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.

Time in the Real World

Last week I was reminded why it’s so important, both as a composer and as a human being, to have a real life. All I did was go to a great exhibit at an art museum. I know this isn’t earth-shattering, but I hadn’t done something like that in a long time. I’ve been extremely busy lately with various projects (both musical and non-musical), and have been feeling the pressure of these projects so much so that I haven’t actually been doing anything that isn’t related to them. Re-reading that last sentence, it doesn’t seem all that odd that I haven’t been doing anything else, since isn’t that what most people’s lives are like? Go to your job, come home, go about your routine, et cetera.

And then I read some old comments on our blog, and I found this one (which is a comment on this post), thanks to our commenter HKL:

“… experiencing life outside the studio, even when we aren't producing art, also contributes to our artistic life (is this a little bit of a cop-out? maybe, but I also think it's true...)."

I don’t think it’s a cop-out at all. Every time I experience “life outside the studio” (which, I suppose, should be every day but sadly, isn’t always), I am reminded how great it is to get outside (both literally and figuratively).  My emotional, physical, and yes, artistic well-being depends on it.

Demystifying the Composer

Our culture has a long tradition of having a deep love/hate relationship with artists of all types. It often seems that the composer, be him idolized or scorned, is very rarely taken seriously as a normal human. Moreover, people will sometimes create a compositional mystique by encouraging stereotypes, being Romantic or evasive about the creative process, etc. Unfortunately, none of these behaviors do any of us any favors. I think it’s incredibly important for all of us to remember, if we don’t already, that the composer is—gasp—a working human who has flaws.

I'm going to share two anecdotes of ways in which composers and/or authority figures unnecessarily create some sort of composer “mystique.” I will then explain why I think these anecdotes offer examples of why such a mystique is fundamentally detrimental to the compositional process.

Happy October Birthdays!

What's more fun than celebrating your own birthday? Celebrating other people's birthdays! Well, maybe not really... but we've decided to start highlighting composers during their birth months. Many cool composers were born in October- way too many to list in one blog post, so we're starting off our inaugural birthday month with three of our favorite composers: George Crumb, Steve Reich, and Kaija Saariaho. We hope you'll take a minute to discover these living composers if you haven't already or to enjoy listening to their music again if you're already familiar with them.

George Crumb's Makrokosmos I:

Kaija Saariaho's Petals:

The beginning of Steve Reich's Music for 18 Musicians: