That’s a picture of the Forbidden City Orchestra with the New Zealand String Quartet during a recent tour of China and New Zealand.  They partnered up to commission composers from both countries to write for them and then toured the resulting pieces throughout both countries.  I’ll be talking to them and featuring audio from this tour on the first Relevant Tones episode in quarter four of 2014.

Now that the show is syndicated we have to plan so much further ahead than we did before which takes away some of the spontaneity but also causes us to do a lot more research and we stumble across really interesting projects like this that I doubt we would have found out about otherwise.  Here then are the complete Q4 show listings!

10/4 Into the Forbidden City and Beyond

In a barrier-busting intercultural collaboration, the Forbidden City Chamber Orchestra partnered with the New Zealand String Quartet to tour commissioned pieces by composers from both countries.  In a Relevant Tones exclusive, we’ll feature the music from this historic project.

10/11 What is Wandelweiser?

Originally a German musical creation, Wandelweiser is a kind of extreme minimalism that is fast becoming popular with composers around the world.  We talk with two of its creators, Jürg Frey and Eva-Maria Houben, about the phenomenal growth of this movement.

10/18 The Art of Spoken Word

It takes fine craftsmanship to achieve a perfect partnership between text and music in which neither element overshadows the other.  This week, we’ll listen to a fascinating array of spoken word and music by composers striving to achieve this symmetry.

10/25 Haunted Landscapes: Music of George Crumb

Legendary composer George Crumb created a unique, haunting sound world that leaves an indelible impression upon anyone who hears it.  The master turns 85 in October and we’ll celebrate with an entire show dedicated to his outlandish music.

11/1- Through the Grapevine

We’re having a ball trying to keep up with our ever-expanding musical collection as composers and performers around the world joyously overwhelm us with their creations.  We’re consistently amazed by their level of talent and artistry, and are thrilled this week to share it with our listeners.

11/8 In the Field: Mizzou Part I

Fast becoming the go-to summer music festival in the Midwest, the concerts and workshops at the University of Missouri’s International Composers Festival are a sure-fire place to hear imaginative new music from emerging composers.

11/15  In the Field: Mizzou Part II

More music from the vibrant inferno of creative energy that is the Mizzou International Composers Festival, featuring Alarm Will Sound, exciting works by faculty composers and a bundle of premieres, concerts and workshops

11/22 The Polish Legacy

As part of Polish American Heritage Month, we put together a live concert of works by a wide range of composers from one of the great music-loving countries of the world .  We’ll hear music from this concert and talk about the incredible legacy of classical music in Poland.

11/29  Has Anyone Seen the Bridge?

Just in the last couple of years Alarm Will Sound has covered Aphex Twin, cello goddess Maya Beiser covered Led Zeppelin and the Osso Quartet recorded music of indie darling Sufjan Stevens.  What’s going on here?  We’ll feature this fun new trend of performers commissioning composers to arrange pop songs.

12/6 Composer Spotlight – Nico Muhly

He’s worked with, and written and arranged for, performers as diverse as the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, Beyoncé, the American Ballet Theater and Björk, just to name a few.  We sit down to talk to this wide-ranging and highly successful composer about life on the cutting edge of 21st-century music.

12/13 Payton MacDonald – Super Marimba

Percussionist Payton MacDonald calls Super Marimba the nexus point of all of his artistic activities.  Featuring influences from jazz and classical to Hindustani and improvisational music, this is the marimba as you’ve never heard it before.

12/20 – Journey into the Sacred: Modern Oratorios

Large-scale sacred works might not be the first thing that comes to mind when you think of contemporary music, but a number of important composers are creating expansive works inspired by their concept of a higher power.

12/27-  Composers Among Us: Laura Schwendinger

Our popular series profiling emerging composers continues with Laura Schwendinger, an artist whose strongly personal style of music is filled with kinetic energy and slow-burning intensity.

I had several beers with two good friends recently while I was in New York and the conversation, as it so often does, turned to music. I was talking about a composer who will go unnamed whose music I really can’t stand to listen to which got us talking about what makes music good and bad. Is it the craft of the composer? Is it the ideas that you don’t like? The execution?

I think it’s all of these things but while we were talking about it I suddenly and half drunkenly blurted out “the thing about music is that intention is audible.” I said this because I’ve been thinking a lot about how to answer the question “what kind of music do you listen to?”

The answer for me is all kinds of music. The kind of music that I like I always say is music that is well considered, well crafted and well executed, all of the three things above, but… the most important part for me is the intention of the person writing the music: that they have a genuine desire to communicate something of value to the listener.

I really do believe that this intention is audible in the music itself. If the idea is facile or the composer is caught up in his or her own self importance then most of the time the music will not be good. The pieces that last are those that have a genuine and lasting communicative value.

So, craft and execution are all very important of course but so is the intention and that is something that can’t be taught. You just have to live it man.

