Absorbed on the train today by an unfa­mil­iar word in this New Yorker piece on Britain’s outlaw egg collec­tors: Oology, meaning the study of eggs. First, I can’t imagine why the New Yorker didn’t spell it Oölogy; and second, this is a hitherto-unthought-of category of English words that look like what they mean. It’s perfect: a pictogram of an egg, followed by ‑ology. The closest thing in English to Ancient Egyptian! There must be a word for this species of word, some­thing along the lines of onomatopæia. Also, do any fonts have an Oo ligature? 

The article also made me realize that I may have a budding fixation on eggs, myself; why just the other day I doodled this logo, which I offer for free to anyone planning on devel­op­ing eggs.com.

I’ve been doing a bit of late-Spring cleaning around the site—poke around for awhile, see if you don’t find some­thing new. 

The reason this tidying-up comes about so late is that I’ve been feeling a bit unset­tled. Not in a bad way, just peri­patetic, and for me, trav­el­ing does not condone any kind of web-work. I’m the sort of person who needs to have every stray file on the desktop accounted for, every imple­ment on the actual desk set straight, before I sit down to do any Real Work. For this reason, the month of May was lost to any compos­ing, and I’m now scram­bling to make up for lost time. 

The defi­n­i­tion of Real Work seems to shift, too; it means the thing which I am not working on at the very moment, so while prac­tic­ing, it is writing, and vice versa. 

I’m writing a set of “work songs” at the moment, for three singers, all of whom are also composers and friends. The text on my screen right now is a poem called “To Whom it May Concern” by Andrea Cohen, which I think is just about the clever­est thing anyone’s ever set down on paper. 

Here is some­thing else stress­ful. I haven’t worked a lot with preex­ist­ing text—haven’t written much vocal music, period—and there­fore don’t have much expe­ri­ence tracking down the permis­sions to set texts. The whole things is quite myste­ri­ous, and it’s differ­ent for every­thing; some­times you ask the author directly, and some­times they are lovely and friendly and say Yes, of course; some­times you ask an agent; some­times you ask a “rights manage­ment company”, whatever that is; some­times they want a comi­cally small amount of money, other times comi­cally large. Some­times it’s dead silence. And of course, once you get around to asking for permis­sion to use a text, it means you’ve already got your heart set on it, in which case a “No” feels like a Major Artistic Setback. 

I don’t have air condi­tion­ing in my new apart­ment, but I do have the next best thing, which is two of these. 

I am inde­cently proud to announce the exis­tence of my second album, which is called Home Stretch. The disc is a product of three years of work, for which I am heavily indebted to Andrew Cyr and the Metrop­o­lis Ensemble, stellar & stalwart collab­o­ra­tors through it all. It will be released by our friends at Nonesuch.

Home Stretch is also the name of the first piece on the album, a concerto for piano & chamber orches­tra which I wrote in 2008. It’s joined by two pieces which are, in fact, not totally by me: a “re-compo­si­tion” of Mozart’s Coro­na­tion concerto (K. 537) and a Para­phrase on Themes of Brian Eno. An excel­lent liner note by Daniel Stephen Johnson explains the connec­tions these rather… differ­ent-sounding things.

The cover photo is by the great William Eggle­ston. Thanks to the Eggle­ston people for letting us use it. The album itself is designed by John Gall.

When will I be able to buy it, I hear you asking yourself? July 30^th is the answer. There will also be some sort of Event. More soon.

Deep inside the bowels of our great nation, I am revising my yMusic piece. There is a Steinway in front of me and beside me a machine that spits out passable coffee.

A couple of rather exciting premières coming up this week—unfortunately, on the same day—Wednesday, the 22^nd. If you are in Wash­ing­ton, D.C., you may want to attend this concert by the Attacca Quartet at Library of Congress. They will be playing a little quartet I wrote them called Early to Rise.

On the other hand, if you’re in New York, you’ll want to find yourself at Rockwood Music Hall Stage 2, where yMusic will be playing new pieces by Mark Dancigers, Marcos Balter, Sufjan Stevens, Andrew Norman, and Nico Muhly (quite a list!) along­side my new piece for them, Safe Travels.

I want to issue my highest recom­men­da­tion for the Living Earth Show’s May 12^th concert at the Cell Theater. Travis Andrews and Andy Meyerson (electric guitarist and percus­sion­ist, respec­tively) have commis­sioned a remark­able body of work for them­selves over the past few years, and they throw them­selves into playing it with a gusto that is inspir­ing to behold.

And you needn’t take my word for it; their YouTube page features many compellingly-performed/pro­duced music videos of their commis­sions. In this video, the duo performs Sam Adams’s Tension Study no. 2, with the fetching trapeze artist Deanna Hammond swinging overhead.

I recently had the good fortune of my name appear­ing on a poster in the NYC subway for the first time. More people in my own age bracket responded to this adver­tise­ment than to any other listing I’ve ever gotten—comprising the coveted “young people who don’t neces­sar­ily rush to buy every new David Lang album, and in fact may not have even heard of David Lang” demo­graphic. And the audience ended up packed with those very people.

I’ve made fun of BAM’s subway posters in this space before (that’s because they were terrible), but I think they’re a great music-PR strategy, espe­cially when deployed on the G line, where one is bound to spend dozens of minutes on the plat­forms staring at the adver­tise­ments. I remember seeing a Chamber Music Society subway poster a few years ago featur­ing the excel­lent cellist Nick Canel­lakis, and maybe one with Wu Han in a red drapery? Clas­si­cal presen­ters should clearly be doing more of this!

Prac­tic­ing Shostakovich this week, along with his comrade-in-angst Mieczys­law Weinberg, for a concert with ACME. I haven’t much thought about Shostakovich’s musical language since sopho­more year of high school, when my attrac­tions tended toward the loud, the disso­nant, the minor-mode. Shostakovich symphonies were just the ticket.

It’s present­ing me with an inter­pre­ta­tional chal­lenge this time around—what to do with all the filler, the stuffing in between the themes. There’s so much of it, both in the Shostakovich and the Weinberg (which sounds a bit wackier, maybe just because I wasn’t familiar with it), page after page of passages like the following:

One of the first great myster­ies of writing music was, for me, just this—how to stuff a piece so it wasn’t just a theme, repeated a few times. What was all that musical caulk filling in the gaps? What do you do after you’ve stated your theme (and restated it, in Wein­berg’s case)?

It’s still kind of a mystery to me, what fills in the gaps in Shostakovich. We’re told the stuff is somehow “political”—that it’s purposely banal, or ironic—saying lots of words and meaning the total opposite. How to convey that in a perfor­mance, though? Power­less as music is to commu­ni­cate a concrete thought, is it even worth trying? Maybe the best I can hope for is to shout “Loud, Disso­nant, Minor”, and the rest will take care of itself.

Lately I have been greeted mornings by the clouds from The Simpsons title sequence.

I sanction every­thing but the music in this video (thanks to @ukeleleuser for the tip).