From the category archives:
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Waltz Nr.70 for violin and piano (1989) mp3
[Audio clip: view full post to listen]
“Waltz Nr.70″ was composed for a festshrift for Leon Kirchner’s 70th birthday. I never heard the piece until some friends played it at a party last year. I quoted it in “Recent Dreams” for horn trio.
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CaLibration Music (1991)
for woodwind quintet and string quartet mp3[Audio clip: view full post to listen]
Music: Roger Bourland
Publisher: Yelton Rhodes Music
CaLibration Music was commissioned by the California chapter of the Music Library Association. This group put on a concert that featured Los Angeles composers, I being one and sadly not at the performance, and my piece [...]
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Stories We Tell for cello quartet (1998) mp3
[UCLA Students] Hillary Smith, Bryan West, Jennifer Li, Christopher Ahn cellos.
[Audio clip: view full post to listen]
Stories We Tell was commissioned by the Concord Community Music School for their 1998 Anniversary Weekend. Students are in their early teens and get lessons and coaching from the schools instructors.
In this [...]
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Yesterday in lecture, my colleague Robert Winter took his turn in imparting the core of functional harmony: the tonic-dominant relationship, or V-I. He pointed out that the tritone–once banned by the church–now had rules of how it is to be resolved: augmented fourths expand out to sixths, and diminished fifths contract into a third. He [...]
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In relation to my recent post on micro-drones, a reader wrote in with this piece. The modal flavor almost has an Old English resonance. I love how slippery the B flats and B naturals are. I listened to some other performances where the bass droners would stay on B flat while the melody sang B [...]
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Here is a fun video of a couple of people dancing the Salsa, the man is 29 and the woman is 92. Many of us think of 92 and think OUCH, but this girl knows how to live it up.
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Writing for harp was one of the techniques I learned that brought me back to writing tonal music. My teacher and the performer here, was Susan Allen, now associate dean over at CalArts and the harp teacher. Susie and I moved from Boston to LA at the time and shared a 23 foot truck. We [...]
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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, [...]
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