Music

Music has been a part of my life for almost as long as I can remember, so it’s not unusual that a good chunk of my website deals with music. Here are the highlights:

Links:

 

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  • Music: Mine: is a where I occasionally blog about making music: the process,the work involved, and so on.
    • If this interests you, so will Back to the Sax: when I first picked up my saxophone in 2013 again after a long hiatus, I did some writing about the process of rebuilding my chops. I don’t post there much these days, but there is some good stuff there. I also had an open music practice log over at Evernote for a while, which I keep meaning to update.
  • Music Posts: Posts on my blog where I discuss music that isn’t mine: albums, books about music, music theory, notation software, and so on.
  • 다방 밴드 (Dabang Band) is the name of the band I joined when I first arrived in South Korea. During the almost three years I played with the group, we toured the countryside, gigged often in Seoul, recorded several albums, played a major indie rock fest, appeared in newspapers and TV, and blew a lot of eardrums. The link above is to a repository site I run collecting all that remains of those days: albums, ephemera, photos, and more, just because I figured it might as well be out there in the world.

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Series:

You may also be interested to read my five-part, in-depth series titled What We Talk About When We Talk About Music, which deals with the question of what art music is, why and how it is different from what comes to mind for most people at the mention of “music,” and why it matters.

Musical Fiction:

Also possibly of interest, I have written several pieces of fiction related to music (and have more in the pipeline). Below are links to my writeup and notes about each story, including where you can get your hands on it to read it:

  • Lester Young and the Jupiter’s Moons’ Blues: A story of the commercialized consumption and jazz… by aliens who show up in the 1940s looking not to invade… but to trade tech for culture. A musician takes a job playing jazz on a touring space cruiser, but discovers he’s signed up for more than he bargained for. Free to read in Starship Sofa Stories Vol. 1, though it has also appeared in a number of other non-free anthologies since its first publication. You can also listen for free to a reading of the story by J.J. Campanella on this installment of the Starship Sofa podcast.
  • The Rite (2013): A piece of weird fiction about Stravinsky’s neo-pagan masterpiece ballet about human sacrifice, The Rite of Spring, as well as the occult power of music, the mysteries of music notation, and more.
  • Trois morceaux en forme de mechanika (2011): This story doesn’t just take its title from a piece by Erik Satie: it also features, in one section, a clockwork automaton who squats in Satie’s apartment after the (early 20th century) steampunk apocalypse, processing the human of extinct humanity… and dreaming of what human music written by a machine might sound like. Free to read on Clarkesworld.com.
  • Stars Fell on Alabama (2014): Another jazz-SF story, this one set on a train running between Kansas City and Chicago in 1929. The protagonist is a jazz man with a long, strange past… and an equally strange, addictive alien artifact in his pocket. But he’s not the only one on the train who wants the artifact…  Published in Asimov’s SF, Oct-Nov. 2014.

Film Music:

Finally, my wife has several times press-ganged me into service as soundtrack/score composer for all the films so far produced by her company, Brutal Rice Productions.

One particularly music-heavy project I scored was Brutal Rice’s award-winning 2012 film “The Music of Jo Hyeja,” which was South Korea’s first Lovecraftian film (and the first South Korean adaptation of a Lovecraft story–“The Music of Erich Zann”). The score features the traditional Korean instrument called the “haegeum” in place of Zann’s creepy violin.