1) At 3PM this Sunday I will appear in the Chamber Music Essentials lecture series at Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center. The talk will cover some of the same territory as my New Yorker Festival event last weekend (thank you, emdashes). However, this time there will be live performance alongside my blabbing: Yoon Kwon and Gilles Vonsattel are to perform the final "Louange" of Messiaen's Quartet for the End of Time. Next stops: San Francisco and Berkeley.
2) NPR's All Things Considered has generously considered me. Also, the convivial folks at NewMusicBox interviewed me for Counterstream Radio. They've also thought it worthwhile to publish two excerpts from the catastrophically overlong first draft of my book. And last week I had the honor of appearing on the legendary WFMU show Intelligent Design, curated by Kenny G, aka Kenneth Goldsmith of UbuWeb.
3) On October 30, at the Paris Bar at the National Arts Club, I will present an Evening of Spooky Modern Music with Ethan Iverson, brilliant pianist of the jazz trio The Bad Plus and blogger of Do the Math. Ethan, expert at classical repertory from the Baroque to the late-high-modern, is preparing a fabulous playlist of excerpts that runs from Schoenberg to Babbitt and touches on Jelly Roll Morton and Charlie Parker along the way. Accompanying the show will be a selection of musical portraits by the photographer Dominique Nabokov, the widow of the composer and Cold War eminence grise Nicolas Nabokov, a major character in my book. Tickets go on sale at 3PM today; they may disappear quickly as Ethan's fans descend.
4) Various people have been very kind to me lately. Links to the right. And while I'm yammering in this Sally Field way, I want to thank my boss David Remnick, my agent Tina Bennett, and my book editor Eric Chinski, without whom nothing. Eric's high-school math teacher? Larry Schoenberg, son of.
