Instrumental Music
“I think that creative improvisation music models the democratic principle. Heads of state and legislative bodies could learn a lot from this practice.”
“As to the church organ itself, it seemed almost like a sample machine, like it could tap into sounds from different eras.”
One way to understand the work of Erik Satie is to imagine a place somewhere between two opposite artistic poles: James McNeill Whistler and Robert Filliou.
Nostalgia for the future, bluegrass, and hating the term “minimalism.”
Improvisation, instrumental music, and the political function of art.
A banjo-playing cab driver and slipping the rug out from under the listener.
The iconoclastic composer discusses his newest opera, the differences between American and European music culture, and space aliens.
Van Dyke Parks discusses his recent collection Songs Cycled, the synesthetic quality of his work and unpopular pop music.
Brooklyn musician Ashley Paul on lyrical development, the conservatory, and the Third Stream between jazz and classical.
Muhly chats with fellow composer, and Pulitzer Prize winner, David Lang about his recent work, love fail, at the Brooklyn Academy of Music from December 6 to December 8.
After the massive wall of overtones created with 400 guitars in A Crimson Grail (2007) and the hypnotic downtown anthemic rhythms of Guitar Trio (1977), Rhys Chatham has returned to the trumpet.
Forget autotune—Nick Demopolous introduces BOMBlog to the future of music. Its name is Smomid.
BOMB Magazine is pleased to feature selections from ONandOnScreen’s summer issue. Each week BOMBlog will showcase poems and video pairings from the Summer 2011 issue of ONandOnScreen, an e-journal project matching poems and videos. This week features poetry by Ernest Hilbert and a video of Sir Georg Solti conducting Mozart’s “Lacrimosa.”
A review of 20 Years, a LP + 3 CD compilation spanning two decades of audio from Richard Youngs and Simon Wickham-Smith. This article is only available in print.
This winter, I wrote a blog post about music I had been listening to during a tour of the southwestern US. Some readers chimed in with what they had been enjoying, too.
If you stripped radiant joy of all associations to sentimentality, you might hear the work of composer Nico Muhly on speaks volumes, his first CD.
John Convertino: “The burning sun day after day can be a brutal reality for anyone trying to hide. If you choose to live in the desert, things eventually come out into the open.”
Amina Claudine Myers, virtuoso pianist and organist, sits down with trombonist, composer, and educator George Lewis to discuss the articulations between sound, history, and place that are central to her work.
Ruins fit William Basinski well—in his compositions, grand melodies, and classical structures are reduced to ghosts.