William Robinson

For me, one of the most evocative pieces of music, of all time, is from Schoenberg's 5 Orchestral Pieces, op. 16 (1909; 1949 version); the second movement, "Vergangenes".

About midway-through, a little figure played on the celesta emerges; it repeats, over and over, like a broken music-box, or child's toy; reminiscent of Tchaikovsky's use of the celesta in "Dance of the Sugar-Plum Fairies";

...only here, it sounds more obsessive, more foreboding; as if one were going over and over the same tho… Continue

Cage did it; Eno did it. Can we do it? Sure...there should be millions of ways to remove your own interfering personality from a process.
(1) Create systems that are automated, that run by themselves. Tape loops of various lengths have done this; If you have on old sequencer, you can create loops of things.
(2) Remove decision-making from the process as much as possible. Prepare a set of "arbitrary instructions" on cards, like Eno's "Oblique Strategies," with meta-ideas like "Repeat a redundancy… Continue

I have heard Dave Liebman and Gil Goldstein's jazzed-up version of West Side Story, and it drew me in to the realization that Leonard Bernstein wrote some great songs of lasting quality.

I'm grateful for the fact that I grew up listening to my mother play & sing the great American songbook: Cole Porter, Harold Arlen, Johnny Mercer; as I grew up & became interested in playing jazz standards, I even managed to turn her on to a song that had somehow slid by her radar, "Stella By Starlight.… Continue

There is more new music on the horizon, as I have finally reconfigured my setup with an external drive.

Remember Schoenberg's definition of 12-tone music (those of you with GOOD educations)? The phrase "twelve notes related only to each other" is worth pondering. If they are related ONLY to each other, not a "tonic" note or root, this makes the series not a MELODIC construct, but an INTERVALLIC construct; like a ratio, or relationship, not a "fixed" quantity as in a tonal melody. So the series can be like a template or shape, which remains more or less constant, pitch-wise, anyway. It is seriously… Continue