I've been working in just intonation since my freshman year in high school, in 1975 or 76, when the music of Lou Harrison and Harry Partch first registered.  The beauty of the pure intervals was the first attraction, but soon, the whole business of organizing tones into scales and systems became an...

Some years ago, I rescued a pile of sheet music from my Grandmother's piano bench.  The collection included a bunch of primers and elementary courses for beginners — my Grandmother gave lessons from time to time — including a number of volumes by a prolific compiler of piano methods, John Thomp...

Here's a physicist's analysis, via FFT, of the opening chord to A Hard Day's Night.  (Hat tip Tyler Cowen.)  As the pop era's moral equivalent to the "Tristan chord" (an ambiguous event in a work of tonal music which continues to create great puzzlement and a regular stream of authoritative pronou...

"Some of the songs in this book... cannot be sung" — Charles Ives, "Postface to 114 Songs". Not writing enough (i.e. almost no) songs.  Why?  A terrific fear of words  (sounds, meanings of words, appropriate scansion, emphasis) and not being, myself, a singer.  The last, in part, due to the hi...

"You can make a million dollars in America," says Jim Teal, a former waiter at a high-end Raleigh steakhouse who now stays home with his 2-year-old daughter because business has dried up. "But if you're making hundreds of millions, you've screwed someone over."  (From here)....

The power of the Texas Board of Education over the content in school textbooks is well-known.  Given the large size of the Texan schoolbook market, publishers go out of their way to modify their books in order to satisfy the criteria of the censors there, which maked the Texan standards effective i...

Just an observation — & one that may well get me into some trouble, but what the hell (to paraphrase the great Tony Rolletti) if we can't get into trouble in a blog, where can we get into trouble? — is that the most successful genre for American operas seems to be the pageant .   Treemonish...

When I first started working with just intonation in the mid-seventies, it was cool but definitely not yet the minor fashion it has become; my work in the area was even actively discouraged by many musicians, composition teachers among them.  Now that tuning to intervals of small and smallish whole...

Here's an interesting document from a moment when the faultlines in the post-war avant-garde were not altogther so clear:  Stockhausen's Originale: Doubletakes, a film by Peter Moore, is a distillation of the New York premiere of Stockhausen's theatre piece, Originale, in the context of the 2nd Ann...

"It's atomic!" Those words, given in knowing confidence by the heroic plumber Mr. Zabladowski to young piano student Bartholomew Collins* in The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T. were a signal of power, mystery, and danger to a generation of children raised, in the years after WWII, and reinforced by the duck...