“City Walks” for String Quartet: A short program note

The following is a program note for my new string quartet work City Walks, which receives its premiere this weekend in Berkeley, California.

Upcoming String Quartet Premiere

My new piece, City Walks for string quartet, will be premiered by the Eidolon Quartet next month in Berkeley, California.  If you’re in the Bay Area, please come and check it out!  The concert also features new works by my very talented colleagues Alexis Alrich, Clark Suprynowicz and Clare Twohy.

The concert is on Saturday, May 9th at 8:00pm in the Dalby Room at the Crowden Music Center, 1475 Rose Street, Berkeley, Ca.

More details are posted on San Francisco Classical Voice.

The Case for Movable “Do” in Classroom Musicianship

Against my better judgment, I’m jumping into the fray regarding methods used in the teaching of sight singing. Normally I try to stay away from such conflicts, but I can only take so much disparagement of my beloved Movable Do system.  The last straw is the discovery of this web site, which contains misleading information designed to promote the sale of a book.

(Warning: This post is intended for musicianship and theory nerds. If you are not in that category, your eyes will glaze over shortly.)

New Mark Adamo Opera Commission Announced

San Francisco Opera has announced plans to commission a new work by Mark Adamo for a scheduled premiere in 2013. The Gospel of Mary Magdalene, in Mark’s words, “draws on the Gnostic gospels, the canonical gospels and fifty years of new Biblical scholarship to reimagine the loves and conflicts of the New Testament through the eyes of its leading female character.”

My “The Rite of Spring” Used Book Store Find

OK, this may not be on par with finding the score of an unknown Beethoven symphony sewn into the lining of an 18th-Century Tyrolian overcoat, but I think this is kind of cool.

I have on my shelf what seems to be an original copy of the first full score of Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring, published in 1921 by Édition Russe de Musique.  (Prior to that, only the four-hand piano version had been published.)  I found it around 1990 in a Budapest antikvárium, a used book store.

Music by Joseph Castaldo: String Quartet 1978

My first (and only) composition teacher at the University of the Arts, where I received my bachelor’s degree in the ’80s, was Joseph Castaldo, whose music is shockingly unknown today.   If you do a Google search on “Joseph Castaldo composer“, you’ll find an inexplicable number of resulting pages having to do with his birthday (today!), but very little about his music other than a couple of obscure recordings and references by former students such as myself.

Did I Write This?

Here’s a bizarre dilemma that is only possible in this post-Sibelius era.

The Taking of Pelham One Two Three

I happened to catch the first 15 minutes or so of The Taking of Pelham One Two Three on TCM last night — one of several films I probably shouldn’t have been allowed to watch as a kid in the ’70s. It’s a great edge-of-your-seat movie, though, as promised by David Shire’s music for the opening titles. A little badass funk, a little avant-garde jazz, and a little Silvestre Revueltas mixed in for just enough chaos.

Fog Horns for Train Horns

One of the things that I knew I would miss about San Francisco, especially my Richmond District neighborhood, was the fog horns I could hear lowing from the Golden Gate.  It’s a narrow path with a lot of shipping traffic in notoriously poor visibility, so there’s a fairly elaborate concert that goes on whenever the weather is foggy (read: always).  It seems there’s at least one on the shore, and if there’s more than one ship passing through, you get some very beautiful low brass chords.

Hello, Oakland

After my longest blogging hiatus in three years, I hope there are still a few readers out there by RSS and otherwise.  Today I attempt to get my feet wet again.  We’ll see if I’m able to stick with it.

Following an incredibly stimulating and positive experience at the National Performing Arts Convention in June, the summer dealt me a couple of situations that rendered blogging among the lowest of priorities.