From the monthly archives:
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Composer, professor, publisher, and Chair of the UCLA Department of Music, Roger Bourland was commissioned by Palm to provide eight ringtones for its new handheld device, the Pre.
Bourland praised Palm for having the vision to commission “micro-compositions; not just phone emulations, or paid-for chunks of pre-existing songs.” Each ringtone is roughly 24 seconds long before [...]
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My website has been broken for a while and is now back up and running. You’ll notice that on the right of this post is a new section called Bourland Music. It is programmed to work on a variety of platforms now, with or without Flash.
Over the upcoming months my goal is to bring [...]
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Dear Rufus
I am so proud and happy for you and your recent compositions. I heard your new Shakespeare Sonnets–they remind me of some of my own songs. You struggle with a desire for an old-time, folky sense of harmony fighting with being more harmonically adventurous. Meld the two my boy.
I have avoided sitting in on [...]
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I was saddened to see that two blocks from my home, the last sheet music store in Los Angeles, Hollywood Sheet Music, has closed its doors. Petelson’s days are numbered, so I hear. (Can’t they just move to an online business??)
With Ralph Jackson and Mark Carlson at lunch yesterday, we wondered about the future of [...]
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I’ve been to quite a few weddings over the past few years and have written about most of them. The one last week in Las Vegas took the cake. As I went through the event, it was a bit shocking, but in retrospect saw it as Performance Art, which may or may not have been [...]
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Today Volker Hauschka stopped by to chat about an upcoming collaboration with me on a new film by Graham Streeter (of CAGES fame). Volker is taking the prepared piano into a new realm, and it is quite often transcendent, hovering, beguiling, pretty to listen to, and original. His career seems to be taking off. Seeing [...]
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I am finally reading Oliver Sacks’ terrific MUSICOPHILIA. It has truly been a life-changing read. In it, he discusses musical hallucinations. I had always assumed that everyone had a constant playlist going in their heads as I do, but I guess not. My brain is full of earworms as well as an enormous playlist of [...]
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Today Prof Steve Loza visited our class to share is passion. Of Mexican heritage, he studied classical music in college, but wanted more and became profoundly curious to learn of his own heritage, and ultimately became an Ethnomusicologist, but keeping his feet in performing and composition.
He spoke of the blend of indigenous, Spanish, and black [...]
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There are times when I’m a Christian
There are times when I’m a Jew
There are times when I’m an atheist
There are times I only think of you
There are times when I’m a Buddhist
There are times when I’m a Jain
But all I know is that
I really love you.
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