If you are craving scones, I’m not sure why you came to my website. But this is a good recipe.

In cele­bra­tion of having nothing better to do today, I converted my iTunes library and Last.fm profile to a composer-centric cata­logu­ing system (rather than the performer-centric one I’d used up until now). I’ve grad­u­ally come to the real­iza­tion that the iTunes ecosys­tem just isn’t designed to support track info for “clas­si­cal music”, where the “artist” and “composer” are differ­ent people. Even though iTunes does support the “composer” tag, it’s only useful for orga­ni­za­tion within iTunes, because no other programs recog­nize it.

In my re-orga­ni­za­tion, the name of the person or group most asso­ci­ated with the creation of the track goes into the “artist” field. For example, “Jean Sibelius” for Finlan­dia, not “Berlin Phil­har­monic”. For album-centric music, the primary creator can be the performer, not the composer: “Bill Evans” is the artist for a My Funny Valen­tine, even though Rodgers and Hart wrote the original song. Despite requir­ing me to make these judge­ment calls, I think the new way is more intu­itive. Also, my Last.fm profile will now tell me more about my listen­ing habits; instead of an incom­pre­hen­si­ble list of perform­ers and disem­bod­ied tracks, I’ll see a nice, clean stack of composers and pieces. My performer tags are now in the “comments” slot, and don’t get uploaded. A new year, a new profile.

Oh! This also gives me the oppor­tu­nity to recom­mend one of my favorite sites: Doug’s Apple­scripts for iTunes. Apple­scripts are tiny programs designed to automate repet­i­tive tasks; this is how I was able to re-tag 9,000 tracks without going through each one by hand (I don’t have that much free time). So, for instance, one Apple­script switched my artists to the “comments” field, then my composers to “artist”, and another one refor­mat­ted the composers to “First name Last name”. You can find a script to do pretty much anything you’d ever want, and they’re acces­si­ble from a menu right in iTunes— a huge time­saver for anyone with a big library.

I love Radio­head for many reasons. One of them is this video. The song they’re playing (The Smiths’s Head­mas­ter Ritual) is one of my favorites, and you can tell it’s one of theirs as well; I imagine them as timid English school­boys in 1985, clus­ter­ing around the hi-fi, listen­ing to Meat is Murder and thinking “That’s what I want to be doing with my life”.

Besides being really touching, it’s also just a great perfor­mance. There’s a “cover band” stigma in the rock world: the act of inter­pre­ta­tion garners little respect, while much more value is placed on orig­i­nal­ity (exactly the reverse of the current clas­si­cal-music paradigm). I think in the future we’ll see a gradual increase of rock musi­cians recre­at­ing the canon, with the original record­ing acting as the author­i­ta­tive version instead of a musical score. More perfor­mances like this one wouldn’t be bad.

In the past few months, I’ve finished three or four new pieces, and I had to think up names for all of them. I used not to put any effort into titles (here’s an example). At some point during college, I had a two-part epiphany. Part one was: would I want to read a book called Bildungsro­man, Op. 4? (OK, actually that sounds inter­est­ing, but not terribly evoca­tive). Part two was: I suddenly realized that many composers give their really great pieces really bad titles. Bad titles, espe­cially ones that sound vaguely new-age, make my spine crawl. And I can’t under­stand why composers, all in all a pretty smart bunch, are allowed to get away with them.

On a related note, the plural­ized-abstract-noun + number thing is just not working anymore. That’s a major cop-out. My friend Alex (who has some great titles, by the way) once made a list of all the plural-noun titles he could think of off the top of his head, and there were some­thing like 400 of them.

I find Sufjan Steven­s’s para­graph-long song titles a bit self-conscious, though I like the general language of them.

Here are some titles I love: Before and After Science. Hallelu­jah Junction. It Takes Twelve to Tango. All the pieces on Lost and Safe. Schu­man­n’s Kinder­szenen, which are incred­i­bly abstract musi­cally, yet have perfect titles. Most of the songs on Mr. Bungle’s Cali­for­nia. The Boards of Canada have a lot of very similar titles, but I think they are pretty ideal. Here is Julius Eastman CD that costs $54 and is full of really memo­rable titles (I espe­cially like If You’re So Smart, Why Aren’t You Rich?).

So how do I think up titles? I like phrases and combi­na­tions of words that are easy to pronounce, and feel like some­thing I would say in conver­sa­tion. There’s some­thing prepos­sess­ing about a title that’s in regular, everyday English, rather than one that forces you to step back and regard it as Art.

