Anna as an opera? I thought so, too

I’m not quite sure to whom I should address this appeal, except perhaps to note it as an entry for the Emerson Alienated Majesty File.
It was Ralph Waldo Emerson who said this, in his 1841 essay Self-Reliance:
In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts: they come back to us with a certain [...]

Having time to appreciate timelessness

 

There’s a wonderful thing in an essay by Milan Kundera that I was reminded of the other night. It comes at the end of Works and Spiders, the sixth part of his 1993 book-length essay, Testaments Betrayed.
It’s about the composition lessons Kundera used to take, and which he got as a teenager from a Jewish [...]

New book series takes closer look at Western musical monuments

 

Thanks to the good offices of a friend of mine, I’ve been looking at a couple volumes from the Magnum Opus series at Continuum Books. This series, edited by Robert Levine, takes a closer look at what it calls the touchstones of the Western classical tradition, in a bid to reach people who want to [...]

Contests should be for all composers, not just ‘young’ ones

 

Consider this an additional composer’s rant to go along with the one I wrote a few days ago.
I enjoy getting my monthly issue of Sounding Board from theAmerican Composers Forum in the mail, and I also like going to the site and seeing what’s up. One of the most important things, of course, is the [...]

Tech takes composers back to old days of entrepreneurship

 

At a concert the other night given by a chamber offshoot of Philadelphia Baroque orchestra known as Tempesta di Mare, which I wrote about for the Palm Beach Daily News, a sentence in the program notes about the pioneering English publisher John Walsh brought me up short.
In it, the writer Susan Halpern pointed out that [...]

Great art keeps revealing itself

 

This past week I saw the Palm Beach Opera production of The Marriage of Figaro, and quite enjoyed it, as I mention here in my review of the first cast.
One of the best things about this performance is that it allowed me to hear Mozart’s achievement more clearly than I have in some time. I [...]