“une nouvelle approche de la complexité rythmique”

My article on Nancarrow for IRCAM’s contemporary music documentation archive is now online – in French, of course. I couldn’t write it in French, but I did brush up enough of my high-school French (three years) to carry on the relevant correspondence in that language. Amusingly, the archive is called BRAHMS, which musicologist Nicolas Donin tells me was originally derived from something like “Base de données Relationnelles Hypermédia sur la Musique de notre Siècle” – though no one now remembers for sure, and it’s now called something else, but the nickname stuck. Book or no book, I’m surprised IRCAM entrusted it to little old Downtown me, just as I’m surprised when prestigious music schools that I assume would never consider hiring me ask me to be an outside tenure evaluator for their professors, as occasionally happens.