DAN JACOB WALLACE

I’m a big fan of the often engaging and thought-provoking WNYC radio show podcast Radiolab. However, as the generally science-oriented subject matter tends to deal with things with which I have little personal experience, it’s hard for me to judge the soundness of the content. The loaded language of the presenters (“the results were… startling”) along with [...]

Earlier today I posted Milton Babbitt’s “Who Cares if You Listen?” as an example of an avant-garde attitude that I don’t care for. As an antidote to that, here is a beautiful article by the visionary avant-garde composer Edgard Varèse (often referred to as the Father of Electronic Music). To me, this writing is an expression of [...]

In 1958, High Fidelity magazine published the following article by avant-garde composer Milton Babbitt. Babbitt is known for taking serialism to the extreme and for being an active proponent of the modernist movement. This isn’t as cool as it might sound. Fortunately, the sort of attitude in which he took so much pride is increasingly [...]

This is an essay I wrote during a recent period in which I was interested in the question of to what extent, if any, emotion as an inherent property of music contributes to our emotional experience of music as listeners. I first look at some of the prevelant existing ideas on the topic (especially from philosophy [...]

One of my favorite discoveries in recent years is composer Gloria Coates. I first heard of her via an interview she gave on the Naxos American Classics podcast in promotion of a recently released recording of her 15th Symphony (along with two other works) by Naxos. I was taken not only with what she said [...]

From time to time I find myself in a conversation with a musician who says something to the effect of, “I’m not interested in learning music theory because it would ruin my music; I believe that music should just come from the soul.” This idea is not an invalid one per se (provided we take [...]