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Dear kindly readers of this blog: A while ago I instituted an interview section here on Mind the Gap (1, 2) and then canceled it like a promising TV show. Well, today it’s back because I just read about composer James Holt’s contemporary music performer profile podcasts, and in this economy who wouldn’t have a few questions. Here we go...

What first gave you the idea that the world needed “My Ears are Open,” a podcast featuring the words of “musicians who have dedicated their lives to performing contemporary music”? Didn’t most of these people go to conservatory specifically to avoid ever needing to speak in public?

Over the past few years, I spent a lot of time asking myself, “If I were to create a podcast, what would it be?” Should I talk about my music? Should I talk to other composers about their music? None of it seemed to matter because 1) I’m basically broke, 2) I didn’t think I had the right production equipment, 3) there’s probably zero audience (who would want to hear me blab on and on about my music?), and 4) there’s only a slightly larger audience that would want to hear other composers talk about their own music.

It all seems so obvious now, but once I realized that I could “borrow” (read: hijack) my cellist girlfriend’s sexy digital recorder, and that I could be portable with it, everything started to fall into place.

[Read more…] about Tell Me Something, James Holt

When it was just a quick glance at the hats and the clothes and the bubbles, she was one thing to me. But now that I’ve seen the new video (below) and read Jonah Weiner’s piece for Slate putting her persona in the context of a post-Britney pop art career trajectory (her entry to this party was drunk and dirty, so she beats everyone to the punch), I’m having more fun thinking about Lady Gaga.

Some may mock her grasp on all the high art philosophy she’s name-checking, but she’s certainly got her hand close enough to pick at our high and low art pretensions. And having a bit of fun while she’s at it.

Why read a silly paper press release when you can watch a movie?! With aliens!

Mobtown Modern announces season 2009-10.

A few weeks ago, I passed a girl sitting in the window of an NYC coffee shop. She didn’t notice me staring at her because she was glued to the text on her very stylish Kindle. I had glimpsed the future, and admittedly it left me feeling old and a bit nauseous at this sign of progress. Just trying to use the web browser on my husband’s small-buttoned Blackberry makes me want to toss it out the car window. Books have been my safe haven from all this technology; the sweet smell of paper and ink my comforting escape from the demands of that ever-blinking cursor.

A few days later my mom asked me if I’d heard of these Kindle things. She thought I might like one for Christmas.

“We need to stop thinking about the future of publishing and think instead about the future of reading,” writes Clive Thompson in Wired. “Every other form of media that’s gone digital has been transformed by its audience. Whenever a newspaper story or TV clip or blog post or white paper goes online, readers and viewers begin commenting about it on blogs, snipping their favorite sections, passing them along. The only reason the same thing doesn’t happen to books is that they’re locked into ink on paper. Release them, and you release the crowd.”

So what do you think? Will your reading experience be improved if you can Facebook your favorite passages? Gchat your way through the complex points of the philosophy you’re studying? Find that sentence you know you read 30 or so pages back with a simple keyword search?

UPDATE: When we all own Kindles, what happens at book signings?

This is probably a sign that I listen to too much NPR, but I love those story-behind-the-story kinds of stories. Relatedly, I often find composers to be funny, exceptionally articulate people who, in addition to writing music, just so happen to spend a lot of time sitting alone quietly thinking about the large issues of life. Sometimes these feed into their work, and sometimes not so much. However, if you catch them outside their studios and ply them with coffee and a microphone (or a fancy “composer’s chair” title and a lectern) they will often generously lay some of those deep thoughts on you.

Two fine minds of the music world schooled me recently, and you can check them here:

• Sounds Heard: David Lang’s the little match girl passion

• Make Your Own Rules: Notes on Composition from John Corigliano

Have librarians begun reporting increased job satisfaction now that Google fields some of the more inane public search requests?

For instance, I’m having one of those “throw your computer out the window” kind of days. Is there an emoticon for that?

Indeed there is:

Elsewhere, the internet can also solve your “I didn’t watch the Tony’s, but I still want to see Neil Patrick Harris make ’em laugh” Monday morning blues.

However, the internet won’t find you a job. In fact, in this recession, it will just mercilessly make fun of your trust-funded behind.

Now, who needs some blue hair dye for a certain forward-thinking new music event? Tang-a-tini, anyone? This, people, is why I got into this racket.

Dreary though the weather, last Thursday was a night of music fun and glamour at the (Baltimore) symphony: the 5-year contract extension (Marin and the orchestra commit to share their love–at least through 2015!), the backstage antics (yes, they have those–now musicians, please take your awesome selves to the lobby after the last curtain call. Your fans want to swoon over you.), and Jennifer Higdon’s shy reports of star spotting (as in: she was, in traffic–Amanda has the details).

And then the sun finally came out (and just in time) for the Metro Gallery’s outdoor Rufustival 2009. The line-up was truely impressive, and the vibe on par with a P.S. 1 show imported for an intimate Baltimore crowd. We stopped by in time to catch Chairlift (you know them from their iPod Nano commercial soundtracking) and Wye Oak (sounds like all the indie rock I’ve ever loved, compressed. I’ll now be listening to them obsessively for the next few days). Wye Oak’s Jenn Wasner signed off the stage with a nod to what she termed the “best band in the world,” and the festival show-stealer was indeed the up-close-and-personal appearance we got from Dirty Projectors. Loved them before, love them even more now. Their new album, Bitte Orca, drops tomorrow, but you can stream the tracks on NPR (of all places) right now here. (Go now!!)

