multimedia things I'd only posted on Facebook as a way of preserving/exploring them a bit more. I have a list of dozens of such items, though oddly enough, new topics have been popping up here more often usual, so it's taken me some time to finish this post. This pattern actually goes back more than a decade with the blog. Once I post one or two things, I'm much more likely to start posting more. About two years ago, a friend posted an image of a staircase with two bars of music designed into the railing. The treble c ..read more

There were some sixteen years between 1983's Star Wars: The Return of the Jedi and 1999's Star Wars: The Phantom Menace. Much as many people assumed that George Lucas was done with those movies in 1983 (of course, he should have stopped there), my six-part series of "Songs Without Singers" from 2008 surely seemed to have reached its conclusion sixteen years ago, after excursions with Chausson, Strauss, Poulenc, Schubert, Hoiby, and Stanford. I've since repurposed the Chausson, Poulenc, Hoiby, and Stanford with updated scrolling scores, all as part of 2021's Introspective Re ..read more

[This post was an unexpected journey in many ways. It started simply with having fun entering some notes by Messiaen into a computer...Eventually, I get around to that.] For years I've had this quarter-baked idea that there are certain compositions which exhibit a special kind of small-scale perfection. Although these impressions are certainly subjective, the feeling I have is that every part of the whole has an inevitable, organic quality - almost as if the composer simply discovered a perfectly formed crystal and shared it with the world. With such pieces, it's as if the music simply generat ..read more

[This is the first in a series of posts in which I simply document some of the odd little things I create when my internal virus is activated. In this introductory post, I'll begin with a quick exploration of the virus.] Back when my blog was barely a year old and I nonetheless had the audacity to refer to "longsuffering readers," I wrote the following: Longsuffering readers of this blog will have learned that I have a weakness for wordplay. (To quote my blogger profile, "I adore alliterations; elegant allusions; absurd non sequiturs; and buffalo wings.") My own experience of this weakness i ..read more

Last spring, at the Catholic boys school where I teach, we graduated four strong singers who provided a dependable core for our choir the past few years. With a larger but less experienced group to start this school year, the pressure of preparing them to lead the singing at our monthly all-school Masses has had me looking for creative choices for what they might sing. Our most recent Mass was on the feast day of Saint Francis of Assisi (Friday, Oct. 4). I suppose I could have taken one for the team and tried to play this (Liszt's virtuosic evocation of St. Francis talking to the birds - and n ..read more