NewMusicBox

Let them when they leave thy altars / Kindle others in thy name

office

This space has been quiet for four months, but, for once, I have a decent excuse, as I have doing my utmost to take advantage of the flatteringly good fortune of a fellowship at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard. The full, worldwide panorama of post-World War II music requires diligent pursuit! Nevertheless, I am giving it a shot. If you’re in Cambridge, feel free to drop by.

Still, it’s a good time to catch up on collating some other work. I am very happy once again to be mingling with the fine souls at NewMusicBox, this time with some ruminations on music’s ability (or lack thereof) to connect:

Courtesy of the implacable nature of the church calendar, there’s also two more choral introits to add to the ever-expanding list:

And the Globe column has been scaled back to a monthly affair, but continues to lurk around the edges of the newspaper industry:

Put it all in one place like that, and I seem really productive. Negligence has its advantages.

This I know

It seems that this space is destined to be updated only in transit. The last post (five months ago?! yikes) was written in the midst of a change of abode, and now we are preparing to move Soho the Dog HQ yet again. It’s like our own Year of the Three Kings, except, instead of monarchs, it’s places to live. Which means we’re about to start living in the residential equivalent of… Richard III? I think that analogy ran off the rails somewhere.

At any rate: as proof that I have not been completely idle, the list of Score columns over on the sidebar there has been finally brought up to date. That’s 141 installments (and counting) of oblique musicological speculation for your summer reading entertainment. I should also link to this article that Molly coaxed out of me for NewMusicBox, which ended up with a pleasant amount of break on its curve, I thought. Plus, there was this Messiaen introduction for Red Bull Music Academy Daily, which led me down the garden path of echoes between Messiaen’s idiosyncratic theology and that of the Flemish mystic Jan van Ruusbroec.

Oh, yeah, and this went down, which at least resulted in some flattering sympathies from smart and nice people—thank you! Like I’ve said before: I have a knack for getting into careers in their categorical twilight. On the other hand, it does leave more time for composing:


Guerrieri: Shining Throne (Prelude on “Jesus Loves Me”) (2016) (PDF, 48 Kb)

And a low-fidelity phone recording:



The registration is only a suggestion, i.e., what happens to work on my particular church organ. (I am, now and forever, a sucker for a good—or even not-so-good—celeste stop.)

And with that, it’s northern-hemisphere summer. Whatever critical scrapes I manage to get myself into will be duly noted here. Or not—I picked up some Apuleius for a dollar at a library sale today, and, I have to say, it’s a better-looking prospect than a lot else that’s going on out there. But Apuleius probably always is.