Die-hard serialists will recognize the tone-row from Webern’s Concerto for Nine Instruments, op. 24. Others can simply watch those twelve tones rotate.
Entries Tagged as '*Music'
Dodecaphonophenakistoscope
August 2nd, 2011 · 1 Comment
Ineffervescence
August 2nd, 2011 · 2 Comments
This is the only piece I ever wrote, or ever will write, in Beggs, Oklahoma.
The Party Next Door
August 1st, 2011 · Comments Off on The Party Next Door
This started out as a song, but soon settled into a piano piece. I used it in some of the shows I did with Bill Irwin, particularly in The Clown Lecture.
It All Went Pfft
July 31st, 2011 · Comments Off on It All Went Pfft
2006 was a bad year for me. I commented on it in this piano piece, in which a melancholy theme deteriorates.
Music For Piano-Zither
July 30th, 2011 · 1 Comment
These are four brief pieces written for the piano-zither, a 3/15 diatonic chord zither with a simple keyboard mechanism — a sort of miniature table-top piano. They can also be played on other keyboard instruments, of course. Here’s a sample of the first piece.
Dip
July 30th, 2011 · Comments Off on Dip
This little tune was written to accompany some business in Bill Irwin’s Clown Lecture; it was later revamped for use in the PBS show Bill Irwin: Clown Prince. Here’s a bit of it.
Aretino In Solrésol
July 29th, 2011 · 1 Comment
I wanted to demonstrate the artificial musical language Solrésol for my show The Musical Underbelly. I decided that one of the famously smutty sonnets of Pietro Aretino would make an interesting example. I later expanded this for my third string quartet, which is based on several Solrésol translations of Aretino. Here’s the first part of […]
On a Theme By Lewis Carroll
July 28th, 2011 · Comments Off on On a Theme By Lewis Carroll
Lewis Carroll inserted a tune into his novel Sylvie and Bruno, for the song “Ting Ting Ting.” It’s a fine little tune; so I wrote a set of variations on it. And this is how it opens.
The Underground Mountain Concert in Norway
July 27th, 2011 · 2 Comments
The tune I’ve arranged here was first published in Hamburg in 1740, in a pamphlet by Johann Mattheson: Etwas Neues Unter Der Sonnen! Das Unterirrdische Klippen-Concert in Norwegen. It related the testimony of a certain General Bertuch, who claimed that on Christmas Eve, 1695, he and a small group of musicians were led by a […]
The Donner Party, Its Crossing
July 27th, 2011 · 2 Comments
Herbert Blau founded a theater company at Oberlin College in the 1970s. It was called Kraken; and in 1974 it toured a production based on the story of the Donner Party. I was a composition student at the Conservatory at the time, and contributed three songs.