Variations for Winds, Strings, and Keyboards (1979). Steve Reich

I was surprised to hear this on the radio tonight. I have it on CD but hadn't listened to it in a decade. The guest host on Sarah Cahill's KALW radio show played it in honor of Steve Reich's 68th birthday.

Although I have disparaged Reich's orchestral music in the past, this was better than I remembered although it still sounds a bit muddy. But I won't quibble given how rare it is to hear American classical music on the radio in the Bay Area, let alone semi-contemporary American classical music. We have KDFC, a relaxing classical music station, and a low-powered AM station, KMZT, which programs in the old-style intelligent but traditional classical format. Since I don't have broadband Internet in the car, to hear what I want to hear, the choices are occasional niche shows like tonight or else sending a signal from my iPod to the car radio with one of those hack transmitters. I look forward to when shows like Cahill's will be automatically downloaded to the iPod for later enjoyment (and when cars have an input jack on the dash). By the way, this week I tried iPodder, a "downloadable radio" application, and although I think the idea of automatic iPod downloads based on RSS feeds is a great one, I'm waiting for a more stable version. Here's a post from someone more enthusiastic than me.

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• Boosey composer notes on Variations for Winds, Strings, and Keyboards.
• Recommendations for minimalism, including the Adams/Reich CD.
•Things are moving quickly. In addition to ipodder.org, as of today, there is now an ipodder.net on sourceforge, which I haven't tried yet. Adam Curry, of MTV fame, is in the vanguard of this technology.