I recently interviewed Dutch composer Louis Andriessen and we had a typically thought-provoking and wide-ranging conversation about music, politics, philosophy, social justice and what kind of music a composer should write. The first question I asked him was “Is music something that can exist outside of politics or outside of the composer’s particular social landscape?”

His answer was that yes music can exist separately but that it shouldn’t. That especially in the modern age the composer should write music that causes people to ask the big questions of social justice, race, gender and class equality, and religious and ethical mores. When composers were servants, he continued, writing music for parties and such then they couldn’t do things like this but in our era they can and should.

This conversation stayed with me and I found myself thinking about it for days afterward. I didn’t grow up in a politically fraught environment. In fact my generation had it pretty easy. But I still do think about the issues that Andriessen is so passionate about even if they don’t surface in my music.

For me advocating on behalf of music, which I equate to social justice in that proliferating storefront music schools is good for society, is a separate activity from writing music. Or so I always thought. These days I’m not so sure. As I open storefront music schools and plan concerts and make radio shows I do wonder how these activities are impacting the music I write.

I always thought that when I go into a room to write music all of that should go away. But now I’m thinking it could be a source of musical inspiration which, frankly, has been somewhat hard to come by lately. Have to think on this a bit…

I had a grant deadline recently for my organization Access Contemporary Music and I was including the proof of our non-profit status as I’ve done so many times before but this time I actually glanced at it and saw that we had received our official status, and incorporated, almost exactly ten years ago.

In effect, we forgot our own birthday. And such a milestone too! We had been active under the name before 2004 but once we incorporated and got non profit statues was when things really started to move. Our concert season came shortly afterward, the first school in 2007 and the composer membership program in 2010 and now we’re bringing our more successful initiatives to other cities and looking to continue to grow from there.

The best thing for me personally is that we finally have infrastructure. For nearly ten years I was running all of our programs myself and everyone was telling me to delegate but it’s hard to do with volunteers. Once I had staff and was able to effectively delegate the organization really took off.

I think now that the biggest mistake I made early on was this lack of delegation. I always felt so guilty asking people to do things for which I couldn’t pay them. I completely neglected to remember that giving them ownership over a project is a great motivator, that it’s not so much asking them to work for free as to give them a way to express their support for the organization.

If I had been better at motivating volunteers and hadn’t always felt reluctant to ask people to do things I think we’d be further along but there’s no sense in dwelling on that. This is definitely something I now share with young arts leader. Now I have to get good at asking for money!

I’m in New York covering the New York Philharmonic’s inaugural Biennial, a series of concerts celebrating contemporary music, and it’s been amazing but something even more amazing just happened: I was asked to voice their Biennial Minute video series.  This is a great honor as I feel that they could have gone with virtually anyone, from Alex Baldwin to any of a dozen radio hosts in NYC.

I’ve scripted all five of them and recorded the first voice overs. They’ll be released throughout the Biennial.  Here’s the first one!

My third annual Thirsty Ear Festival is coming to City Winery on July 12!  We just got the lineup done and it’s going to be an exciting show.  Thirsty Ear is a special two-hour live broadcast of my show Relevant Tones on 98.7 WFMT and it’s designed to feature an eclectic mix of interesting performers in Chicago and elsewhere.

This year’s headliner is Graham Reynolds who I met when he was performing in Chicago many years ago.  I spoke with him a little bit backstage before his performance and thought we had a similar philosophy toward music making and then the performance was excellent so he was someone I definitely wanted to keep in touch with.

I describe Graham as Lou Reed meets Shostakovich meets Duke Ellington.  His music has this angsty cool that has to be heard for you to know what I’m talking about.  He’s a fantastic pianist and drummer in addition to a composer and his performance will be wonderful.  The other two groups are Fonema Consort, a vocal group that leans toward extended techniques and interesting, often experimental sounds and the Gaudete Brass Quintet, an energetic virtuosic shot in the arm of musical adrenalin.

Tickets are on sale so don’t miss Thirsty Ear!

I’ve thought a lot over the years about how ACM’s Palomar ensemble should relate to the rest of the organization. I decided to give the ensemble it’s own name about seven years ago when we were still called Accessible Contemporary Music.   When the group would play on something outside of our concert series it just seemed so clunky in the listings to see Accessible Contemporary Music performs at the Empty Bottle.

What does that even mean?  It doesn’t sound cool, that’s for sure.  Not that I worry too much about being cool but if you’re playing someplace like the Empty Bottle then a mouthful of a name like that, with all of the negative connotations, seems almost calculated to keep the normal patrons away.  So, I thought the ensemble and the whole performance element of ACM could be called Palomar and for the most part it has worked fine.

But then there has always been the question of who is Palomar?  Are they a stand alone ensemble that contracts to perform on ACM concerts?  Are they a group of freelance musicians playing ACM concerts?  And especially now as ACM moves outside of Chicago and starts bringing shows to Austin, New York and hopefully Boston and other cities soon, this question is more important than ever.

