It's Our Anniversary!

Last year we had a whacky idea to start a new music blog and now Alphabet Soup is a year old!

If you're new to Alphabet Soup or just want to reminisce, read our first introductory post here, where we talked about our dreams and goals for this blog. 

Thank you for your readership!

This blog project has been and continues to be a central aspect of our lives as composers and we have been so grateful to all of you for your readership, feedback, suggestions, contributions, and encouragement. For us, Alphabet Soup is a way to explore musical ideas, share an appreciation and awareness of new music, and, at times, commiserate about the difficulties of pursuing such a challenging career path. It has been really fantastic to read your comments and opinions!

Happy Thanksgiving!

Happy Thanksgiving from Alphabet Soup!

 

We will be taking a short break for the holiday in order to gobble up some turkey, but we'll be back as soon as we recover from the food coma... Stay tuned as we celebrate Alphabet Soup's first birthday next week!

 

Happy November Birthdays!

Continuing with our birthday posts (yes, a little late this month, we know), we'd like to wish a happy birthday to Krzysztof Penderecki and Tom Johnson!

Penderecki's Threnody to the Victims of Hiroshima:

Johnson's Failing:

Yes, There IS Music Outside of the New York Bubble

After finishing my master's in Ohio, I was pretty excited to get back to the D.C. area where I grew up. Despite attempts to convince myself otherwise, the East Coast (or at least the Mid-Atlantic) will always run through my blood for better or worse. However, because I spent six years of my life living in the Midwest I do have enough perspective to realize that the East Coast is not all that there is in the U.S. in terms of life, culture, music, etc. Therefore, I have been somewhat stunned and disappointed upon my return to realize how much New York City seems to cast a shadow over East Coast new music culture. 

Even a couple of weeks ago we had a guest speaker at Peabody who told us that he had been slightly appalled by a joke that he heard recently at a new music party in Brooklyn. Someone said something along the lines of, "Wow, if a bomb were to go off in this building right now, what would that mean for the future of American music?" Obviously this is incredibly anecdotal and is also just your typical elite party talk, but it still ticked me off because of its arrogance and ignorance.