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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 [...]
My latest album, Den of Maniacs, has been out for almost two months now. Response has been slow (fewer reviews so far than any other album of mine by far), but mostly positive. One comment that I’ve gotten consistently, and which I think probably accounts for the slower than usual response, is that the album seems to [...]
(I’ll get this obligatory preface out of the way quickly: It’s been a long time, I’ve neglected my blog, I’m mad at myself for it while also forgiving myself due to the understandable circumstances in which this transgression occurred. I shall now hopefully resume with regular postings.) For the longest time I’ve been meaning to up [...]
The official release date for my new album, DEN OF MANIACS, has been confirmed as March 23, 2010. In the meanwhile, here are two free mp3s and the album cover (left-click to listen, right-click to save): Look at Me (link no longer available) (in which I improvise a lot of electric guitar solos as a means of [...]
The documentary American Artifact: Rise of American Rock Poster Art, which features two of my songs on its soundtrack, will be making its Chicago premiere this month at the Gene Siskel Film Center, running January 29th through February 4th. The Saturday, January 30th, 8:00 p.m. showing will be followed by a Q&A Panel with director Merle Becker and poster artists Jay Ryan, Mat Daly, [...]
One of my favorite discoveries in recent years is composer Gloria Coates. I first heard of her via an interview she gave on the Naxos American Classics podcast in promotion of a recently released recording of her 15th Symphony (along with two other works) by Naxos. I was taken not only with what she said [...]
