Ellen Taaffe Zwilich b. 1939

Studied at Florida State and the Julliard School
She was elected to the Florida Artists Hall of Fame and the American Academy of Arts and Letters and, in 1995, was named to to the first Composer’s Chair in the history of Carnegie Hall. � Musical America designated her the 1999 Composer of the Year.
Ellen Zwilich is the recipient of numerous prizes and honors, including the 1983 Pulitzer Prize in Music (the first woman ever to receive this coveted award), the Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge Chamber Music Prize, the Arturo Toscanini Music Critics Award, the Ernst von Dohnanyi Citation, and Academy Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a Guggenheim Fellowship, four Grammy nominations, and, among other distinctions, she was designated Musical America’s Composer of the Year in 1999.
http://dmoz.org/Arts/Music/Composition/Composers/Z/Zwillich,_Ellen_Taaffe/

Joan Tower b. 1938

  • born in 1938, New Rochelle, NY.
  • spent her childhood in South America
  • studied at Bennington College, Vermont (1958-61); Columbia University (MA – 1967, DMA – 1978).
  • In 1969, founded Da Capo Chamber Players; won Naumburg Award for Chamber music in 1973.
  • Taught at Bard College in Annadale0on-Hudson starting in 1972.
  • Was Composer-in-Residence of the St. Louis Symphony from 1985 to 1987.
  • Received numberous fellowships including a Guggenheim (1976), a Koussevitsky Foundation grant (1982), several NEH fellowships, and the prestigious Grawemeyer Award (1990).

cut and pasted from: http://www.emory.edu/MUSIC/ARNOLD/JTOWER.HTM
writes for chamber and orchestra
http://dmoz.org/Arts/Music/Composition/Composers/T/Tower,_Joan/

Ruth Crawford Seeger 1901-1953

developed “heterophony” – a new style of dissonance that won her acclaim as a prophetic composer
joined the proletarian music movement in New York during the great depression and started doing folk songs instead of avate gaurde
returned to dissonance shortly before her death
Her masterpeice is String Quartet (1931)
Pioneered the use of folk songs in Children’s music education
Critics said she could “sling dissonances like a man”
http://dmoz.org/Arts/Music/Composition/Composers/S/Seeger,_Ruth_Crawford/

i am so absolutely and completely not making this up. it’s from scott’s
“webster’s new world dictionary” AND “onelookup.com” AND
http://education.yahoo.com/reference/dictionary/entries/73/c0727300.html !

crapulence
SYLLABICATION: crap-u-lence
PRONUNCIATION: AUDIO: krpy-lns

NOUN: 1. Sickness caused by excessive eating or drinking.
2. Excessive indulgence; intemperance.
ETYMOLOGY: From crapulent, sick from gluttony, from Late Latin
crapulentus, very drunk, from Latin crapula, intoxication, from Greek
kraipal.
OTHER FORMS: crapulent ADJECTIVE
crapulous ADJECTIVE

— mail from Danica

Consonance / dissonance

It’s a small step from equal temperment to total dissonance. Have you ever noticed how all the melodic composers are in to alternate tunings? This because equal temperment is just out of tune. It doesn’t sound that way to me and maybe you, because we’re used to it. But consonant folks can hear it. So they experiment with just intonation, new tunings, historical tunings, anything to fix the out-of-tuneness of the equally tempered system.
Tuning ought to be built on fractions. This note vibrates three times, during the time this other note vibrates two times. Equal temperment has no fractions. It’s based on the twelfth root of two. An octave, from any note, is excatly twice the frequency of the octave below. A chromatic step from a note whose frequency is N, the frequency of the next higher note is N+N*2^^(1/12). Got that? This is not a fraction.
So everyone used to equal temperment is used to tuning that is not fraction based. Every other tuning in the world, as far as I know, is fraction-based. Our tuning is weird and artifical. It always sounds somwhat out of tune, so as to avoid ever sounding completely out of tune. The charecter of older pieces of music suffers for this. But furthermore, we lose a reference point for consonance. A fifth should sound completely consonant. But in equal tempermant, it’s not because the fractions are off. It should be a fraction of 3/2, but it’s something different. If you graph the frequencies, they don’t cross at Y=0, even though they should. Since everything is out of tune, everything is in tune. You lose track of consonance completely. After a while, it sounds just dandy to put a tritone in the bass line. Can’t decide on a fourth or a fifth? Go in between! It does sound fine and dandy, because the tuning is encouraging it.
All notes are equally valid, you know, like 12-tone rows, because it’s just the obvious direction for equal temerment to go. Tritones are great. minor seconds are great. Sitting in the bass on a minor 6th in a major chord is just as good as anything else.
If you see my band-mates, please pass this along….

Jenny gave birth

today. It’s a boy. A big one too. Not yet named.
I was suppossed to have dinner with her last night, which ws her due date. She cancelled. This is good, since it would be awkward to have dinner with someone and she went into labor. Also, Berkeley is along way from Stanford hospital. I guess we could have gotten food in the Palo Alto area.

Planned Obsolescence?

Did you know the new apple airport is faster than the old one (provided you also get new network cards) and is blue-tooth ready (whatever that means) and you can attach a USB printer to it, so you can print acorss the network (provided you are running 10.2 or better). Pretty cool, eh? I was saying that if I didn’t already have an ariport bass station, I’d want to get one, you know, if all my ‘puters were on 10.2 and I didn’t already have older network cards.
I’d been having some problems where my airport network was going down intermittantly. Then, this morning, it started having it’s red LEDS blink on and off while it made buzzing sounds. Not good. Resetting did not help. So I sold it for parts to Elite Computing and got the brand new one, which has many features that I can’t use. yay. they don’t make the old ones anymore and I’m not sure buying a used one would be very smart, given the sad, slow burn mine went through.
Anyway, I took the old one apart, looking for an obvious indicator of something wrong, like a loose connector or a smoking chip. I found nothing. But there’s a lucent card inside. It’s not apple technology. It’s apple re-marketting Lucent technology. The super drive isn’t apple either, it’s panasonic. And motorolla akes apple processor chips. I guess Apple is a software company and a hardware reseller, that’s not bargain friendly. I wonder if people still have “Hackentoshes.” Those were home-brew ‘puters mixing apple-type and Intel-type technology. They were rumored to be fast, upgradable and able to speak both apple and PC in the time when that didn’t happen.