Tomorrow the days start getting longer again! This makes me indescribably excited.

Good hustle at New Music New Haven, everybody! I was surprised (in a good way) by many of the pieces. Also, let’s continue this upward trend on the attendance front.

Quick updates: I’ve added a couple of new pages to the composition section, and some new events over the next few months. More to come. I just finished a piano quartet for Hannah Collins, an homage of sorts to Brahms’s op. 25. Next up: a piece for piano and chamber orchestra, for the illustrious David Kaplan. Tomorrow I’m going to Baltimore for family fun-times, then home for the holidays. I am planning on constructing one of these.

This might be the most viscerally adorable design I’ve seen since the original iMac (and there’s something of a family resemblance). I really hope Sony puts it into production— not because I really want a "little TV that rests in the palm of your hand," but because it would be a step up for Sony’s consumer designs, which have felt pretty stagnant for the past decade. The little TV is interesting from a tactile standpoint, because it is soft and squeezable (not qualities generally associated with electronics). Functionally, it reduces the distance between itself and the viewer, which allows it to shrink drastically and offer a comparable experience. I admire it when designers totally rethink quotidian activities like this. But it also takes a leap of faith on the corporate side, something I think Sony has not been so good at lately. Though I have been eyeing one of these beauties. Think of all the musique concrète I’ve been not writing by not having one!

Last night I hosted a dinner party for the composition first years (Fernando, I can’t find a link for you!). The level of social grace was, for a sampling of composers, among the highest I’ve seen; it’s one thing to write cool music, quite another to interact in the real world. Though I would love to invite Frederic Rzewski over to dinner sometime. If by some chance you read this, Fred, you have a standing invitation.

Over the course of the meal, the question came up about whether we listen to our own music. This is an interesting corollary to the rhetorical question I posed a few months back about how many composers routinely listen to their colleagues’ music. I’ve always felt that I should listen, and want to listen, to my own music; if it’s not something that comes up regularly on my last.fm, do I really want to subject others to it? I do find myself listening to my cleaner recordings/performances, simply because they’re more flattering. I think what I’m doing, somewhat subconsciously, when I listen to my music, is refining my ideas and techniques in preparation for future pieces, so I can spend less time writing the same piece again and again. Andrew was on the other side; he said that he can’t stand to listen to his own music, for reasons I’m not entirely clear on. This usually happens to me only with older pieces (which is why I keep pruning my back catalogue).

Does this make me self-obsessed? Or worse, complacent? Please weigh in.