Let's Talk About Music!

Aleatory means, basically, improvised. It is a type of music where you write some musical guidelines for the performers to follow but you don't write every note, every beat of the music. It gives us different possibilities for the same music, to a degree. All three pieces have elements that are not fully notated, but the first one is the one that is 97% aleatory. There is also an element of social...

In this episode we listen to an oboe concerto, a work for two sopranos and a piano solo piece and we get to experience life through David Dies musical language, which borders in the atonal and gives us a challenge, but with great rewards if we accept it. I find that with commercial music, for example, you can wait for the music to come to you and move you or not, but it doesn't require great parti...

Join Jordan and me in a chat about his projects of writing new music based on the standards of the American Songbook. Listen to Jordan's take on Oh, What a Beautiful Morning, Tea for Two and Begin the Beguine, as interpreted at the piano by pianist Tom Kotcheff of the piano duo Hocket.

Gregory composes choral music and has his own style. The texts he used are very interesting and you will learn something about contemporary choral music if you listen to this conversation.

I met Kile Smith through his choral music. He was nominated for a 2020 Grammy for his work The Arc in the Sky, of which we will hear the first movement. Kile writes music in his own singular style and I think you will find enlightening to listen to his music preceded by own commentary about it.  As with all my podcasts, feel free to join us for all of it or for only part of it. These podcast...

Robert Sheldon is a very well known symphonic band music composer in the U.S. We listened to two works of his and we talked about how he works and how he arrived at his compositions. 

Eduardo Alonso Crespo is a neo-classical composer from Argentina and he shares with us some of his works on the ocassion of Ellie Weingarten's release of a recording of Crespo's double concerto for oboe and clarinet. 

Professor David Lefkowitz teaches composition and music theory at UCLA. We collaborated on a project called "David", which is an oratorio about the life of the biblical King David. We both form part of the Hefner composer group, which did the work and I wanted to share his story and some of his music with you. His music is contemporary classical, which entails an interesting use of dissonance whil...

Shawn is well known as a choral composer, arranger and also as a songwriter. We talked with him about his different hats and his approach on music.  This is the last episode of Season 1, which was the initial season. We will continue in 2021 with season 2. 

In this episode we talk about composing music and we listen to 3 different works by Kurt Knecht: an organ work, a choral work and a chamber piece for piano and cello. Kurt has a very definite and distinctive style of writing and we chat about composing classical music at this time, we share experiences and we also share a few laughs.

Alex Shapiro is a composer that, these days, writes primarily electroacoustic music for band but that has composed in many styles and genres, from film music to TV music to chamber music to symphonic band music. We talk about her carreer and about combining musicians performing live with a prepared track.

Robyn Lana is the founder and artistic director of the Cincinnati Youth Choir, which in a normal year has 900-1000 singers. I talked with her about running a youth choir during this pandemic and also about programming music for youth and children's choir in general. The podcast ends with a beautiful rendition by the Cincinnati Youth choir  of the work We Will do Miracles by Dominic DiOrio, co...

In this podcast I talk with Proffesor Mark Kligman. director of the Department of Ethnomusicology at UCLA,  about Middle Eastern Music, particularly about the use of two extra tones that do not figure in Western music scales, one which would be between E and Eb and another that would be between B and Bb and how the use of those 2 tones gives Middle Eastern music its unique character.  

Composer Gernot Wolfgang was nominated for a Grammy award in 2016 for his CD Passing Through.  He lives in L.A., writes chamber music and his music uniquely mixes classical and jazz elements, making it original, interesting and accesible. 

In this episode composer Adam Wernick talks with composer Sergio Barer about writing music for the theatre, its peculiarities, its difficulties and its triumphs. We hear several segments of Adam's music- which has been performed in or by The Guthrie Theater, The Shakespeare Theatre Company, The Kennedy Center,  Classic Stage Company, Manhattan Theatre Club, Denver Center Theatre Compan...

In this podcast I chat with Frank about two pieces of his and about the use of microtones (smaller subdivisions of the scale than half tones) in his music, with digressions into how the tuning system of Western music evolved and his personal use of musical concepts of the XX  century like serialism and minimalism. (Serialism - a compositional technique in which a fixed series of notes, especi...

In this episode we talk about what is Contemporary Classical Music, how to listen to it and how to approach it and we also talk about Bernardo Feldman's music in particular and use it to illustrate our points about the Classical Music that is being composed today.

In our inaugural episode , Brian tells us about his musical carreer and about composing, playing and improvising in today's COVID world. By the way, the intropductory music and the end music are taken from an improvisation made by Brian.

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