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“Callin’ it your job don’t make it right, boss.” –Cool Hand Luke I. Overview: Philip Pettit on Group Agency The other day, I heard a fascinating interview with philosopher Philip Pettit on the Philosophy Bites podcast. The topic was group agency (the subject and title of Pettit’s as-yet unreleased new book), described thus on the podcast’s [...]
I’m a big fan of the often engaging and thought-provoking WNYC radio show podcast Radiolab. However, as the generally science-oriented subject matter tends to deal with things with which I have little personal experience, it’s hard for me to judge the soundness of the content. The loaded language of the presenters (“the results were… startling”) along with [...]
Here is an excerpt from Adam Payne’s new movie Damn Dirty Hippies, which I recently scored. This segment is an animation depicting a dream of one of the main characters, Katie. The song is Fell (For Two Musicians and a Computer), which appears on my album Den of Maniacs; the song is edited for the [...]
This site is currently under construction, with new color schemes, content (such as reviews of my new album Den of Maniacs, called “crazy soup” by one reviewer), and an improved, user-friendlier layout coming soon. I’ll be working on the site in my spare moments. In my other moments I’m writing a new album and working on some other projects [...]
Earlier today I posted Milton Babbitt’s “Who Cares if You Listen?” as an example of an avant-garde attitude that I don’t care for. As an antidote to that, here is a beautiful article by the visionary avant-garde composer Edgard Varèse (often referred to as the Father of Electronic Music). To me, this writing is an expression of [...]
In 1958, High Fidelity magazine published the following article by avant-garde composer Milton Babbitt. Babbitt is known for taking serialism to the extreme and for being an active proponent of the modernist movement. This isn’t as cool as it might sound. Fortunately, the sort of attitude in which he took so much pride is increasingly [...]
This is an essay I wrote during a recent period in which I was interested in the question of to what extent, if any, emotion as an inherent property of music contributes to our emotional experience of music as listeners. I first look at some of the prevelant existing ideas on the topic (especially from philosophy [...]
