What a year!
The highlight of my year had to be the premiere of HOMER IN CYBERSPACE, my new musical written with Mel Shapiro. I don’t have the interest or connections to try to send it to Broadway, but am certain it could have a huge audience if put in the right hands.
A trip to Hawaii [...]
One aspect that much of the old Christmas music has is good voice leading. In lay terms, this means if you have four people all singing together, each part flows smoothly and doesn’t jump all over the place. Most of the songs have four parts and are adeptly harmonized. It is exactly this kind of [...]
This a a piece I fell in love with after I heard Ruth Laredo play it. I took it to my piano teacher (Carroll Chilton) who said it was beyond my ability. I said I didn’t care, he said “you ARE stubborn, ok, try it.” And I learned to play it. All the luscious inner [...]
What a find! Here is a video with brief pictures of various women who have worked in [classical] electronic music. There are a LOT of women missing, young and old, but hey, it’s a start, and an interesting document. The music is by DELIA DERBYSHIRE and is called “The Wizards Laboratory” (1972) — quite catchy [...]
I called Martha Stewart a while back and told her that what she really needed to do was to invite Rufus Wainwright onto her show. In fact, why not the whole family. So I was thrilled to find that she followed through on it. Here’s what turned out, in two parts. (And don’t play [...]
This is a very old map outside the Los Angeles Courthouse. Sometimes maps age and need to be replaced. In this case, it has, in my view, become a work of art and no longer functions as a map and therefore needs to be replaced. It seems like a symbol of our world today. As [...]
I stumbled across this cover for a film I that did the music for in 1989 called NIGHT LIFE. I didn’t realize that it had been released in Spanish under the name “Animas” and at another time as “Vida Noctorna.” Here is the VHS cover. Zowie!
[Compare this picture to the one below: it's Arnold Schoenberg at the same chalk board and the same room that I am in the photo below.]
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