Glory be, I am mentioned, quoted, and even pictured in tomorrow’s Times. It’s in Steve Smith’s advance piece on the New Albion festival that starts at Bard next Friday, August 1, and runs until the 10th. The ever-wonderful Sarah Cahill will play my Private Dances on the 2nd. You can read the entire program here (scroll down). Should be a fun ten days, with lots of Downtowners and California composers and musicians, all recorded on the New Albion label, running around in my (metaphorical) back yard.
By the way, you’ll notice that the Uptown-Downtown split gets mentioned in the article, not by me, but by composer Ingram Marshall. Guess he didn’t get the memo that there was never any such thing, or at least that there isn’t any more. Funny how I wasn’t the only one deluded into that peculiar perception.
UPDATE: The Times also contains an obituary for Norman Dello Joio (1913-2008). I played a delightfully bitonal piano sonatina by Dello Joio in high school (I can hear it in my head as I write this), and always found his work inventive and musical. A self-described “conservative,” but not a bad composer by any means (even if he did win a Pulitzer), and someone who didn’t deserve to fall off the radar as much as he has. Probably, in fact, a victim of the 12-tone years, as he himself seems to have thought.