Apparently not literally a self-portrait? The museum doesn’t claim that. I don’t have a stake in this, but I was a little surprised to find the suggestion mattered to my reading of the picture. Would take an essay to chase down why. www.centrepompidou.fr/en/pompidou-...

This is cute and quotable, but it’s not clear to me how it’s different from “No”.

No complaints about the performance. As for the composition: - I think I did handle the rhythmic challenge of Rukeyser’s prosy free verse. (Not a knock! She’s subtle and I mostly honored how I hear it.) - My form works but imposes an arch structure that isn’t really there in the poem.

Now I have the recording of my setting of this poem! By Sarah-Nicole Carter, mezzo, and Phil Dannels, piano. youtu.be/T4BxHEW5ALk

I've been working hard at the day job lately, on a project that has let me do a lot of fun software design and coding. Last week, I realized that there's a tiny subproblem (formatting some tabular output) which is actually somewhat challenging to get right....

I think this is the best!

I’m going to have to read this, if only because every time I see it mentioned, I wonder again whether its title is an allusion to a poem that could hardly serve the theme without being forcefully recontextualized ;-) www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43285/...

I did not realize this was Saxophone Day! Dr. TM's suggestion is a good one, and I'll add some of the only music I've written for the instrument. In my opera, the part of the spirit or fairy is played onstage by a dancer, and in the audible realm by a saxophonist. www.youtube.com/watch?v=afQd...

There has been a long-anticipated insurgent campaign to replace her -- I think this means we will get a new establishment candidate (meaning the insurgent will have a different problem to solve)

I caught a video ad for a product called Reputation Defender, in which the protagonist suffers some kind of calumny but then is made whole so that a search for him shows a "successful businessman". His name in the ad is William Blake, so one can imagine the misunderstandings....

Maybe George Oppen's Collected? With most poets, I jump around in their collections and focus on individual poems. With Oppen, I remember just reading with pleasure from beginning to end like a novel.

Opera/lied people, New Wave Opera in Portland is looking for singers and composers! @lisaneher.bsky.social seems not to have announced this here yet.... www.newwaveopera.org/work-with-us...

Nagged by the thought that I was quoting something as I sketched a piece, realizing it’s Parsifal (and I haven’t been to the current production — it’s in the air)

Nobi is doing much better. And you know the saying "fortune is bald behind"? For some reason, since this urological procedure, I find myself thinking about it as he strolls around the house.

Change one letter, ruin a candy: Horehound (I swapped the first and second h's)

My cat has just gotten home from a few days at the vet. He’s still a bit woozy, but apparently recovering (a kidney/bladder thing). He’s not ready for pictures, so here’s one from a few days ago.

My cello teacher asked me about the goals of performance, i.e. to what end we're putting together our little phrases. I went down various byways of aesthetics, mostly denying that there was a singular nameable thing at the end. ...

I follow a classical performer on Instagram who posts advice on practicing in the light of neuroscience. I may be too reflexively skeptical…but just once I’d like her to say “here’s the problem, here’s the surprising solution”, with a demonstration, and only then invoke the hippocampus.

Timeline cleanse! Post a beautiful or adorable thing, please. www.life.com/people/andre...

Obligatory excerpt from Cage's "Silence":

Jessica Smith marveled at why her students are majoring in business rather than in the humanities/creative fields many of them love. My own story was a little different, because I had the privilege of supportive parents who were happy I wanted to study music...

my one quibble, of course, is that "Some metric" belongs on the Y axis, and time running from left to right on the X axis

Is it too banal to say it's both? We have the power to use words to make new phrases, but we mostly don't use it. There are well-known demonstrations of invention ("colorless green ideas"), and also underminings of set phrases ("I lust after Bob because he always gets it over with so fast")

For daily music writing, I found it helped me to use a special pencil on quite ordinary paper. I wouldn't argue for this particular combination, but it feels like bringing a well-balanced wrench into the greasy machine room, to do the grubby job right

As a rusty old programmer currently working with Jira in a soup of other strange names, I identify

Writing songs, I often turn to old poetry, for reasons of taste and rights. I still haven't worked out to my satisfaction, though, how to deal with meter. So I was glad to participate in the performance of a new song setting a long poem in quatrains, in which each verse took exactly 16 bars...

More details at bayareaartsalliance.org/2025/10/19/o..., including a ticket link!

Any year now, the accumulated mass of knowledge will start yielding wisdom.

I don't think it's up on www.westedgeopera.org yet, but an email went out announcing the 2026 lineup of their Snapshot program of excerpted new operas -- including @eyesack.bsky.social ! mailchi.mp/westedgeoper...

Either that was an earthquake, or an unusually heavy truck delivering artisan goat cheese to the market across the street

This gives some idea: youtu.be/m4yy0U_fHNk?...

A category overlapping with “fragile music” is virtuosic music. There’s a kind of virtuosity which I think is a legitimate virtue in the music — where as a listener you’re appreciating how the skill and effort are paying off. Not all merely hard music accomplishes this

Huh, weird that replies are disabled. In literature and visual art, I too easily rate everything by its closeness to Modernism, just because that’s the first art I really got excited by. I even used to be skeptical of representational art. But I got better

In the mid-90’s, our phone number was one digit off from Yellow Cab. After a number of calls, we recorded an outgoing message, “If you want a cab, call XXXY instead.” The first message recorded after that was “f*** you”.

Coming up soon, music of @pwallinga.bsky.social and others! Bay Area Arts Alliance presents Opus 8 Saturday, Oct. 25, 7:30 pm Community Music Center 544 Capp St. (between 20th and 21st) San Francisco, CA 94110 (more links/announcements coming!)

A better Italian; he even died in New York City.

In an academic book on music theory, some disputant's words are described as "greased with vitriol", which sounds extremely painful for all concerned

It's the canonical architectural duck! (Of Venturi and Scott Brown, plus Izenour whom I always forget) www.artsy.net/article/arts...

Quote-post with a frog to scare ICE images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5...

the girlfriend of one of the founders of antifa

I have definitely felt this about some pieces and moments (the beginning of the recapitulation in Brahms’s 4th, first movement). But the feeling shifts and the become examples of human craft and art again.

We've just updated our tracker for ICE arrests in San Francisco. Since May, Mission Local reporters have personally seen or verified 130 people arrested by ICE in the city—the vast majority at immigration court. missionlocal.org/2025/06/sf-i...

Nooo @bookforum.bsky.social, it can't be that you referred to "Tyrone Slothdrop" in the pull quote of an article on Pynchon! ;-)

Post something random or have an awful October.

As a grad student in computer science, decades ago, I did take undergrad music classes, and it wasn't remarked on. But I wasn't doing it to wage ideological warfare!

Is @lewis-carroll-bot.bsky.social constantly searching for quotations to like?

I’m having trouble visualizing this diagram of the school essay form. Are all the arrows pointing clockwise? (So it’s a six-point cycle with two of the points more important than the rest?) (The word “shooting” might be the crux.) www.newyorker.com/magazine/202...

Gertrude, you’re great, but this is truly a matter of degree at most.

I know of three sculptures by Douglas Tilden. Two are sensitively posed sports scenes, like the baseball player in Golden Gate Park. The other is the carnival of bulging flesh downtown, like a celebration of Soviet industry by Tom of Finland. artandarchitecture-sf.com/golden-gate-...