A terrific cover by Neil Young of “A Day in the Life” with a walk-on cameo by Paul McCartney. Young seems profoundly moved at the end, almost tapping into the primal scream John so loved. He didn’t have the courage to smash his guitar, but he broke all the strings instead. It’s ok Neil, we [...]
Emma Lew Thomas came back from Germany aglow with Rufus Wainwright and Robert Willson’s collaboration on 25 Shakespeare Sonnets. Nothing has been released to date, so, sniffing around YouTube I found a collection of sonnets in progress, as well as a preview from a Berlin TV news show. I threw in the Bacharach collaboration for [...]
I thought it was peculiar that my fabulously new, hi tech Acura TL would have a cassette deck. I knew the end was coming for the audio cassette, but didn’t realize how soon that it would be.
Today, I got out my trusty old Sony Professional Walkman cassette recorder, and for the first time since 1972, [...]
Last night, Vox Femina hosted a reading of my new work for women’s chorus, HEALY MADRIGALS, based upon the poetry of Eloise Klein Healy. Iris Levine, the director, welcomed the small but warm audience and explained what was about to happen. I got up and spoke about the commissioning process as well a bit about [...]
I had the great fortune to have this past Saturday off, to stay home with my little family, read, nap, eat, and watch lots of movies. Through some cosmic combination of three separate movies, I got a clear message: we have no proof that life elsewhere in the universe exists. The shows I saw were [...]
For academics, summertime is a time of recharging: reading, doing our research, catching up on projects that we didn’t have time to do during the academic year, and traveling. I note that my blogging pattern is about once every five days of late. My year has been so busy I just haven’t had the time [...]
Today is Mark Carlson’s birthday — Happy 57th, Mark! He is six months older than I, so Mark gets to go through the experience before I do. As I expected, the not-divisible-by-five years are less notable. We agreed that reaching 50 was monumental, and now, we both see 60 not too far away. I don’t [...]
Vox Femina, one of the great women’s chorus in America, received a grant from the City of West Hollywood to commission a composer. They chose me!
Iris Levine brought me a stack of books by women poets who live around LA, and I chose Eloise Klein Healy. I have been in Palm Springs setting as [...]
Some of my colleagues were standing around grousing about something yesterday. I joined them and found them complaining about students.
“I can’t believe that these kids have only come to 50% of my counterpoint class! BW just texts during class and it drivesme crazy. When I was in college, I NEVER missed classes.” Another joined in: [...]
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