I’ve wanted a general blog, for music, literature, and other topics for a long time. We don’t really have one, so I’m putting it here.

I just finished listening to George Crumb’s Ancient Voices of Children. If you have any inclination towards 20th century music, Voices is an amazing work. The texts are fragments of poems by Federico Garcia Lorca, though many of the vocal parts are just abstract sound (vocalises). It’s strange and wonderful music.

The CRi recording is excellent; the engineering (by David Moulton) is a masterpiece. The piece is full of textures that are incredibly difficult to capture: singers offstage and onstage, mezzo and boy sopranos singing into a piano, non-Western percussion instruments, even toys.