Yesterday, composer for The Simpsons, Alf Clausen visited our school and focused on the broadway music that he has featured on that show. I only popped my head in from time to time as my chairmanly duties pulled me away, but the Mancini studio was packed — smelled like a basketball gym in there. Most […]
Daniel and I have fabulous front row tickets to the Chamber Music series at Disney Hall. On Tuesday, Josie (his mother) and I went to a concert that featured our new conductor, Gustavo Dudamel. Like us, everyone was anxious to see him in action. But here he played second violin in the Mozart Clarinet Quintet […]
Before I moved to California, my teacher, Leon Kirchner, introduced me to Leonard Rosenman. I remember several trips out to his beautiful Malibu home. I brought my music, and we played each other music for three hours, and chain-smoked.
Leonard taught a few times for us at UCLA. And before my time, he taught music […]
Dear Tim
I love watching you on Project Runway. People tell me that we look alike, but you have MUCH better clothes. You have inspired one of our administrators here in the UCLA Herb Alpert School of Music who now quotes you regularly and isn’t even gay. His favorite motto now is “rally!”
My note to you […]
As I get older and realize how much I’ve lived through already — at the ripe old age of 55 — I realize and appreciate how much my elders have lived through. I think of my parents who were born in the late 1920s: they have lived through the 1930s, the 1940s, and the 1950s, […]
We have two very close friends that both have cancer, specifically lung cancer.
L is 60, HIV positive since the early 80s and still smokes in between sessions on his oxygen tank. His cancer started on his back with a tumor. Even though they thought they had got it all with chemotherapy last summer, some of […]
My father has gotten back in touch with the photographer he was some 40 years ago (I forgot to tell you, he earned his living as a Methodist, and later, United Church of Christ minister). I highly recommend his photoblog which consists of exactly one photo a day: a nice amount for this information overload […]
Hats off to Clint Eastwood’s brave production, STRAIGHT NO CHASER(1988), about jazz musician Thelonius Monk. After watching this, I realize that Thelonius is as important as Schoenberg or Webern in terms of modernist composers.
It’s just he always has a rhythm section going so classical snobs can never truly accept him as an equal to […]
One of the “joys” or habits many of us newspaper readers have is reading the obits, learning of someone’s passing, and offering up a personal sigh of appreciation of how they touched our lives. One such man showed up in today’s paper: Mahlon Clark, who died at age 84 in Los Angeles. Doesn’t sound familiar? […]
Mark Del Vecchio
Angus plays the piano
Jim Kelly as Bacchus
[Photographs © Roger Bourland]
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