It’s been almost exactly a year to the day since my last live broadcast for WFMT at Le Poisson Rouge.  I’ve been asked countless times since then if I’m planning to launch a podcast version of it and the answer has always been no. I spent 2019 writing several chamber pieces, a feature film score and my first opera La Jetée, plus producing a dozen or so events in three different cities and my let’s not forget my day job at ACM.

I don’t know how I would have done a weekly radio show on top of that let alone launching a podcast from scratch. The other night I was back at LPR for a show, and a publicist I know came up to me and said “how’s retirement?”   It took me a while to figure out that she was talking about Relevant Tones. I was like, oh yeah, some people only know me as the former radio guy.  How strange.

Overall it’s true that I don’t miss doing a radio show. The deadlines are constant and the truth is that we were never on solid footing with the network which was stressful. The threat of cancellation hung over the show from day one.  There was also nearly always someone telling me not to do the things I really wanted to do.

I didn’t want to just play music.  I wanted to engage with composers on the important topics they were thinking about or that affected their lives and the music they create. Art doesn’t happen in a vacuum after all.  I love music but like most composers, I have a wide range of interests and I wanted to do a show that reflected those interests.   What are composers thinking about automation, climate change, the rise of Japanese whiskeys, you name it.

In classical radio though, talk of any kind is bad. The mantra is the more we talk the more listeners flee in droves and apparently the Arbitron numbers bear this out so I’m not giving them a hard time.  But who wants to listen to a playlist you can’t control?  How are we providing value if we’re not telling the listeners what they’re listening to and why we love it?  What are we doing to reach new listeners?  And why isn’t radio doing a better job embracing digital media?

The last couple of months I’ve started thinking of bringing Relevant Tones back as a semi-regular series broadcast live through streaming. We streamed a few of our last live broadcasts for WFMT and the results were intriguing.  I’ve mentioned this idea to people recently and their responses have also been intriguing.

There’s an interesting divide along age lines.  People roughly 40 and over ask if I’m partnering with WFMT or another old school media company.  People under 40 just ask Youtube or Facebook?

As I got more serious about this idea I started to reach out to media outlets to partner with.  In the end I decided to go with Caveat in NYC.  Caveat is primarily a venue as of now but they have a sophisticated setup for streaming and they are looking to launch their own media company in the near future.  They also are fluent in millennial which, well, there’s a lot of them so that seems good right?

I’m doing a pilot program on February 23rd.  If they like it then I’ll be entered into their incubator program. Incubated! Sounds so warm and cozy. I know a lot about broadcasting and event production but they know a lot about the people I want to reach and how to reach them through digital media so, though it’s a totally new direction for me, I think I made the right choice.

I don’t know how often I’m going to do these yet because, as a composer, I’m really enjoying this whole getting a piece performed every few weeks thing lately and want to keep that momentum going.  A lot of it will depend on what kind of support team I wind up with. I realize, though, that composing alone isn’t enough for me.  I have this need to reach people, to share music and ideas and I’m really excited to do that again.

Plus, it turns out I’m kind of an extrovert and I miss being on stage.

There are some moments in life that just stick in the brain as an indelible image.  Such a moment for me was New Year’s Eve 2009.  Maria and I were in London with her family and her sister took us to a fancy dress party which is what they call a costume party. The theme was American Prohibition which, coming from Chicago, was pretty hilarious to us.

But we put on our 1920’s clothes and went to the bar which I believe was in Tooting or one of those still somewhat disreputable neighborhoods, at least at that time. It’s probably changed by now.  At any rate, there was a smoking hot jazz band complete with a tap dancer and we drank bathtub gin and it was alright.

I was absolutely entranced by the tap dancer, partly because of her skill, partly because she wore a ludicrous smile the whole time she performed and partly because she was on a not very wide platform that was at least four feet high which I thought was amazing.  I stared at her and the band with such a look of naked fascination that at one point the guitarist winked at me like I was a ten year old in a Dickens novel. Which maybe I was, just for a bit. London is a weird place.
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Years ago my Relevant Tones producer Jesse and I were in Helsinki for a couple of weeks interviewing composers, going to concerts and generally checking out the amazing music scene there.

Finland had long had a thriving music scene but after they were able to take advantage of the Bolshevik revolution in 1917 to gain independence from Russia and while they were still searching for a national identity, a young graduate from the Helsinki Conservatory of Music named Jean Sibelius wrote a series of pieces incorporating Finnish folk songs that became so popular that classical music became an “inextricable part of the Finnish psyche,” according to his biographer.

I’ve always found it fascinating to see how what a society chooses to spend its resources on shapes the people who live there.  In the case of Finland they put enormous resources into music education and the results are amazing. (more…)

“What is it?”
“Well, it’s my therapy. I’m still perfecting it.”
“What does it do?”
“Do?”
“What’s it for?”
“Well, nothing — nothing. I mean, that’s the beauty of it. Every machine in the world does something, but not mine.”

I took a little bike tour of the Bronx a couple of months ago which, if you’re the kind of person who prefers to bike without traffic barrelling unpredictably at incredibly high speeds in all directions with absolutely zero thoughts given toward hapless bikers slowly making their way up ludicrously steep hills in a joke of a bike lane which is really just a bike symbol spray-painted onto the side of the road, I cannot with any degree of honesty recommend.

