Category: Allgemein

  • 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,…

  • 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…

  • The summer of shove

    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…

  • On trolling

    Most of us who are not ‘bots or people who write nasty, misleading, divisive or otherwise questionable material on open forums (because they’re being paid to do so or because they simply prefer sharing their opinions in a nasty, misleading, or divisive manner) are horrified on a regular basis by the things that people are…