One of my great joys as Alarm Will Sound’s conductor is that when we perform John Luther Adams’s Ten Thousand Birds, I have absolutely nothing to do. We perform the piece is a kind of environmental installation, with players all around the audience playing bird songs that John has imaginatively realized for instruments. It’s not […]
There’s an interesting Alex Ross article in this week’s on classical music’s migration to the cloud and what might be lost in the process. My transition to conducting off of a tablet has been part of a bigger digital-migration project this year, which has also involved transferring all of my CDs (liner notes included) to digital. With all […]
Our latest album, Canzonas Americanas, is of music by Derek Bermel, who is a long time collaborator of ours. Our conversation about the album covered a lot of ground, which is no surprise given Derek’s eclectic approach to composing: we talked about Nancarrow, Latin music, Ives, African music, Messiaen, blues, Brahms, and the European avant-garde. Even astrophysics worked its way in: I don’t know if I’ve gotten to talk about different types of equilibria since my undergrad days.