I received an email today from Jason Thomas that a piece of mine, Four Quarters, is being performaed on Mark So‘s “Quiet Music at Night” concert over at CalArts. Not everything seems to be set in stone, but the details that are worked out are that the concert will be November 9th, 10pm-3am, at the CalArts Main Gallery. As I get more details I will certainly post it here.

I’m very excited to hear that another performance of this piece is being done as I’m quite fond of this piece. A big thanks to Jason Thomas for letting me know and Mark So for organizing the concert!

A while ago when subscription music services first started I had tried out Napster, but for some reason or another I decided to stop using it. Perhaps it was that I found that downloading albums took up too much space, and perhaps I wasn’t using it so much at the time.

Today, however, after discussing Hillary Hahn’s CD’s with Will, I decided I wanted to try out one of these services again. At first I thought I’d try Napster again, as I remembered the service to being alright, but decided instead to try out Real Rhapsody. So far, I’m enjoying quite a bit. I like that it’s focused on streaming on-demand music and not downloaded files. I find that having access to any music on a whim to be a very liberating experience. I like very much that the playlists I create are saved on a server as that allows me to move from computer to computer and have access to the playlists.

So far, the music selection has been very good. It’s nice that they have Naxos’s collection as it contains a great deal of Lutoslawski and other 20th century composers I’m very much interested in. I was able to find Bruckner’s and Brahm’s symphonies, and am looking very forward to delving very deeply into all of the symphonic music that I can.

I think this type of service very well addresses my needs in that I’m not very much interested in managing music files or allocating space for them. I don’t want to own this music as much as I’d like to have access to it. It feels to me very much like a public library, in that I am able to have access but not own these items, and that suits me very well.

The only down side to all of this is that it only runs on Windows, as my preferred OS to use at home is Linux. At work it’s absolutely fine as that is what I use there, and at home it’s not a problem for me to log into Windows as I the tools I use for my musical work and other work are available on any platform I use. So, all in all, I’m pretty satisfied.

Real Rhapsody has a 14-day free trial and so I am taking advantage of that now. As these are all my first impressions, perhaps I’ll stop using this as I did Napster, I don’t know. I guess I’ll see how I feel in a couple weeks when the trial is over. ^_^

I woke up this morning and finished reading John Luther Adams’ Winter Music, which I found to be quite enlightening and just a wonderful way to start the day. He simply is just an amazing artist and human being. So much in his work and way of seeing the world to admire.

In reading the book I came across a number of things I wanted to explore, particularly the books of Barry Lopez (which should be coming in sooon) and the book The Cloud of Unknowing (which I picked up yesterday). I’ve found that most of the things I’ve come across have been through this amazing web of connections, from finding an artist I like and reading about them, finding what they liked and reading about those influences or those texts. It’s been such a journey from one person to the next, to read about their views and to read what influenced that view, and through these encounters to find myself in a new world. I find myself very fortunate to have come across this world of art and ideas that has exposed me to so many different aspects of the world I may have never ventured to explore otherwise.

Tonight I went to hear an sfSoundSeries concert where amongst the pieces they played, they performed an arrangment of Morton Feldman’s “Three Voices”. Now, Three Voices happens to be one of my favorite Feldman pieces, one I’ve listened to many, many times on CD and have also had the good fortune to hear live, sung by Joan La Barbara at Carnegie Hall. (That performance was absolutely amazing and left quite an impression on me, performed at a tempo such that the piece lasted an hour and a half, and of course that wonderfully gorgeous voice…)

Tonight’s arrangment was… unbearable. Everything that I so much adore in Feldman’s music was so completely absent in tonight’s “rendition.” (I don’t know what to even call it.) The use of different families of timbres didn’t work at all for me; the fluctuations in tempo really lost the continuity of the piece; the use of whispered words didn’t come close to the effect of the original. (Listening to the Joan La Barbara recording now, it’s such an amazing moment when words are introduced into the music…). I found tonight’s arrangment to be a very insensitive handling of the original music, really doing very little justice to it.

Perhaps my utter disappointment is obvious by now. But if not, I should say I was very disappointed in tonight’s performance.

I recieved my copy of John Luther Adams’ Winter Music from Amazon today and am very much looking forward to reading it. For a long time I’ve been an admirer of his music and work, as well as his character. I was pleasantly surprised to find that the book also comes with a CD of some of his pieces (it’s stated on the site but I didn’t notice it the first time). Such a nice way to start the weekend. ^_^

I have for a long time very much loved a recording of hers of Swedish songs, entitled “Wings in the Night“, and while in the store yesterday I came across her albums and purchased “La Bonne Chanson“, an album full of French songs which is absolutely delightful. Her voice is as beautiful on this recording as the other I have, and only makes me want to purchase everything she’s ever done, as her voice is certainly amongst my favorites. (I have quite a love of mezzo-soprano voices…).

(All of the albums I’ve had the fortune of getting yesterday have all been wonderful, and it’s quite a joy to be so interested in listening to music actively. It seems to come in waves lately, the desire to spend time really listening to music and spending time otherwise, perhaps just a matter of the music I’ve come across. It really is such a joy to find new music that one finds so much in…)

I came across this cd while looking at the cold blue music website which I found after looking at John Luther Adams‘ website, and finally got around to purchasing it at Tower Classical Records yesterday. How absolutely gorgeous! It makes very much sense to me that these two should be on the same label as they seem to have very similar aesthetics, an aesthetic which I very much love. Quiet, serene, lush sounds floating along…

I had known of this album for a while but took a while to find a store that carried the DVD version of it. The DVD feature interview with Marilyn Nonken (a performer who I absolutely adore and who I’ve had the great fortune of seeing perform many times when I lived in New York) is quite a treat as she shares her stories of encountering Feldman’s music and what care she’s taken in performing this piece. The recording is much slower than the other recording I have and it’s something I appreciate very much about it, as the performance is quite fantastic. The recording also seems to have captured an absolutely wonderful piano sound, and on DVD, listening to the performance is unbroken (the CD version is on two CD’s). All in all a wonderful piece performed by a wonderful performer and all very much worth the wait of getting on DVD.

I’ve been working on a piece lately and although I’m quite fond of the material, I’ve been at somewhat of an impasse. The form of the piece really has yet to reveal itself, so I’ve been patiently listening, contemplating, wondering where the material wants to go, trying to cultivate a calm and open mind, to see how the music will take its shape…

After talking about Wendy Carlos with Nick, he mentioned Isao Tomita‘s music, which I had never spent very much time with. I think I wasn’t so interested in it as most of his music, just from looking at the package, seemed to be just electronic performances of pieces I already knew.

However, Nick picked up Tomita’s version of Holst’s “The Planets” and let me check it out. I was astounded! The sounds which Tomita gets is really quite phenomenal. Lush, organic, alive…

I’ve been really floored as of late by the sounds of Tomita and Carlos. The sound worlds they achieve are very much of interest to me. Aesthetically, I think I am after different ends, but the I think that somehow this music of theirs will play a part in my own.