I’m a composer (since I was 13), a music critic (since I was 27), a musicologist (since I was 32), and a music professor (since I was 39)….
I’m a composer (since I was 13), a music critic (since I was 27), a musicologist (since I was 32), and a music professor (since I was 39). I was new-music critic for the Village Voice (Greg Sandow’s successor) from 1986 to 2005, and I teach music theory, history, and composition at the music department at Bard College. I’ve published five books: The Music of Conlon Nancarrow (Cambridge University Press, 1995), American Music in the Twentieth Century (Schirmer Books, 1997), Music Downtown: Writings from the Village Voice (U. of CA Press, 2006), No Such Thing as Silence: John Cage’s 4’33” (University of California Press, 2010), and Robert Ashley (U. of Illinois Press, 2012). My next book, Essays After a Sonata: Charles Ives’s Concord, is due out from Yale U. Press in 2015. About a third of my music is microtonal – I feel bilingual in that respect. I’ve performed my one-man opera Custer and Sitting Bull in Australia, Russia, Costa Rica, Ireland, Germany, Holland, and all over America; Cinderella’s Bad Magic, my opera with librettist Jeff Sichel, premiered in Moscow and St. Petersburg. My CDs are on the New World, New Albion, Mode, Cold Blue, Lovely Music, Meyer Media, and Monroe Street labels. I’ve lived my entire life immersed in and involved with classical music, and started making the transition to postclassical many years ago.