Familiarity is a natural outcome of shared spaces and experiences. It’s the result of working alongside others, of overlapping routines, and of chance meetings. It is strongly shaped by institutions: our families, our schools, our places of worship, and our workplaces. For many people, this works out reasonably well. For professional artists and creatives, though, it’s not sufficient.
Read MoreThe Ecology of Collaboration
Collaboration is at the heart of everything we do as artists, designers, and creatives. But collaboration as a subject unto itself is rarely taught, examined, or critiqued in art schools, conservatories, and universities. Many activities in these places implicitly require us to collaborate, but we rarely examine the collaborative process itself with the same level of reflection and discipline that we bring to our core artistic skills.
Read MoreOn Interiors
We are all inside our homes these days, experiencing interiors in ways that most of us have not experienced them in the past. Through a series of new compositions—Interiors—I am creating work that fits these strange circumstances: music that is composed inside and alone, performed inside and alone, and listened to inside and alone. I wrote the first piece in this series for Julia Dawson, a Canadian opera singer with whom I have collaborated closely for several years and whose artistry I respect enormously, to sing with violinist Guillaume Faraut and with me performing as pianist, which is something I do not normally do.
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On lateness, dinner parties, and the end of days
For several years in my early 20’s, I was fascinated by the apocalypse. It held no religious meaning for me then—and nor does it now—but there was something about it that I found irresistible from an aesthetic point of view, and from a social point of view. I imagined all of us huddled together, trembling at first, as fire rained down from the sky. As the inferno raged on, our whimpering would slowly turn into cries of joy and raucous laughter. The calves would be slaughtered and the wine cellars emptied and the ripe fruit gathered in one last harvest. A great feast was laid on. Hesitant lovers made their long-delayed approaches and held each other close under a dark and darkening sky. There was an effusive blossoming of long-dormant humanity in those last hours, and I wished that I could find and subsequently remain forever in this condition, an ecstatic and endless present.
Read MoreOn Communication
It’s the week after Thanksgiving, December 2019. I’ve made the hasty and perhaps ill-conceived decision to restart an old blog and it remains to be seen whether I will find a way to add to it with any regularity. I’m doing this because I have lately felt an absence of a certain type of communication. I am a reasonably social person, and I am reasonably active online. I maintain a number of very close artistic and intellectual relationships, and I speak on the phone with people I respect several times each week. Furthermore, I am a university professor and have the opportunity to discuss subjects that are important to me with very bright students and colleagues on a weekly basis. But despite these different types of communication, I find that I very rarely discuss—or am required to clearly articulate—the ideas that motivate and inspire my current, ongoing creative work. And when I do, it is usually on someone else’s terms. Both the content and register of language are calibrated to a situation beyond my control.
Read MoreBook Review: The Cambridge Companion to Arvo Pärt
My review of The Cambridge Companion to Arvo Pärt is now published at MAKE, a Chicago literary magazine.
Arvo Pärt is a paradoxical figure in contemporary music: his work is widely performed, but almost never studied; it presents itself as disarmingly simple, but is fiendishly difficult to perform; it is meant to be heard in concert, though most know it only in recorded form; it is unabashedly sacred in a profoundly secular age.
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Read MoreBoston, October 2014
