I'm making my YouTube debut with the world premiere performance of Renderings of Things We Couldn't Take Home for percussion quartet, featuring the Berkeley Contemporary Chamber Players (Joel Davel, Ben Paysen, Loren Mach, and Christopher Froh). Special thanks to the performers for giving me permission to use this video, and to Dave Coll for shooting it. Enjoy!

The BBC documentary "The Outsider: the Story of Harry Partch" (2002) is available on Youtube:

For those of you who don't know of Harry Partch, the documentary can explain his work and his life far better than I can. He's best known for his unique, handmade instruments, and his interest in alternate tunings. The two combined yield music that is truly unlike any other.

The website for American Mavericks, a 2003 radio series produced by American Public Media with the San Francisco Symphony, includes a virtual collection of Partch instruments so you can play with them yourself.

Post-orals, I felt this momentum for continued productivity, but no project to which to apply that productivity came to mind as being most urgent, so I ended up downloading Processing and checking it out. I've been meaning to for a long time (years, really); Processing is what has made many of the incredible information visualization projects of the last few years possible. The History of Sampling (by Jesse Kriss) is still one of my favorites, and Jesse's former professor Golan Levin has a simply ridiculous body of amazing work.

I've made a few little first forays into Processing so far. Here they are:

1) A sketch that imports data (a composer's name and years of birth/death), and creates a timeline graph at the appropriate scale. It took a little time to make the graph update dynamically based on the data it got.

2) A bouncing ball. Mindblowing, I know.

I passed my orals on Tuesday. For those of you who are wondering what that feels like, I refer you to this picture of a unicorn and a rainbow, in the style of a late '80s to early '90s Trapper Keeper folder:

My orals are on Tuesday. To mark the occasion, here are three of the six pieces I've been working on for the past semester or so. Luckily, I still love them. I also still love the other three, which I couldn't find on Youtube: Toru Takemitsu's riverrun, John Cage's Two (no superscript), and Kaija Saariaho's Amers.

György Ligeti: Síppal, dobbal, nádihegedüvel

Morton Feldman: Rothko Chapel

George Crumb: Black Angels

Saturday, I was silly enough to ask someone at Amoeba Records if they carried any copies of La Monte Young's The Well-Tuned Piano, and got laughed at (not unkindly). Apparently, recordings of his work are notoriously difficult to get; the original releases were generally (completely?) done through small, now-defunct labels. The thing was, I had seen a copy of it for sale at the Amoeba in Hollywood, years and years ago. It had cost a lot, but not the $500 or so that Amazon's third-party sellers want for it now.

However, it's on Youtube! All five hours of it (!!), in thirty parts. If you're short on time, you can at least get a sense of the sound world of the piece by leafing through the sections.

If you don't know the piece, The Well-Tuned Piano is a work for solo piano that has been tuned in just intonation (the term given to any tuning system in which intervals are determined using integer ratios). The exact tuning system used for the piece is published on Kyle Gann's website with permission from Young. Gann also has a short, lucid explanation of just intonation itself available here. (If you happen to be an academic type with access to JSTOR, you can read Gann's article about the piece from Perspectives of New Music vol. 31.1 here.)

One of my favorite effects of the tuning is the "buzz". The first time I heard this piece, I thought the piano was being subtly electronically processed because the timbre of it was so unlike my idea of what a piano could produce. It's just the buzz. In sections where the music is spare, there's a subtle "crunch" to the sound. In sections where the music is really loud and active (like Part 11/30), there's this sense of a low, steady drone that arises as a result. (That section also makes use of pitches that aren't-quite-in-unison to wonderful effect.) While I've never heard this piece live, I have heard justly-tuned piano with a similar texture live, and it's the kind of sound that fills a hall and reverberates in a completely stunning way.

I'm a bit too sleep-deprived to say as much about this piece as it deserves, so, in conclusion: ♥

The ads below are header images on the website of KUSC, the only classical radio station in Los Angeles. (The slogans are also used in other forms of advertising; I noticed them on the sides of all the buses on campus at USC.)

I've been unsure for a while now about whether this was or was not worth blogging about. Complaining about these ads seems too easy, in a way. Everything I would say about them seems foolishly self-evident, like the written equivalent of shooting fish in a barrel. But, then, the fact that the ads exist at all suggests that I'm probably wrong.

Not pictured is my actual least favorite slogan: "Less Bombs, More Brahms".

Yup. That just happened to you.