I took a big risk in packing for this tour: I only brought one book. 

Now, I thought I was being careful, since it was 500 pages long and we had concerts to play and new places to see and blog posts and daily journal entries to write. But I miscalculated, and by day six of the tour found myself in need of something new to read. 

So, on our last day in Sudbury, I dragged Ben, Arie, and Jonathan to a used book store downtown. It wasn’t hard – we’re all readers, and there was also a promise of coffee and a…

It is late. 11:13pm on Sunday, August 12th to be precise. I like these late hours. Everyone has gone to bed. There is very little sound save the hum of the dishwasher and the chirping of crickets coming in from outside. Late nights are times where I can let my mind wander where it wills. Usually I find myself running through the events of the past day: the accomplishments, the near misses, and the encounters which gave the day its texture. Traveling provides a rich palette of experiences to ponder at day’s…

Two things. 

“Hey isn’t this great, we have an unusual instrumentation people are going to love it, we are so trendy and new!” GREAT! But. “Hey come to think of it, I’ve never heard of this ensemble before either…and I’m part of it….what are we going to play? Is there anything for us to play!!!?” 

It’s time to pick repertoire, it’s time perform, what are we going to do? As an ensemble this it the issue we’ve had to work with over the years. We’ve learned to love our abnormal instrumentation and how it…

or, why I love new music 

by Erica Jacobs-Perkins (interviewing Charles Zoll) 

Classical musicians can easily be trapped into feeling that our art is dead, that everything we do is at best an accurate reenactment of something that was over and done with hundreds of years ago, or at worst, a mechanical transformation of dots on a page into the sounds they represent. Any MIDI file can do that, so what’s the point of having humans do it instead? What’s the point of doing the same old thing, day in, day out…