Whenever a 21st-century composition pops up on GBH radio, my ears perk up. Joby Talbot's "Hovercraft" came on while I was driving my kid to a Tufts Youth Philharmonic rehearsal last week, so now we've each wandered down our own Talbot rabbit hole! @crbclassical.bsky.social tidal.com/track/140922...

Excellent literature rack in a coffee shop in Middletown CT

🎻🪗 Electric (but all-acoustic) show by the New England contra dance pros Pine Tree Flyers, touring the east coast this month. Check them out: www.pinetreeflyers.com

🎶 Finally made it to a Boston Community Chamber Music open mic night at Somerville Music Spaces. On the program: quartet by Korngold; Paganini on two violins; arrangements of Telemann, Busoni, and Bartok for bassoon; and Bach on piano. Great org! bostonccm.org

Great interview with composer Sarah Kirkland Snider about her new Hildegard opera, "music written in the cracks" between pop and classical, the New Amsterdam label, and migraines and mental health. I hope I get to hear her opera someday!

🎶 Today’s concert outing: marvelous chamber music by Mozart performed by the Boston Symphony Chamber Players with guest pianist Inon Barnatan.

What an intense, compelling World Series. Wow.

Tonight’s concert outing: the fantastic Québécois band Le Vent du Nord at the Somerville Theatre!

Stayed in the car last night after we arrived home just to let the kids listen to Michael Jackson's "Thriller" for their first time, on a WERS Halloween special.

Can you make an automated Bluesky account more annoying with each new post?

Never has there been a better or more loved cat toy than this blue ribbon. He expects me to play a ferocious game of ribbon with him multiple times a day. 😸

🎶 I can’t pass up Ravel’s “Le Tombeau de Couperin,” and here it joins a program of recent pieces by Mexican composers, arranged for the Kalliope Reed Quintet!

🎶 Streaming concert: At noon ET today, the Tufts Composers New at Noon series resumes, with a lot of us contributing to the theme "Sonic Geo-Detection: Recovering Time and Place." Bonus: Hear mechanical engineering PhD student Leon Li, who is a harmonica virtuoso and expert instrument builder!

Adventures in poorly targeted marketing: I got a postcard today—addressed to me “or current resident”—asking if I could be the next rector of an Episcopal church. “Could” is doing a LOT of work in that sentence…

You could plausibly say the No Kings movement started in Lexington in 1775, so it was a great pleasure to be on the Battle Green today with thousands upon thousands of good people unafraid of the fight ahead www.motherjones.com/politics/202...

Greetings from this morning’s #NoKings rally on the Lexington MA Battle Green, which was packed with patriots once again to stand up against a corrupt and capricious would-be ruler. More photos… 🧵 @indivisible.org @universalhub.com

Who’s excited for #NoKingsDay? This churchgoing married dad who believes in liberty and justice for all. 🇺🇸🚫👑

Good news! Tufts has funded the position that administers the Community Music program and private lessons for Music students. Apply for the newly announced position: jobs.tufts.edu/jobs/22426?l...

Great insight from composer Bruce Adolphe: “[I]nspiration is a lifestyle, not a phenomenon… The most extraordinary things happen to everybody… It’s the person who receives the inspiration who makes it happen, not the outside object or condition. Inspiration is an awareness & a readiness to respond.”

Composer Michael Daugherty reads that Ligeti loves jazz & rock. “I went to Hamburg, found his apartment, & said, ‘I want to study with you.’ He asked me, ‘Do you like Milton Babbitt?’ & I said no. Then he asked, ‘Do you like Thelonious Monk?’ I said yes, & he said, ‘Then you can study with me.’”

20,000 to 30,000 vinyl records collected by the late classical music critic Richard Dyer are for sale Sat 10–3, Sun 10–12 at 61 Garfield St #3 in Cambridge. “I doubt there’s an opera recording made between 1930 and 1980 that he didn’t have,” says nephew.

Game 5 is Groundhog Day?

Looking forward to the 14th inning stretch

Did not expect to see this much intense baseball after a full length tragic opera. Wrung out!

Opera selfie time! “Macbeth” with Boston Lyric Opera (in what may be the tightest seat I ever squeezed into!).

Let’s call this what it is: A baseless attempt to chill free speech and scare people away from exercising their constitutional right to protest an authoritarian regime. We have been committed to nonviolence from the very beginning. It’s a core principle, not just a talking point.

