In any performance, there is an information network that exists between the performer, the instrument, and the audience. By maximizing information exchange between objects in the performer/instrument/audience network and creating interactions between the separate information streams of that network, an electronic composer/performer is more likely to create a compelling performance.

Adventurous new music reaches wide audiences and they applaud it, so this is a good time to sort out rhetorical falsehoods from rhetorical flourishes in the great debate over new music.

While openness has only lately started to trickle slowly through the creative minds of the European musical establishment, it seems to have been a characteristic element of American repertoire from the beginning.

During Parsifal, in a coup de théâtre, virtually the entire libretto of Our Giraffe snapped into my head.

What kind of music could benefit from repeated performance on the same program?

The most predictable, preposterous, despicable absurdity of the “classical” performer, confronted with new work, is to say “Why can’t you just be more like this?” gesturing to Haydn Strinq Quartets, or Beethoven Symphonies, or Debussy Preludes.

The modernist presumption that audiences exert a negative and coercive effect on our artistic options is often an inversion of the truth.

I doubt that rejection of modernism is what drove Baby Boomers away from classical music; they weren’t there in the first place. Part of their act of rebellion was to put a minus sign on anything their parents found important and classical music was seen as part of the conformity and stuffiness of the middle class life they rejected.

What is the purpose of the “gift” if the composer doesn’t follow his muse?

The subdominant is a mystery: no matter how high one goes in the harmonic series, a fundamental pitch will not produce a perfect fourth above the fundamental. Yet, every standard Western scale and church mode except the Lydian contains it.