Matthew Welch: ‘My Music Sounds Like An Optimistic View Of The Future’

“The bagpipes are actually incredibly difficult to play,” says bagpiper-composer Matthew Welch in Music for Writers by Porter Anderson. #MusicForWriters at Thought Catalog Read More

Music For Writers: Martin Bresnick And The Terrible Beauty Of Sorrow

‘We Will Always Sing Such Songs Of Longing’ Each time I visited, my grandmother wept bitterly about the murder of her parents, her brother, her two sisters, and all their children. Can a child comfort a grandmother, a grandfather? I became a witness, a musician, and a composer. Martin Bresnick is a native New Yorker.… Read More

Music For Writers: Donnacha Dennehy’s New Chapbook

A Sonic Anthology: The Abstract Gone Narrative There’s a kind of single-composer album that’s a lot like a writer’s collection of short stories or poems. So much of this ilk is the composer Donnacha Dennehy’s new album for RTEthat it arrives without an over-arching title of its own. It’s simply Donnacha Dennehy: Crane/O/The Vandal/Hive. Those… Read More

Music For Writers: Agata Zubel ‘On Both Sides’

‘The Most Beautiful Place Where The Two Professions Meet’ In earlier #MusicForWriters columns here, I’ve mentioned how many of our contemporary composers are also performers. Caleb Burhans, a composer and multi-instrumentalist, is one. His Excelsior is one of the works in our series. As the notes from Kairos Music on Agata Zubel’s new release, however, point out, the… Read More