Category Archives: Music Writing

And speaking of female composers…

By Posted in Admirable Others, General, classical, Various Worthwhile Things 1 Comment

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My friend and fellow music addict Dean Minderman alerted me to this interesting story. Yet another reason to be proud of the St. Louis Symphony and our inestimable Maestro, David Robertson! I look forward to hearing Berg’s work premiered (no, not that Berg–I like him, too, of course).

http://www.columbiamissourian.com/a/160907/mu-graduates-music-to-be-performed-by-st-louis-symphony/

 

Update: Here is a link to Ms. Berg’s web page if you want to read and hear more:
http://sjbvc7.wix.com/stephanieberg

My Two Favorite Living Music Writers

By Posted in Admirable Others, General, classical, Music Writing, Various Worthwhile Things Leave a comment

This essay, a discussion of female composers and their scandalous lack of representation in the concert repertory, is beautifully written and incredibly smart. Inevitably, whenever I read anything by Alex Ross, my favorite living music critic, I am dazzled and overwhelmed by his crazy talent. When I have a writing deadline looming, I can’t even read anything under his byline because he makes me feel like I, along with almost every other music writer working today, should just STFU.

I could pick any passage at random to support my case for his brilliance, but this sentence I loved particularly: “In the end, these works evoke a universal desire: to seek beauty in shards of a damaged world, or failing that, to take shelter in silence.”

http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/musical/2013/04/29/130429crmu_music_ross

Here is a wonderful essay about piano lessons by my other favorite living music writer, the glamorous and hilarious concert pianist Jeremy Denk. Unfortunately, I don’t think you can read the whole thing if you don’t subscribe to The New Yorker. (You probably should subscribe, by the way.) In addition to being a great pianist, Denk is among the smartest, funniest, and most entertaining music writers alive. His talent is unfair and obscene. I highly recommend all his recordings. His CD of Bach partitas is astonishingly great, and I’m also very fond of the Charles Ives one and his collaboration with the violinist Joshua Bell, French Impressions. He has a brand-new CD for sale featuring works by Beethoven and Ligeti, but I haven’t bought that one yet. I’m sure I will love it, too.

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2013/04/08/130408fa_fact_denk

Some updates

By Posted in Adventures in Copy Editing, Cats, I Love the Library, I Read Books, I Watch Movies (Mostly DVDs), Music Writing, Rants and Appreciations, Uncategorized 6 Comments

Today I added several links to the Links to Published Writing page, gussied up various pages with some new uploaded photos, and created a new catch-all page for unpublished writing. It’s called Odd Unpublished Things and contains, of all things, odd unpublished things: from a spate of fever-fueled DVD reviews to the last poem I ever finished, when I was an undergraduate in college.

This blogging bidness is a laborious task for a compulsive person with terrible completist tendencies tempered with paralyzing self-doubt, but I guess I can’t make a decent blog in one day, even if I do keep teenage vampire hours.

I will strive to be more interesting in the future. Thank you for reading, all three of you.

I’m not an early riser. I just haven’t fallen asleep yet.

By Posted in Adventures in Copy Editing, General, classical, Music Writing, Program Notes, Rock & Roll and Other Forms of Popular Music, Uncategorized Leave a comment

For at least 10 years, well-meaning people have been telling me that I need a blog. For professional reasons. Seeing as how I call myself a freelance writer. Sometimes these well-meaning people even put me on the spot and ask me where they can read my so-called writing. I  just wave airily and say, “Oh, you could always google René Spencer Saller, and see what comes up.”

In truth, I mostly hate blogs, and it seemed very likely that I would hate my own, if I had one. But early this morning, plagued by insomnia, I thought, well, why not? It’s free, after all, and it’s easier if everything is organized in one place.

So far all I’ve done is upload a bunch of links. They’re all on the Links to Published Writing page above, haphazardly organized. Click at your peril.

I am also a freelance editor, but that’s far too boring to write about. I’m fairly good at it, and I’ve been doing it professionally for more than 20 years now.