In Austin we hired musicians there and only flew myself and our conductor down and I think that worked well.  I’m thinking now that Palomar is, as I think of it, a continental collective of excellent musicians in cities around the country.  Of course I’m already looking into events in London and Helsinki so it may become intercontinental in the near future, but let’s not quibble.

The idea of having a standing body of excellent musicians in different cities around the world is enormously appealing to me.  Of course I’ll want to have storefront music schools in these cities too eventually.  The ACM presence in a city will consist of storefront music schools, a body of musicians who are part of Palomar, Open House projects, Sound of Silent Film and other innovative collaborations designed to bring out new audiences to hear new music.

Sounds simple and we’ve done a nice job of it in Chicago but spreading it around the world will take some time. But what else have I got to do?

I remember vividly when Vonnegut’s last novel Timequake came out in 1997.  I actually went to the University of Chicago to hear him speak and bought a signed copy of it.  One of my first author autographed books. This would become something of an obsession with me and I now have a great many signed books.  Of course there are fewer author signings now that no one reads and no one has a physical book to sign but that’s for another day.

I’m thinking about Timequake now because of a Malcolm Gladwell article in the most recent New Yorker in which he talks about late bloomers and prodigies in the arts.  The example he cites most frequently is Cezanne as the ultimate late bloomer versus Picasso as the ultimate prodigy.  Cezanne borrowed money from his father all his life and didn’t make his first masterpieces until he was in his sixties.  Picasso, well, everyone knows about Picasso.

All of this was very interested to read, especially as I consider myself to be a late bloomer, certainly rather than a prodigy.  But it also reminded me of Timequake in which Vonnegut divides creative types into “swoopers” and “bashers.”   A swooper is someone who creates easily, the inspiration flows and the quality of the work is generally even.  A swooper creates pretty reliably good art with relatively little effort.

A basher on the other hand is someone who sweats and struggles for months, even years on a single piece of art and the quality is not always even.  A great example that I think of from history are the two greek playwrights, Sophocles and Euripides.  Sophocles was a swooper. He wrote effortlessly, he was instantly successful and the works that have survived are all of high quality and there’s no reason to think that the other works were any different.

Euripides, however, took much longer to write plays and he wrote many plays universally considered to be awful.  But when he was good he was the best there ever was.  Sophocles couldn’t hold a candle to Euripides when he was writing at his best.  For the record, Vonnegut considered himself to be a basher.

I’m definitely a basher, no doubt about it.  A late blooming basher killing myself to bash out uneven work. I only hope that the best of that work has a tenth of the power of Euripides, or Vonnegut himself for that matter.

Just finished reading Peter Gay’s history of modernism and it’s a great read.  He does an amazing job of distilling a very complicated subject into a readable book that mostly makes sense.  But my intention is not to review his book but to voice a complaint.  And that is, let’s just shut up about modernism already!

I’m so tired of hearing modernist this and post-modernist that.  The original idea of the modernists was to stop basing architecture, poetry, art, music, etc. on classical models that came from the Greeks and Romans.  Well I think we’ve succeeded at that.  I don’t know about you but I never think about the ancient world when I’m writing music.

I certainly don’t care if my work is modernist or post-modernist and I don’t care about it in architecture either.  People created according to classical principles for a long time, then a group said make it new and then another group came along and said well let’s go back to classical models and now some are doing one and some are doing the other.  None of which is particularly surprising or interesting.

So, let’s declare modernism a success and move on.  Quit the talk of modernist and post-modernist and come up with a new way to discuss art and architecture. It would really make me happy.

Working on the last of the three movements of my new work, now titled Inner Visions, inspired by the art of Sanya Glisic.  This one is called Galactic Drifter and I absolutely love it.  Who is this guy? What worlds has he visited?  As I did for the other paintings I kept a series of journal entries to help me sort out what the work means to me and how I can represent it musically.  Here are my thoughts on Galactic Drifter.

Galactic Drifter – like a Star Wars character is the first thing I think of.  Possibly shouldn’t be the first thing I think of but it is.  He’s dancing too or seems to be, clapping his hands to an unheard music.  His face is covered with a bandana or part of a one-piece outfit of some kind?

Or are those obscuring lines over his body? I like the way those lines become color-inverted in the rest of the piece, what was green is white and vice versa.  He’s wearing some kind of watch or intergalactic travel device. Yes, that’s a chronometer that he wears that also has the power to transport him through space and time.

And he has sharp looking boots on, he’s a sharp dresser in general.

Prophets of tomorrow – like an imaginary tarot card. He dances like a devil, looks like a devil or a death card that signifies change.  He has his hands up in the air palms out which signifies …?  Not sure.  His face is like a cross between a wolf’s and a crocodile’s and again, like all of her characters, he is a sharp dresser.

What to do musically?  Something kind of sneaky but plaintive too, must be lonely drifting around the galaxy like that. I think there will be a sax solo, not sure why but it just seems right.  Shouldn’t the galactic drifter have a lonely sax solo?  Yes, I think so.  Mostly pizz in the cello, sneaky kind of bass line, perhaps somewhat bluesy.