Update…my July 8 performance won’t be streamed. It’s in the catacombs under Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn. No Internet there! But it’ll be filmed, and there will be video available later on. Sorry for the misinfo! If that’s a word. Should be! July 8 — two variations I’ve written on “America the Beautiful,” for Min Kwon’s America/Beautiful project. Me and more than 70 other composers! Unfolding online July 4, with live performances July 7 and 8. I’ll be on the July 8 concert. Not all composers on every performance, of course! Not even Min would have the stamina for that, and I’m sure the audi ..read more

That’s the name of a variation on “America the Beautiful” that I wrote for Min Kwon’s America/Beautiful project… But wait…what IS that? Min commissioned variations from more than 70 composers. I wrote two.  Pause now…to imagine her learning them all.  That’s what I wrote in my newsletter. Adding that Min’s got boundless energy. And that she’s a pleasure to work with!  She’ll unveil her commissions from July 4 to July 9, streaming and live. With my pieces coming July 8, both ways. The live performance is on Andrew Ousley’s “Death of Classical”series at Green-wood Cemetery in New ..read more

I haven’t blogged in a long time. I’ve been quiet lately. Not storming the world with ideas about the future of classical music. Just peacefully teaching at Juilliard (remotely, of course), doing some composing, doing some consulting. That’s how I started a newsletter I’ve sent out. My first in quite awhile. It marks a reemergence into a life more public than I’ve lately had. In part I’m motivated by a performance of my music, coming up soon, both live and streaming. This is part of a big project launched by pianist Min Kwon, called America/Beautiful. To quote my newsletter, about the two pie ..read more

By popular demand on Facebook…well, two people asked for it …here’s the story I said there I’d tell about the Pet Shop Boys. How something I said gave them an idea for a song. I was interviewing them in LA in 1988 or ’89, when I was pop music critic for the LA Herald-Examiner. I’d long liked them, as I remember serious rock critics tended to. I know Greil Marcus did. I loved their delirious rhythm, their intelligence, and Neil Tennant’s deadpan singing, which somehow made room for both the intelligence and the delirium. But a friend of mine back then called them “disco trash.” That must have ..read more

One of my happiest moments, in my years as a journalist, was when I got Ice-T (shown in the photo) to stop saying something homophobic and cruel in his live shows. That happened in LA, late in the 1980s, when I was pop music critic for the Los Angeles Herald-Examiner, a now long-defunct daily newspaper. Ice-T — now best known as an actor, a regular on Law & Order: Special Victims Unit — was the leading rapper in town. So it was natural for me to interview him. Before the second time I did that, I went to a live show he did, and heard something that appalled me. To get the crowd going, rap ..read more

“When the task force made its report, it led with a bombshell.” Read on! It’s early in the last decade, and the CEO of one of America’s top orchestras is at a gathering, talking to someone they’re friendly with. At this gathering are board members, staff, and musicians from more than a dozen orchestras. And at this point in their proceedings, anyone can start a discussion. You just write the subject on a sheet of paper, and post the paper where everyone can see it. The CEO writes his subject: “WHAT TO DO ABOUT THE SHITY ECONOMY.” Their friend points out that they’ve misspelled “shitty.” The CE ..read more

How could we think in a really big way — an expansive, loving way — about the future of classical music? I think we might move toward acceptance. Acceptance of classical music’s place in the world, even if it’s not as large as we’d like it to be. I don’t mean we wouldn’t work to give it a larger place. But we wouldn’t be angry at how things are now. We wouldn’t blame anyone. And above all, to all the many people who don’t love classical music, we’d open our arms, with loving acceptance. Because these are our fellow humans, who deserve respect and love just as much as we do. People who (if you ..read more

Continuing from my last post, with what should be in a book on the past few decades’ history of American orchestras… One main focus of the book would of course have to be orchestra finances. Along with the long-term decline in ticket sales, which of course affects the bottom line. So the writer of this book would need accurate information about orchestra ticket sales from the 1980s till the present. And orchestras won’t reveal this! They of course have the data, and report it to the League of American Orchestras. The League then publishes it — or at least this used to be true — in a large book ..read more

I wrote on Facebook awhile ago that there ought to be a book on the history of American orchestras from the 1980s on. Or the 70s, maybe. I got that idea from comments on a good-natured post I did, citing Will Roseliep’s writing about the first websites the Big Five ever created. Period pieces, all of them, As of course they’d be, since they date from the early days of the web. The Chicago Symphony’s very first website! In the comments on Facebook, people active in orchestra affairs back then reminisced about creating those websites. How hard it was to convince orchestra boards that websites ..read more

Some anecdotes from the backstage front lines (so to speak) of opera in the US in the 1980s. Ardis Krainik I served on an NEA opera/music theater panel with two larger than life women, Beverly Sills and Ardis Krainik. Beverly at that time ran the New York City Opera, and Ardis (a beautiful soul) ran the Chicago Lyric. At one point they got in an argument. Beverly said it wasn’t possible to sell tickets to contemporary opera, Ardis said it was. Beverly was adamant. I thought Ardis was right. Because if she could sell them, they could be sold. I didn’t say that, figuring it was smarter not to ..read more