Tomorrow night (October 18) at 8, pianist Lois Svard is playing my music in a program at Muskingum College in Concord, Ohio. She’ll play my recent work On Reading Emerson (which is coming out on a New Albion disc with Sarah Cahill any minute now), along with “The Alcotts” from the Concord Sonata, Bill Duckworth’s Imaginary Dances, and George Tsontakis’s Ghost Variations. Gann and His World, indeed.
Thursday, October 25 [note – I had originally listed the wrong date], I’m giving a concert of microtonal and Disklavier works at the Mendelssohnsaal of the Hochschule für Musik und Theater in Hamburg, Germany. My solo program will include Unquiet Night, Charing Cross, So Many Little Dyings, Bud Ran Back Out, and my own C#-minor Prelude Custer and Sitting Bull. (Anyone still get that joke?) Address in Hamburg: Havestehuder Weg 12, showtime 8 PM.
In other news, microtonal composer Jarod DCamp (a Henry Gwiazda student from the Fargo flatlands) has started a Live-365 internet radio station for microtonal music called 81/80 Microtonal Radio. Among people who never listen to it, microtonal music often has a reputation for dry convolutedness, a devotion more to theory than to sound. It is and isn’t true: the proportion of lousy music in microtonalia is about the same as in any other genre, but sometimes the inability of people’s ears to adjust to the intonation gets blamed for nonexistent sins. The initial strangeness is what turns me on, and Jarod’s station will prove that there are a million varied reasons to step outside the bland 12-pitch scale, since he’s showcasing all of them. I’m already astonished by all the bizarre new music I’ve heard by composers I didn’t know. Way to go, Jarod!
As for Postclassic Radio, it got an infusion of British music when I visited England and Wales, and as you’d expect it’s about to be flooded with Dutch music. Keep listening, dank u wel. And hey, all you foreign postclassical composers: You want your music played on Postclassic Radio, just invite me to your country and make a big deal out of me!