Warning to New Music in the form of an African proverb: "The child who is not embraced by the village will burn it down to feel its warmth."

People love institutional critique ... until it's about their institution.

talkingaboutmusicwords.wordpress.com/2018/07/24/rev…

Realize that it is not that you are too stupid to understand the typesetting software lilypond, but that its syntax is not consistent or logical and that someone needs to build a simplified css-style parsing language for the layout settings.

Book reviews don't praise novels for "inventing a lot of new words", so why should I be impressed with your newest extended-technique-athon?

Music isn't about sound in the same way that novels aren't about phonemes and soccer isn't about gravity.

Too many composers avoid tackling the hard problem of music "how do I create syntactic relationships between sounds to create a meaning that arises out of sound itself" in favour of easy the off-the-shelf answers by importing meaning generators from other disciplines.

Listening to a piece full of new sounds is often like watching someone showing you their holiday photos - presenting all the interesting places they discovered on their travels - and attendant with all the self-absorption, formlessness and tedium that this normally entails.

Just because you have conservative-sounding opinions does not mean you have conservative solutions to problems. I don't want a return to the music of the past, I want to raze the entire shitshow of Contemporary Music and start again.

If you are a composer and you don't agree with a particular tweet I have posted, remember that the world would be greatly improved by you reading every one of my tweets with the prefix "Your music is shit because..."

Beware commercial interests. (Images from youtube.com/watch?v=vpUx9D…)

For most musicians “excellent acoustics” is just a synonym for “something that sounds different to when I play the same thing in the rooms in my house”.

Contemporary music is a field filled with so many intelligent people... all of whom seem incapable of thinking intelligently about music.

It's amazing when you watch some improv and realize that there are twice the amount of ears on stage as there are players but there is no way you could tell that from listening.