Naming a piece is like how I imagine naming a fictional char­ac­ter would be; you can decide to make it really signif­i­cant and symbolic, or you can just choose some­thing that sounds more or less suitable. I keep a list of phrases I think would make good titles, some of which are prepos­ter­ous and will probably never find a comple­men­tary piece (example: Every­thing Seems Edible). I play around with differ­ent vari­a­tions on a title as I’m working on a piece. Usually the most stream­lined version ends up working best, and it’s often the one I thought of first.

All this goes to show that titles are less mean­ing­ful than you think (and than program notes would have you believe). People often ask me what Shy and Mighty means. The answer is “not much”. It’s just the first thing that popped into my head.

Tomorrow the days start getting longer again! This makes me inde­scrib­ably excited.

Good hustle at New Music New Haven, every­body! I was surprised (in a good way) by many of the pieces. Also, let’s continue this upward trend on the atten­dance front.

Quick updates: I’ve added a couple of new pages to the compo­si­tion section, and some new events over the next few months. More to come. I just finished a piano quartet for Hannah Collins, an homage of sorts to Brahms’s op. 25. Next up: a piece for piano and chamber orches­tra, for the illus­tri­ous David Kaplan. Tomorrow I’m going to Balti­more for family fun-times, then home for the holidays. I am planning on construct­ing one of these.

This might be the most viscer­ally adorable design I’ve seen since the original iMac (and there’s some­thing of a family resem­blance). I really hope Sony puts it into produc­tion— not because I really want a “little TV that rests in the palm of your hand,” but because it would be a step up for Sony’s consumer designs, which have felt pretty stagnant for the past decade. The little TV is inter­est­ing from a tactile stand­point, because it is soft and squeez­able (not qual­i­ties gener­ally asso­ci­ated with elec­tron­ics). Func­tion­ally, it reduces the distance between itself and the viewer, which allows it to shrink dras­ti­cally and offer a compa­ra­ble expe­ri­ence. I admire it when design­ers totally rethink quotid­ian activ­i­ties like this. But it also takes a leap of faith on the corpo­rate side, some­thing I think Sony has not been so good at lately. Though I have been eyeing one of these beauties. Think of all the musique concrète I’ve been not writing by not having one!

Last night I hosted a dinner party for the compo­si­tion first years (Fernando, I can’t find a link for you!). The level of social grace was, for a sampling of composers, among the highest I’ve seen; it’s one thing to write cool music, quite another to interact in the real world. Though I would love to invite Frederic Rzewski over to dinner sometime. If by some chance you read this, Fred, you have a standing invitation.

Over the course of the meal, the question came up about whether we listen to our own music. This is an inter­est­ing corol­lary to the rhetor­i­cal question I posed a few months back about how many composers routinely listen to their colleagues’ music. I’ve always felt that I should listen, and want to listen, to my own music; if it’s not some­thing that comes up regu­larly on my last.fm, do I really want to subject others to it? I do find myself listen­ing to my cleaner recordings/performances, simply because they’re more flat­ter­ing. I think what I’m doing, somewhat subcon­sciously, when I listen to my music, is refining my ideas and tech­niques in prepa­ra­tion for future pieces, so I can spend less time writing the same piece again and again. Andrew was on the other side; he said that he can’t stand to listen to his own music, for reasons I’m not entirely clear on. This usually happens to me only with older pieces (which is why I keep pruning my back catalogue).

Does this make me self-obsessed? Or worse, compla­cent? Please weigh in.

As New Haven descends further into the cold and dark, I was surprised and most pleased to find, of all things, loquats. Not a tree, sadly, but a flat of them at the Chinese grocery. I’ve heard that these fruits are so delicate that they are almost impos­si­ble to ship, yet these ones looked handsome, so I bought a whole bagful. Loquats remind me of growing up in Berkeley, where they grow on street­corners, and my dad would hoist me onto his shoul­ders so I could pick them.

I had deli­cious loquats last summer, when D. and I were in Paris. We spent a day wander­ing around the Marché aux Puces in Clig­nan­court, and late in the after­noon became suddenly very hungry; a large loquat tree presented itself just in time, and I climbed up and gathered a late lunch. The fruits were a little overripe and very sweet; I’m not sure if they were the best loquats I’ve had, or whether the circum­stances made for such a memo­rable experience. 

Notes to self, to be re-read before I write my Phil­har­mo­nia piece next year:

1. Have one or two good ideas. If you have more than that, save the rest for later.
2. Don’t write any details because no one will ever hear them in Woooooooolsey Haaaaaaall.
3. You don’t need to fill up your allotted time; better too short than too long. Just as in cooking, it’s easier to add stuff than to take stuff out.

