I wish I did not have to write elegies. I composed my first one the morning after my grandmother died, in 2010. It was essentially a first species counterpoint melody for violin and cello, and was performed at her funeral. I felt odd about the piece, because it did not sound like anything I had written before.…

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Something crazy happened to me the other night. I was hanging out at the Silverlake Lounge waiting to play a set with my band The Newports and two people came up and asked if I was in the band. I said “Yeah! Thanks for coming. Who are you friends with?” and they looked at me…

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It’s year end list time. Most blogs and such do this at the end of the year, but I like to wait to the beginning of the new year to read everyone else’s lists, see what I missed, and make sure to check those things out. I’ve got a firm belief that experiencing as much…

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Kazuo Ishiguro

I saw a tweet from Timo Andres the other day that had a quote from the author Kazuo Ishiguro in it that I absolutely loved, and did a nice job succinctly encapsulating my ideas about genre. So I thought I’d retype it out here.

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I never like it when year end lists come out before the year is over. In addition to the arbitrariness of dividing music into annual dates, who knows when something cool might drop at the end of December? Isn’t that like releasing a year end movie list before Oscar release season is up? Rant over. Here…

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There’s an election tomorrow, and a NOFX song I loved in high school (George W era) has been stuck in my head all day. It’s admittedly reductive, but it does vent many of the frustrations I feel right now—and have felt for a good long while—in a surprisingly accurate way. It’s not the right time…

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Hiya. It’s getting late on a Friday, I’ve been home making parts all evening (save for seeing Ate9 dance company perform Jodie Landau’s mouth to mouth, which was awesome), and I suddenly feel an urge to make a list of my top ten records. This list changes over time, but everything on tonight’s version has…

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I just delivered the score and parts to a new piece, Three Graces at Perigee, to Cadillac Moon Ensemble. It’s been an incredibly busy summer and I haven’t been keeping the blog updated, so I thought writing about this piece would be a good way to get going again. Over the past year or so I’ve started…

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I just finished reading Robert Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land for the first time. I loved the ideas it presented, but will admit getting a bit bored by the narrative. In any case, there’s a scene about two-thirds of the way through where one of the main characters, Jubal Harshaw, who acts as a sort…

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