Thanks for the shout-out, sequenza21! You can go there and read all about the upcoming IGIGI concert at Roulette. I totally didn’t write the press release. Actually I did.

I also designed this poster:

Has anyone else noticed the scrab­u­lous Facebook app is a completely superior way to keep up with your friends than the entire rest of Facebook itself? I am hope­lessly addicted.

I heard the first perfor­mance of Talking About Dancing at Stony Brook yester­day. To get there, I had to take a boat, which I don’t do nearly enough. It really feels like an accom­plish­ment, making a boat journey. I also like the feeling of ferry-boats, which all seem to orig­i­nate from the same era (maybe the 60’s?) after which they appar­ently stopped making them. I’ve never seen a new ferry. The Martha’s Vineyard Islander was my favorite when I was six, and she appar­ently just retired last year!

he SUNY campuses also seem to have been built around the same time as all ferries, at the height of the kind of imper­sonal modernism that every­body now hates. The build­ings are brown-brick mono­liths with huge, feature­less spaces between them. The inte­ri­ors of the build­ings are iden­ti­cal corri­dors of white cinderblock. I’m sure that if I went to school there, I would get lost most days, espe­cially since there are no windows with which to orient oneself.

Flying Forms put on an incred­i­bly ambi­tious concert of seven world premières. I think this means that the modern reper­toire for Baroque trio just increased by about 30 percent. My friends Robin and Zach both wrote really enjoy­able pieces, Robin’s a pretty literal inter­pre­ta­tion of ancient Scottish folk-song practice, and Zach’s a spicy neoclas­si­cal tribute to the Greek muses. Even though many of the pieces referred to the past for inspi­ra­tion (mine included) I was impressed with the variety of styles and instru­men­tal idioms that people came up with. The trio played tire­lessly, in fact even seemed to gain energy towards the end of the concert, when they were joined by an awesome soprano named Elis­a­beth Holmertz.

Last Thursday was another New Music New Haven, one of the strangest I’ve been to: two and a half hours of weird styl­is­tic juxta­po­si­tions. Tom Duffy dressed up in a half-black-half-white tuxedo, with makeup and hair… paint (there was music that went along with that, too). Derrick had an improv… techno? piece? And don’t forget Alvin Lucier’s Silver Street­car for Orches­tra, a 15-minute triangle solo spec­tac­u­larly played by Mike Compitello. Then Jay had a moody, atmos­pheric piece for trombone and sampled trombone. In between those were some more normal pieces, which I think only seemed normal compared to their surround­ings (my piece, Play it by Ear, again included).

I had a strange expe­ri­ence the morning of the concert. I woke up not hearing well in my right ear; it felt sealed off somehow. The health service discov­ered that in fact both my ear canals were almost completely blocked. I’d been hearing every­thing through two pinholes for who knows how long. So they shot some water all up ins and that seemed to do the trick. I spent the day being entranced by what I had thought were familiar sounds; a running faucet, rustling bedclothes, typing on my computer, and so forth. All those high frequen­cies I’d been missing! I could even hear the beats in Fide­liotrio (just in time)! I can’t imagine a better state of mind (and body) in which to listen to Lucier’s music (OK, perhaps I can), most of which is based on the unhur­ried explo­ration of natural sonic phenom­ena. I really enjoyed Silver Street­car. Trian­gles have some truly amazing overtones. 

Here’s a nice article from the New Haven Advocate about tomorrow’s New Music New Haven.

Here’s another nice article ummm… what?

The mythical “Young People” are skipping out on piano recitals because pianists move too much? Could’ve knocked me over with a feather.