http://www.aboutthecomposer.com/blog Career info and weblog of composer Michael Kaulkin Mon, 05 May 2008 16:11:05 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en In the course of researching (read: obsessing over) Bartók's one-act opera Bluebeard's Castle, I came across a Hungarian film adaptation of the piece on YouTube. It's annoyingly divided into fourteen segments, but anyone familiar with the piece or interested should take a look. Here's the segment containing my favorite part, ... http://www.aboutthecomposer.com/blog/archives/255 I'd like to alert Bay Area readers to the upcoming performances by Berkeley Opera of my two favorite one-acts, Bartók's Bluebeard's Castle and Ravel's L'Enfant et les Sortilèges. These two composers are not particularly known for their dramatic works, but each work reveals the composer's complete mastery of music ... http://www.aboutthecomposer.com/blog/archives/254 Well, I haven't had much to blog about for a while, so just to keep this thing alive, here's a kitty playing a theremin. Enjoy. Real blogging to return soon. http://www.aboutthecomposer.com/blog/archives/253 This past Sunday was a date I'd been anticipating for months. As part of the City Arts and Lectures series here in San Francisco, Stephen Sondheim sat down with Frank Rich for a thoroughly spontaneous and entertaining hour-and-a-half discussion. Now, I've read and heard so many interviews and similar Sondheim ... http://www.aboutthecomposer.com/blog/archives/251 I discovered this service that converts any PDF into a slick browser-based document viewer, and immediately thought it might be a good way to present a score for cursory perusal. After playing around with it, I'm not so sure, but I'd love to know what others think. One ... http://www.aboutthecomposer.com/blog/archives/249 This may be of interest to very few regulars, but here it is for the future Kodály googler. More YouTube trolling has turned up this footage of Zoltán Kodály himself interviewed on Hungarian Television in 1953. It was around this time that the ideas about music education he had been ... http://www.aboutthecomposer.com/blog/archives/247 It is well known among Sondheim kooks such as myself that Stephen Sondheim's favorite among his own songs is "Someone in a Tree" from the 1976 musical Pacific Overtures. I love this song too, but it's never been clear to me exactly why it stands out in particular for ... http://www.aboutthecomposer.com/blog/archives/246 Happy new year! I just found this and had to share. This is Kodály's "Esti Dal" (Evening Song) performed by the King's Singers. It is possibly my favorite piece of choral music. Here's my own translation of the text: As I lay down for the night by the edge ... http://www.aboutthecomposer.com/blog/archives/245 Why am I so uninterested in the new Sweeney Todd movie? It's as much a surprise to me as it is to anyone who knows me. I remember being excited about it about 15 years ago when there began to be noise about a Tim Burton adaptation, but ... http://www.aboutthecomposer.com/blog/archives/244 About twenty years ago I responded to an offer for a free magazine subscription that had been made available for college students. It was probably Newsweek or something like that. Just for the hell of it, instead of my own name, I gave the name "Paul Hindemith" with ... http://www.aboutthecomposer.com/blog/archives/243