If you do nothing else today, I don’t think you’ll regret giving it a listen. When you get to “Remade Horizon,” note the vocal magic that begins at 2:37. How the lovely ladies of Dirty Projectors pulled off that kind of hocketting live in a parking lot still sets my mind spinning. Now I have all kinds of nerdy compositional questions for Dave Longstreth and his crew.

*Dirty Projectors, Photo by Sarah Cass

Remix (Classic tune + Economic Upheaval) ^internet = Brilliant

The digital revolution will not be advertised.

We’ve all heard the one about the judge who forced a rap fan to listen to hours of classical music as penance for crimes committed, and if you’ve waited out a delayed train in NYC’s Penn Station, you’ve absorbed the Handel that’s supposed to bring down your blood pressure while keeping the homeless population at bay. (I have no idea how that last part is supposed to work–poverty breeds intolerance for chamber music? Someone missed The Soloist?) If you want teens out of your food court, however, Barry Manilow works best.

I was thinking about this over coffee this morning after a press release came through for Drive Time RX with Subliminal Affirmations by Steve Halpern. The purported purposed of the CD is to keep you destressed and alert in traffic and “transmute any feeling of road rage into feelings of calm and centeredness.” You can sample the music here. Now, how are you feeling?

Music may be a universal language in Disneyland, but it seems to me its vocabulary words are actually all homonyms–depending on myriad factors, my chill out music may motivate you to put your fist through the stereo–so using it to make certain statements with the goal of emotional manipulation is a pretty dangerous game. In most cases, it seems to me that what you’re really playing with is a whole bag of cultural stereotypes of what sounds will trigger what response. Whether the listener will play along is up for grabs, and in some cases, it may only be an act. What 14-year old with pink mohawk could cop to a love for Manilow, even if she wanted to? Alone in my car, will the sounds of yoga zen really keep me from rear-ending that Hummer? How powerful is music, anyway, and how well do we understand that power?

Just back from a week in New York City that was pretty rockin’, and for once I almost mean that in the literal sense.

There was the Bang on a Can Marathon, an annual event that now feels like a new music reunion of sorts (at least to me)–always providing the opportunity to catch up with scene fans I haven’t seen in ages, alongside the chance to encounter new pieces and performers and hear plenty of old friends. Spilling down the marble steps and tucked around the palm trees that make up what is usually something of a food court for the World Financial Center, the crowd in the Winter Garden was hundreds strong and as enthusiastic as ever. Free music, many great performances, sunlight streaming through the windows, the freedom to walk around, the comfort of knowing that, even if a particular piece doesn’t catch my ear, a new group would be on stage bringing something completely different in about 20 minutes: I wonder if these are the things that make the Marathon so popular, or just what brings me back each year.

A few nights earlier I was a guest at the final Undiscovered Islands show, the last of a four-concert series New Amsterdam Records put on at Galapagos Art Space in Brooklyn. Approaching the venue, what to my wondrous eyes did appear but a line snaking around the building and down the block (also two pet pigs on leashes(!) but let’s leave that be for the moment). It felt amped up and exciting in a way new music shows sometimes don’t. Missy Mazzoli and William Brittelle each presented…well, we could call them “new dramatic multi-song art pieces,” but you might not expect the attendant level of screaming from the crowd that accompanied the performance with so uptight a set-up from me. The guy who was sitting next to me can fill you in on the stage action.

The thing I left musing over was the whole package deal–or perhaps, rather, the joys and pitfalls of packaging. If I hadn’t read in Time Out New York that this was a “classical music” show, it would never have occurred to me to file it that way. (Well, except for Mark Dancigers in the “Classical Music is Dead” t-shirt. That might have given it away.) I can’t credit this genre confusion to the “classical influenced by rock music” mantra (lord knows what isn’t these days) because I’m not convinced that saying this music was “influenced” like that is in any way accurate in either case (though for different reasons). Past work and degrees held by the participants aside, no one was playing that awkward game of genre dress up. This was just performance with spilled drinks and mic feedback and cramped seating and high energy, like a lot of music performance. Set changes took their good sweet time in this non-union house, and Brittelle did have to pause to shush the crowd before launching into a quiet section of his piece–all of which seemed to bother no one–and I was thankful for the setting. As far as consuming new art that I really want to dig my teeth into, this was up close and personal enough to taste. The crowd certainly swooned over both Mazzoli and Brittelle’s works (and over the composers themselves after the curtain came down), so I think it safe to say they’d be more or less with me on this point.

On the down side of these scenarios, the caveat I must acknowledge is that in both venues the sound left a bit to be desired (and lord knows I’m no audiophile). The Winter Garden rings like a cathedral, but with crying kids and chatty patrons, the din rises pretty quickly. At Galapagos, the levels never did seem comfortably balanced, even when they weren’t feeding back on the artists. I don’t mean to nit pick, but it is the music we are gathered together to hear, whether we like to be rowdy about it or not. An unsolvable conundrum?

Sadly for me, a last-minute work commitment meant I had to miss the final event on my itinerary: Green Aria – a ScentOpera, a piece created by Stewart Matthew, fragrance designer Christophe Laudamiel, and composers Nico Muhly and Valgeir Sigurdsson. It was advertised with the explanation that “original scents and music will be performed in the dark via a customized scent organ for a world premiere unlike any other.” I was really looking forward to this show, both because I’m a fan of Muhly’s work and, I admit, just because it sounded crazy and I completely wanted to try it. I give these guys mad props for the confidence I imagine it must take to premiere a piece that already has the bad version of the review set up by the concept. Anyone experience this piece? The guy I gave my ticket to had, well, a rockin’ good time of his own.