The Fredösphere

Why is it so satisfying to watch an animal drink?  When I give my dog his food, I can walk away, no problem, but when I fill his water bowl I just have to stay and watch him lap it up.  What's up with that?

Byzantium's Shores has an idea what a concert at the New Jersey Symphony Orchestra is like.

"Regular folks" are comissioning new music compositions.  Somebody give these people a medal!

Linda Hoeschler, who was working at the Dayton Hudson Foundation in Minneapolis at the time, had an idea. She had recently advised the two composers who had founded the Minnesota Composers Forum. Why not, she suggested to her husband, commission a piece of music from one of them?

The Hoeschlers' two children play flute, oboe, cello and piano, so Linda Hoeschler asked Stephen Paulus to write a piece for those instruments. She asked Paulus how much he charged, and he answered $100 a minute.

"Well," she told him, "it's for our 15th anniversary, so how about 15 minutes?"

He agreed, and eight months and $1,500 later, "Courtship Songs for a Summer's Eve" was given its premiere at the Minnesota Club in St. Paul, during a 40-minute private concert.

Last summer the couple celebrated their 38th anniversary. In the intervening years, the piece had taken on a life of its own and been recorded twice. The Hoeschlers still vividly recall its debut.

All of my friends who have a sense of civic duty and generosity, and who are really, really rich are encouraged to give me money to write music right now!  Or right after you are done financing your film projects.

The article mentions Stephen Paulus, who in turn deserves a medal for writing the Pilgrim's Hymn:

Even before we call on Your name
To ask You, O God,
When we seek for the words to glorify You,
You hear our prayer;
Unceasing love, O unceasing love,
Surpassing all we know.

In fact, I've been promoting a system of barter where music manuscripts can become a kind of currency.  I hired a guy to do some plumbing repairs for me, and when he was done I decided to give him a new musical composition rather than cash.  The piece was titled 5' 17" and is one of my more experimental works; I performed it for him by sitting down at my piano and -- get this -- doing nothing for five minutes and seventeen seconds.  The idea I had is, you start noticing all kinds of ambient noises and that becomes the music!  (Actually, what I noticed was a dripping noise that I later found out was the plumbing "repair" that wasn't done right.)  Then I gave him the score, which basically is a blank sheet of paper with the title of the work on top.

Hoooooo, boy -- was he pissed!  I was talking with a composer friend the next day about the whole fiasco, trying to decide what went wrong.  Sometimes I feel like I just don't understand people.  I wondered, as I sipped my absinthe, if I should have scored the piece for circular saw and nail gun, you know, stuff those contractor guys can relate to.  As my friend fanned himself with his black beret, he informed me of another composition similar to mine, called 4' 33", by John Cage.  Wow.  Talk about coincidences.  My plumber must have felt my work was too derivative.  Oh well, live and learn.