Mike Brown interviewers musical theatre composer Stephen Sondhiem: When I venture that his songs might suggest that he has a somewhat jaundiced view of love, he momentarily flares into irritation. ‘How can you tell? Every single song I’ve ever written is sung by a character created by somebody else. Some might have a jaundiced view […]

It appears to me that the subject of music, from Machaut to Boulez, has always been its construction. Melodies of 12-tone rows just don’t happen. They must be constructed…. To demonstrate any formal idea in music, whether structure or stricture, is a matter of construction, in which the methodology is the controlling metaphor of the […]

“Without music, life would be a mistake.” — Friedrich Nietzsche, in Twilight of the Idols

“Art — reaches out to one specific person (even and especially if that person is imaginary.” Todd Brison, “A Warning Letter to All Writers”, Medium, 25 August 2020, https://medium.com/better-marketing/a-warning-letter-to-all-writers-df00d53f8795, accessed 4 September 2020.

George Plimpton, a writer and sportsman, asked if he could play in the New York Philharmonic for a month to write about the workings of an orchestra.  Leonard Bernstein assigned him to the percussion section.  The principal percussionist, Walter Rosenberg, recalled his experience: During rehearsals I would lean over and point to where we were […]

The thing that makes a creative person is to be creative and that is all that there is to it. — Edward Albee, American playwright  Kolin, Philip (ed.) (1988) Conversations with Albee.  Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, p.35.

“It is cruel, you know, that music should be so beautiful.  It has the beauty of loneliness and of pain: of strength and freedom.  The beauty of disappointment and never-satisfied love.  The cruel beauty of nature, and everlasting beauty of monotony.” Benjamin Britten

Language is at its most powerful when it disturbs, not by arriving at insights/understandings, but by creating possibilities. – Thomas Ogden T. Ogden, Reveries and Interpretations: Sensing Something Human, Lanham, Roman & Littlefield, 2004, p. 219.

“An idea is salvation by imagination.” – Frank Lloyd Wright, American architect

In a surprise union of two quintessentially American composers from different eras, one the 1960s mastermind of “Good Vibrations,” the other the Jazz Age creator of “Rhapsody in Blue,” former Beach Boy Brian Wilson has been authorized by the estate of George Gershwin to complete unfinished songs Gershwin left behind when he died in 1937. […]