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Welp
I feel compelled to write about the election today, but no fear – I intend to do so only briefly. So you know where I’m coming from: Having established these things, I don’t think the president-elect is really a good fit for the job he’ll apparently be taking up again, mostly because it seems like…
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Please Yaeger don’t hurt ’em
My thanks to Vorarlberg’s Rheingold Quartet for sending me a review of their concert in August, which included the premiere of the commissioned work “Patchwork Suite“. The reviewer said some nice things about the piece, and described my writing with the words “hard-hitting tonal language” (knallharte Tonsprache) Which I would totally put on business cards,…
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AI the death of music?
It strikes me that the hyperventilation about AI and music – see fake Drakes, illegal “scraping” of artists’ work to “train” the machines, AI-generated music forming a major portion of Sp*tify’s repertoire etc. etc. – is almost all coming from the pop scene. And I’m not talking about the underground/indie/art/pop scene; I’m talking about the…
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Petit Mal: A brief history of a longish piece
On June 16th, my piece Petit Mal, with text by Carolyn Amann, will premiere in Hohenems, Vorarlberg. It’s been a bit of a long and winding road getting here.
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On envy and solidarity
An uneasy feeling creeps among musicians these days: to do well, in these times, is to be envied – and it is a terrible thing to be envied by your friends and colleagues. It is to have one’s place in a foundering boat challenged: don’t you belong in that bigger boat just ahead? The one…
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The summer of shove
It’s been . . . interesting. I’m always struck by the universal small-talk question: so, where are you going on vacation? At the barber’s, when you see a casual acquaintance, whenever conversation lags for a moment. It’s kind of like the (to my mind endearing) Austrian practice – mostly confined to offices – of wishing…
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This is the best election result we could have hoped for.
No doubt Mitch McConnell is crowing today, and Democratic celebrations are a little muted: Ted Cruz is still a Senator and the Republicans have retained their majority. Andrew Gillum lost the governor’s race in Florida and in Georgia Stacey Abrams will very probably do the same. The highest-profile races, in other words, largely went to…
