On my way! @yoshionishi.com www.taleaensemble.org/event-detail...

Taruskin ftw 🙌

Happy New Year! My new album 'Rosehart' with orchestral works was recently released - happy listening! Listening link on Spotify open.spotify.com/album/6YHZal... Listening links on YouTube and more info on the new album rozalie.com/rosehart-cd-...

Dorian and I sat down and listened to/watched @ramonlazkano.bsky.social’s “La main gauche” and I was very moved. Very highly recommended! philharmoniedeparis.fr/en/live/conc...

We all need more Jo Kondo

May there be plentiful potassium for the new year 2026!!! 🍌🍌🍌🍌🍌

🙏🙏🙏

Today is the day! Finally I can place my second order from @bastillemusique.bsky.social to align with the @bandcamp.com #Friday, to keep myself warm with some good music this winter ☃️

Slightly late to the game, but in the spirit of giving thanks, this year I am grateful to friends, family, students, and colleagues whose support and trust have kept me going as a musician. I don’t have a large following of people but those who listen to what I do mean so much to me. So thank you.

In case nobody noticed, I dressed up as a JMU student/alumnus. I did my part.

🙏 Incidentally this was the first piece @buddytwo.bsky.social put the term “modernism” and my compositional approach together, and I had an “all makes sense now” moment when that happened 👉🏻👈🏻💥🤯

Rather recently I recommended a student to look into Oxford English Dictionary (as a uni student they'd have access to it). Obviously OED doesn't have an entry to Labubu (but it had ones for labba and labby), but it had one for "brain rot," which actually is a somewhat old word from 1854. Who knew?

Just a fleeting thought that, just like ex-Finale users were at the mercy of the CEO who simply decided to close its product development, the US higher education—insofar as the fiasco of Canvas all day today is concerned—is at the mercy of a certain Mr. Jeff B… 👀

With @yoshionishi.com

Ars subtilior ftw 🙌

Meeting up with friends, some of whom I hadn’t seen in years, and then afterwards congratulating and hugging the composer himself was perhaps the best way to spend the afternoon in NY

Nota bene

With a guest seminar presentation coming up, I am trying to select which piece(s) to present. I listened to a recording of a piece of mine, which still upsets me greatly b/c of how approximated and uncommitted the performance was. In fact I had to stop after 30 seconds. I struggled recognizing (1/3)

Non-music. Music about music, with music held in abeyance. Sound. Sound on the cusp of music. Musical sounds. Musical events and processes, yet not yet music. These relationships are real in improvisational settings. Music, as a music. theopenspace.bandcamp.com/album/open-s...

Many students came in to their lessons saying how tired they were. As for me, after a long day I went back to the school garage to my car, only to find that it was someone else’s car, after wondering why the door wasn’t opening and if the key fob’s battery was low. I, too, am tired.

One of these days, I hope to finally buy frames for my diplomas.

Helped my publisher with the piece “Play” by Makoto Shinohara. That piece means a lot to me, and it was a joy helping them, but I should be careful with my sleep schedule (ended up writing an introduction and analysis/performance advice for it in a day staying up till 3 am…).

That the name of the singer of “Call Me Maybe” eluded me was a stark reminder of how old I have become; that song came out 14 years ago. Bemoaning the youth’s indecisiveness feels like yesterday. Also I am now unsure if the current college students would immediately get the reference.

I never went to UC; actually, as a high school student in California not so long after moving from Japan, I was told by the HS counselor that the courses I took (incl. ESL classes, which back in the day were called “Sheltered English”) didn’t fulfill the admission requirement and he dissuaded (1/2)

**Winnie-the-Pooh enters the chat** 🐝🍯🐻

Great music from my friend Mahir Cetiz with thanks to @yoshionishi.com. soundcloud.com/mahir-cetiz/...

A lot of wonderful insights on music scholarship in the digital world here!

Trying to wrap my head around the fact that I’ve lived my life so far without ever knowing that this piece by Xenakis existed: youtu.be/PZqa5gnJsJs?...

💗💗💗

I wrote about Otomo Yoshihide’s music years ago. Great stuff. www.jstor.org/stable/10.77...

On another note, some 1.5k lines later, I made the metric modulation equation work on LilyPond, which I am quite happy about. Probably I could tweak to refine the looks, and I admit my math might be off in the screenshot, but glad I made it. There is another version with the regular flags.

The fine line between claiming music is emotional, and claiming music, though its cultural/semiotic codes, compels the listeners—emotional beings—to feel in varying ways.

Book by @annakornbluh.bsky.social that, even while not reading, compels me to come back to www.annakornbluh.com/immediacy-or...

Someone whom I have known for over a decade and even worked for their music, wrote to me and said that they'd hope I'd join Darmstadt again in two years. Sense of belonging is a strange thing. Sometimes you realize you are connected to something/place that appears very far from you.

I thought about something and visited the monthly webzine, Suigyu, that composer and pianist Yuji Takahashi and others organize (suigyu.com). Takahashi's post for August was about, among others, the discontinuation of the music notation software Finale, and how he plans to go back to handwritten

I just used a word in its past participle for the first time: Forsook …what an odd-looking word.

During my quick visit to Darmstadt, I bought Ablinger’s “Now!” from MusikTexte, and only a few pages in, I am already finding it very compelling!

Practicing Messiaen’s Quatuor pour la fin du temps, and revisiting the solo movement, I realized I learned it in a way a bit cheating, in that I would play it in the way this recording—which I’ve obsessively listened to as a high schooler—went. Time to restudy rhythms! youtu.be/saEgIIgL2JY?...

Just how big was that earthquake?

Although for only a few days, this past weekend I went to Darmstadt for the first time in my life after having a work performed there 15 years ago. I was somewhat nervous going there, but I was surprised how welcoming everyone was, and it was so wonderful to reconnect with people in the field.

After one of the semesters I taught Music Hum at Columbia, a student came up to me, thanking me for teaching and added “Now I have some things to talk about during the cocktail party!” And then I knew that, even despite our honest effort in provide students with frameworks of lifelong thinking,

Grateful for people like @buddytwo.bsky.social who give what I do, what @santibeis.bsky.social does, and what we do together truly proper and deep listens. It’s worth all the effort adventuring in this otherwise very solitary world.

Maybe the point of music is to keep people like Schuyler Tsuda alive: onethirteen.bandcamp.com/album/schuyl...

In the culture that puts emphasis on immediate pleasure and disposability, there are only few that creates art, as thorny as it may seem, that begets many revisiting and speculation. We lost one of such few visionaries.

Stockhausen: The Grafiknovel

Here is the recording of NO! my protest piece. The piece will be available for listening for 30 days beginning today : July 4th after 16.00 EST and 20.00 in Europe No! recording starts at 26.35 Dur: 18 minutes My deep gratitude to the wonderful performers. www1.wdr.de/radio/wdr3/p...

I am thinking about this post, as I just received a newsletter from US Vote Foundation that said something about celebrating Independence Day & making our voices be heard through voting and it’s making an odd counterpoint with how she writes: “People are going to die. Livelihoods gone.”

There has been a thread of ways to feel better without the use of alcohol or drugs. While I too believe it is well intentioned, I also feel great sense of unease because some people cannot simply afford some of the ways suggested, especially psychologically.

This has been playing more frequently in the background as of late, and I do not mind any bit of it at all: youtu.be/-hwkKJCXsqw?...

Ben Johnston String Quartet no 7 @yoshionishi.com youtu.be/Wp7VjBtOJ74?...