Of all the popular and scholarly writers on music, the one that tends to irritate me the most is... ....wait for it... ...no, not Norman Lebrecht... it's Ted Gioia. It's partly because he is so darned prolific, tossing off a thousand or more word essay every couple of days. And yeah, I could do that too if I didn't have a lot of other things to do, plus, laziness. But it's mostly because while he is so deeply mistaken on anything having to do with music history, he is also utterly self-assured about it with no hint of the awareness that his knowledge might be a bit off-kilter. I guess that is ..read more

How Winning (or Losing) a Grammy Changes the Music Artists Make: We found that after winning a Grammy, artists tend to release music that deviates stylistically from their own previous work, as well as from other artists in their genre. Nominees who lose do the opposite—their subsequent albums trend toward the mainstream. We think this happens because winning a Grammy grants an artist more leverage to pursue their personal artistic inclinations. Nonwinners, however, might interpret their loss as a negative signal about how their artistic choices deviated from the norm, and thus feel more boun ..read more

The title, by the way, comes right off the license plates: that's the motto of BC and it is entirely appropriate. They chose that over "obsessed with health foods" and "socialized medicine no matter how long the waiting list is!" Oh, sorry, that was my acerbic side sneaking out again. No more, I promise! Today I knocked a couple of items off my bucket list: I visited a Wendy's for the first time in twenty-some years, and did some sightseeing in a nearby park. Wendy's, for those of you joining us from far-flung lands, is the finest fast-food hamburger joint in Canada. It doesn't quite come up t ..read more

 I do have an acerbic, critical side and if I were to let it out for a moment, possibly with this facial expression: I might make some further comments about my trip to Vancouver. I encountered a new kind of cuisine a few times that I will call "bullshit cuisine" defined as the kind that focusses on the presentation and "healthy" aspects to the exclusion of things like good preparation and flavour. I think the exemplar of this was the ridiculously over-priced room-service breakfast I had at the ridiculously over-priced hotel in Victoria. The presentation was impeccable:  large tray ..read more

Yesterday afternoon was the last of the three concerts premiering my String Quartet No. 2 "Landscapes." Yes, I've decided to append that nickname officially to the quartet. It was an excellent finale to the series as it was in, by far, the best space acoustically--a large church hall with a glorious high wood ceiling. Also, my old friend Richard Volet was there to capture the performance in a recording that I will undoubtedly share with you in the coming weeks. The Pro Nova Ensemble were very comfortable with the piece by this point and gave a very fine performance and I gave my best impromptu ..read more

I have to prepare this miscellanea ahead of time as well, as Friday is another travel day for me. Friday morning I fly the little inter-harbour seaplane from Vancouver to Victoria, flight time 35 minutes. Then Saturday morning early I fly back in time to attend the last concert at 2 pm. The usual way to go from Vancouver, the largest city in British Columbia, located on the mainland, to Victoria, the second largest city and capitol located on Vancouver Island, is by car ferry. These travel every hour from harbours located quite a ways from the city centres so not very convenient if you have li ..read more

I like to do some commentary about the place when I go on these music-related junkets. In this case, I am back in British Columbia, Vancouver to be exact, after a long hiatus: the last time I was here was in 2005. After twenty-five years in Mexico, Canada feels a bit like a foreign country, but one I used to know very well. So what do I love about Canada? Ok, the climate is not as nice as Mexico, but the air is fresh and clean and everything, I mean everything, is green. This is a gardener's paradise. Here is where I am staying, taken from the front. There is a house back there somewhere: Ca ..read more

I'm in Vancouver and my String Quartet No. 2, which should probably be nicknamed "Landscapes," will be premiered tonight in a concert in North Vancouver. Getting here was a bit of a mess, though. Flying to either Canada or Europe I always fly out of Mexico City because there are direct flights avoiding having to travel via the US. It is just a five hour flight to Vancouver so I anticipated an easy travel day. Alas! or as they say in some Italian madrigals "Ohimè!" Normally it is about a three and a half hour drive from where I live to Mexico City. My flight was at 9am so I arranged for my driv ..read more

I have to write this ahead of time because I will be traveling all day Friday. And it's likely to be skimpy as a result. The bonus is I will be in Vancouver next week attending the premiere of my second string quartet. There might be photos and later on, a recording. In Escaping Netflix, the On An Overgrown Path blog reviews a documentary about Alma Mahler: That is Alma Mahler in the photo. In July 1940 she fled from unoccupied Marseille in France across the Pyrenees to neutral Spain in an escape masterminded by American Varian Fry's Emergency Rescue Committee. She escaped with the Czech writ ..read more

I'm tagging this "guitar technique" because I don't have a "music and health" tag. Yesterday I was diagnosed with tendonitis. I have played guitar for over fifty years and never had a problem, but now I do. The irony is that for quite a few years now I have been the guy professional guitarists come to when they have a problem with tension, technique or tendonitis. I have been fairly successful in helping with these kinds of problems. I even wrote a book on guitar technique. So how did I come down with tendonitis at my advanced age, especially since I retired from my performing career a long ti ..read more