Roger Bourland
writes about music and life

We are playing with a new look for this blog. There may be some erratic behavior for the next day or so, so be patient. If you find any bugs you can email me at my first name at my last.

This week in Music History, Culture, and Creativity, our students must compose, record, convert to mp3 and upload their compositions to the class website. Their compositions are to feature a drone (a sustained bass note throughout a section or an entire piece of music), or pedal (as in when an organ holds down a PEDAL, [...]

I’ve heard a lot of Tibetan monks chant, but never with this incredible sense of cosmic harmony. Listen to all the notes in each chord: unbelievable! Then, you have the contrabass solos functioning as little interludes. Then they all join in again. WOW!

Uh, yeah.
This website alleges to have “found” a cassette of a lost Beatle album. Whatever. But it IS a wonderful mashup of Beatles tracks put together in fun new ways. Instant Beatles! Shazaam!

Link -via YesButNoButYes

Rachmaninov: Song of Grusia performed by Clara Rockmore, theremin

Rachmaninov: Vocalise performed by a much younger Clara Rockmore, theremin

After decades of wishing, the composition program at the UCLA Department of Music now has a Composition for Visual Media track in its Masters degree. In its second year, we have started slowly and accepted only two per year–although we plan to expand to eight or so.
And after decades of wishing, we now have a [...]

Last December, Marc Hirsh wrote a terrific article for the Boston Globe called “Striking a chord” about how a chord progression [think: Joan Osborne's "What if God were one of us? Just a slob like one of us?" and you'll hear the progression] that has shown up in a [...]

Mmm, I’m having a summer flashback. In our trip to southern France, we ate at home several times. One of the highlights of those meals was Jenny and Daniel searing a demi-lobe of foie gras, with salad, a lovely Gigondas wine, stinky cheese, French bread, and ham. That was lunch.
Jenny was perpetually photogenic as she [...]

I watched the two-hour documentary on Philip Glass this weekend called GLASS: Portrait in 12 parts. It’s a terrific look inside one of America’s most successful composers. The amount of work he has done in his life is stunning: operas, symphonies, film scores, concertos, chamber music, piano music. He confesses to getting up early in [...]