My undergrad piano professor, David Renner, introduced me to Nikolai Roslavets a few years ago. I finally followed his suggestion and bought Marc-Andre Hamelin’s excellent CD of a few of his piano pieces. Roslavets was dubbed “the Russian Schoenberg” — he dabbled in his own type of serialism. He himself This was (predictably) not to [...]
Jenny and I went up to Oregon’s Crater Lake this week. We decided to camp at a state park 40 miles south of Crater Lake, since there is no camping at Crater Lake this time of year. That should have been our clue. When we got there, the weather was beautiful: high 60s, a light [...]
Kyle Gann has been on a microtonal kick lately. Today he posted a MIDI rendering of a microtonal quartet of his teacher, Ben Johnston. It makes for some very interesting listening. What strikes me about this piece is that even though there are three or four times as many possible pitches per octave than we’re [...]