Still, I did manage to survive the worst parts to make it to a more or less flat stretch of the Grand Concourse where there is a divided bike lane and I could catch my breath.  After falling on my knees and thanking the patron saint of bicyclists (Madonna del Ghisallo in case you don’t know) for watching over me, I looked up and saw the Bronx Museum of Arts and decided to head in and see what was shaking. (more…)

“A peacetime bedroom, a real bedroom. Real children. Real birds. Real cats. Real graves.” – La Jeteé

In Chris Marker’s film La Jeteé, a boy goes with his family to the observation deck at Orly airport to watch planes take off and land.  While there he sees a man shot and killed.  The boy becomes obsessed with this image; a woman’s gesture, a sudden roar, the man falls.  Some time later,  the narrator tells us, a massive war breaks out.  The boy, now a man, must fight in the war. He survives along with a very small percentage of humanity and, with the other survivors, is forced to live in underground catacombs because the surface is radioactive.

They are governed by autocratic pseudo-scientists referred to as the camp experimenters.  The experiments they conduct are centered around the idea of sending someone through time.  They first want to send a person through a “loophole in time” to “summon the past and the future to the aid of the present.” (more…)

“Opera is when a guy gets stabbed in the back and, instead of bleeding, he sings.” ― Robert Benchley

You know you’re living in a weird bubble when everywhere you go every person you talk to seems to be in the midst of writing an opera.  This isn’t conjectural, this is my life currently.  It reached a kind of apotheosis yesterday when, at a meeting at a coffee shop in the West Village, the guy who took my order told me he’s working on an opera too

It’s about a misunderstood barista who has quietly revolutionized the percolation process but who foolishly spouted off about his idea at the regional convention one night after too many Baileys Irish cream coffees in the hotel bar and it was stolen by an unscrupulous middle manager who went on to achieve great success. (more…)

Growing up in Jefferson City, Missouri was not quite the Tom Sawyer-esque adventure it probably could have been though this is entirely my fault as I could never bring myself to jump into the Missouri River or even to wade into the mud along the shore.  I also had no idea how to build a raft and I look terrible in a straw hat. I did spend a little over a year barefoot though so hopefully that counts for something.

At any rate, my friends and I mostly spent our teenage years escaping to nearby Columbia to see what we thought were punk rock shows.  Then, when we got more adventurous we started driving to St. Louis to see bands with actual punk cred like Danzig. On one such trip my friends learned that I had never been to the top of the Gateway Arch and it was decided that this must be rectified immediately.

If you haven’t done this then I have to say that it is a singular experience. The arch was designed and built long before accessibility was a buzzword in architecture.  The elevator is a miserable, cramped affair in which you’re forced to sit staring in uncomfortable silence at the people across from you as it, suspended from above by a cable, sways back and forth on its creaky, painstakingly slow way to the top. (more…)

Lamper, noun. “Someone who stays in one spot almost all day even if they are needed.” – Urban Dictionary

Long ago I had a desk job in a faceless corporation on the fifteenth floor of a glass skyscraper overlooking the Chicago river.  The performance of this job mostly required that I sit around waiting for the phone to ring at which point I would answer it and help someone work through an easily solvable problem with the internet connection that my faceless corporation had provided them with.

Sometimes the faceless corporation did something really stupid and caused mass outages and the phone would ring constantly for a few days but most of the time it was quiet and I would spend my time working on the iMac I had told them I needed in order to provide support for the approximately three customers we had who used Apple products but which I really used to format and print my music.  Or if I was musically sated I would spend my time exploring the internet which was actually fun in those days. (more…)

“Dark star crashes, pouring its light into ashes.” ― the Grateful Dead

For years I’ve planned the Sound of Silent Film Festival for the second weekend in April but for some reason this year I put it on Saturday of the third weekend which coincides with not one but two religious holidays which is bad enough but, to make matters worse, apparently 4/20 is some kind of stoner holiday as well so now I have no idea who’s going to show up.

And, because we get a day rate on the theater, we hold our music school fundraiser on the same day as Sound of Silent Film so now I’m having our school fundraiser on 4/20 too which is kind of weird right? Thank goodness we’re not selling muffins or brownies or something as part of the event.

I was told recently that 4/20 came about because it was police code but according to Wikipedia it’s because of five high school kids who called themselves the Waldos because they met at a wall to get stoned way back in 1971 which technically should have made them the Walldos but let’s let it go.  They had a treasure map leading to an abandoned cannabis crop and were going to meet at 4:20 to go find it. (more…)

“By the time she had finished unburdening herself, someone had turned off the moon” ― Gabriel García Márquez, Love in the Time of Cholera

Quite by accident I find myself reading, or having recently read, two stories about the destruction of the moon.  In the first story the moon basically dies of old age although it’s strongly suggested that this process was hastened by the increasingly mercenary attitude of humans.  Having lost a certain sense of romance in their continuing addiction to blind consumerism, humans no longer appreciate the moon and it wastes away and dies.

In the other story the moon just suddenly blows up one day for no apparent reason that anyone can discover.   There’s no sound and no fury, it just blows up and where there was a moon there are now seven distinct chunks of former moon. (more…)