“the girlfriend of one of the founders of antifa”

Adventures in composing: I had no idea, when I checked it out, how much I would enjoy Ann McCutchan's 1999 book of interviews with 25 composers born between 1930 and 1960, "The Muse That Sings: Composers Speak about the Creative Process." I'm halfway through, and have found each one fascinating.

The Boston Symphony Chamber Players program today concluded with Amy Beach’s very fine Three Compositions (opus 40, 1898) and the marvelous Schoenberg Society for Private Musical Performance arrangement of Mahler’s Songs of a Wayfarer (1884-5; 1896; 1920).

Composer John Harbison: “When I was a student I asked Maxwell Davies, who had already done quite a lot as a composer, if he worried about whether what he was writing was any good. ‘Good?’ he said. ‘I don’t have time for that.’” (In “The Muse That Sings” by Ann McCutchan, 1998)

Academic footnote of the day: Andrew Killick's engaging 2006 essay "Holicipation: Prolegomenon to an ethnography of solitary music-making" (Ethnomusicology Forum 15:2). He wonders why scholars haven't studied people who make music alone, and thinks through how they might. doi.org/10.1080/1741...

“Debussy said, ‘I have these magnificent dreams, and then I have to think about quarter notes!’” Composer Eric Stokes, in “The Muse That Sings: Composers Speak About the Creative Process” by Ann McCutchan (1998)

Commiserating with the cat about the Red Sox

I love this interview with composer Jessie Montgomery. Three observations I'm bookmarking: 1) Music as theater: "As the composer, you’re thinking about how the person who’s listening to it will experience it over time and that it does feel theatrical in that way."

🎶 In the past two days, I've heard amazing recent music composed by Curtis Hughes, Joan Huang, Sarah Gibson, Christopher Cerrone, Nina Young, Naomi Epstein, and Steven Stucky (by Collage New Music at Longy), and Andrew Blickenderfer and three student composers (at Tufts). So stimulating! 👏👏👏👏

Midlife in grad school update: I learned such a cool concept today, "entrainment," first noticed by Christiaan Huygens from his sickbed in 1665 as he watched two clocks with pendulums gradually achieve synchronicity. He called it “la sympathie des horloges” (the sympathy of the clocks).

I was today years old when I first heard some of the piano music by Teresa Carreño (1853–1917). Do seek it out! She was world famous as a pianist (and singer), and performed for both Abraham Lincoln and Woodrow Wilson. My introduction was through a Clara Rodriguez recording, but there are others.

Alas. (In good news, however, I've managed to interest one of my kids in the novel!)

D.T. Max, writing in the New Yorker: With the Sagrada Família, Antoni Gaudí "became the Gerard Manley Hopkins of architecture."

I really love Wesley Morris’s conversations on “Cannonball”—not because they’re fun as opposed to challenging but because they’re so full of life and reflection and engagement. Definitely recommend his convo with Nikole Hannah-Jones about legacy of “1619”: podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/c...

@tufts.edu 😉 www.newyorker.com/cartoon/a28902

Just pulled the plug on Disney+ and told them why: A media company that doesn't fight for the First Amendment betrays its audience's trust and loyalty. I hope they come to their senses.

The Tufts Music Department has had to suspend private lessons for students for a semester — and almost all community music classes — putting many instructors effectively out of work for the fall. Here's a link to fundraiser to help them out. @universalhub.com

A bit of a fiasco affecting my music department: Private lessons for music students were canceled for a semester, leaving students and instructors in the lurch. Tufts Daily fills in some of the details.

You go, nearby star

New sculpture on the Freedom Trail by Harmonia Rosales commemorates 219 known people who, we now know, were enslaved by members and ministers of King's Chapel (founded 1686). Dedicated today on the corner of Tremont & School Streets. @universalhub.com

Side note: The number or participating organizations (37, some of which are based around one person) is less than the number of religious organizations that have already sued the Trump administration this year (at least 55, including 15 entire religious denominations).

Great to see an interview with my wonderful fellow composition student Julia Soojin Cavallaro, an early music advocate and mezzo-soprano who was kind enough to perform two of my original songs at one of the Tufts Composers "New at Noon" concerts last year. Brava, Julia!

Midlife opportunity I could not pass up: Today was the first day of my MA in Music program at Tufts, where I’m studying composition with John McDonald. Sometimes you get a second chance to do what you love.