Coming Soon to a Blog Near You

I'm working on the third installment of "The Still, Small Note" (Parts I and II), which will deal with specific instances of how I came to write the series of quiet pieces I recently completed with The Beginning of Things, which premieres tomorrow evening at Stephen F. Austin University in Nacogdoches, Texas. I'm wrestling with the age-old problem of how technical/detailed to get in writing about the music itself.

Adam Baratz' post on Morton Feldman's writings highlights the difficulty of writing about one's own music:

Don't get me wrong. A solid technical piece on "so you think this music is intuitively assembled, but really it's highly structured and organic" is invigorating in its own way. There is something particularly probing, though, about Feldman writing about "concentration," or why he only worked only in pen, or the time when he finally found the perfect chair. It's a view of composition not fixated on the end product, but as a process that is a kind of performance.

Last year, I wrote about perhaps why composers are so guarded about these issues. I still feel the same way, that the act of writing music is a very personal process, one
that other people shouldn't necessarily be privy to. With that in mind, Feldman's writings on compositional process strike me now as courageous in a certain way.

I'm working on finding the balance between technical and personal that will enable me to write about my experience and my music that's useful to me and informative to you, and to performers.

Listening in the meantime:

Stravinsky: Symphony of Psalms, Les Noces, Threni; Robert Craft.
Beethoven: Quartet, Op. 130. Guarneri Quartet.