Friday night was the Philharmonia/New Music New Haven Concert, or, how the second-years spent their summer vaca­tions. I always look forward to these (I’ve even reviewed them in the past) as it’s the only time the Phil ever plays anything New, and when I was a small, small under­grad, it was really inspi­ra­tional to see all the cool Older Kids writing such cool stuff. (Unfor­tu­nately, now that I’m actually an Older Kid, I realize we’re not partic­u­larly cool. Damn.)

The other side of it is that I’ve been secretly plotting my revenge, I mean my orches­tra piece, for the past several years now, and by seeing so many other composers run the gauntlet before me, I’ve been able to glean more or less what works and what doesn’t. Thus, the notes to self. The main problem composers run into is Woolsey Hall itself, which was built with a huge organ, not orches­tras, in mind. It is essen­tially a giant bathroom. No matter how fastid­i­ously controlled a perfor­mance, every detail is over­whelmed by the acoustics. Not only that, but the orches­tra just sounds small, which is a shame because they really play with a lot of gusto.

These hand­i­caps were turned into advan­tages in Ingram Marshal­l’s piece, Kingdom Come. In true Ingram fashion (and when I say fashion, I mean fashion) the orches­tra is treated more as an atmos­pheric back­ground for the pre-recorded compo­nent, which consists of various Balkan folk singers. Ingram gener­ally builds layers of reverb into his music (either through orches­tra­tion or elec­tronic manip­u­la­tion), so in this case, the hall just added another dimen­sion of moisture, helping the orches­tra and elec­tron­ics to merge. Harmon­i­cally, the piece is clear enough so that muddi­ness was never a problem. Ingram also has a way of fooling with time scales, so that I’m never sure how long his music is. I seri­ously couldn’t tell whether Kingdom Come was 10 or 25 minutes, and neither would have surprised me.

About the Length Issue. Every time I bring this up with Ingram, he says, “Aren’t you the one who wrote that hour-long piano piece?” Touché. Maybe I’m not qual­i­fied to talk about this. But I still feel as though most New pieces I hear are inter­minable. Perhaps it’s an issue of expec­ta­tions; I never know how long to expect a piece of New music to last (as opposed to a pop song, which I know will be over in five or so minutes, or a Brahms sonata allegro, which I know will last about 10). This is closely related to the Form Issue, which is that when composers make up their own forms, I usually feel lost in them. I have no feeling of antic­i­pa­tion, and when that happens, the piece loses its ability to surprise.

Last night’s excep­tion to this was when I read Derrick Wang’s apoc­olyp­tic-voiceover styled program note for his piece Action [Trailer], I said to myself, “This had better only be one minute and 30 seconds.” Which it turned out to be, and I was quite happy.

Yuan-Chen Li worked hard to solve the Woolsey Issue by really tailor­ing her piece to the space, which meant putting soloists in the balconies, and using the organ as a sort of rein­force­ment to the orches­tra. Her piece was soni­cally adven­tur­ous and unex­pected and I really liked it.

Dan Vezza’s piece was called there was never, never was there so I expected it to be some sort of palidrome. Actually it was in two sections, the first very gestural (kind of reminded me of how toddlers treat pianos— just glissing up and down the keyboard in great clumps) and the second totally aleatoric, even­tu­ally coalesc­ing around a repeated F‑sharp trombone solo, which went on long after the rest of the orches­tra had ceased to play. It was spec­tac­u­larly weird. I felt bad for John Concklin, the conduc­tor, who just sort of stood there for the second half. Maybe he should have pulled out a kazoo or some­thing and joined in the fray.

I some­times feel that Ted Hearne’s music is the closest of all my colleagues’ to my own sensi­bil­i­ties, and then some­times he just goes and does some­thing totally differ­ent, which is great. Patriot was defi­nitely one of those pieces. I think it might have been polit­i­cal, I’ll have to ask him about the title. There was a lot of activity through the whole piece, little disso­nant brass fanfares and woodwind machi­na­tions. I really had the sense that I was missing a lot because of the acoustics, so I’m looking forward to hearing the record­ing of the concert next week. I also want to ask Naftali Schindler about his piece, which sounded like distorted recol­lec­tions of West Side Story. He wasn’t at the concert because it was on the Sabbath.

NPR has a new music-devoted subsite. It looks pretty promis­ing, as these things go. There is a nice mix of genres, which are all given equal billing. The design of the site is clean, though EVERYTHING IS IN CAPS so it probably feels more chaotic than it could. There are also some deli­ciously weird juxta­po­si­tions result­ing from the genre-neutralness—the heading “ROCK/POP/FOLK right under­neath a big picture of Mahler, for example. Here’s an inter­view with Grizzly Bear. I’m currently digging Yellow House.