An amalgam of notes I had pending:
I respect people fighting the important fights, be it The Standing Room on proper conducting of John Adams...
What Alan Gilbert presented was an total mess.Alex Ross on proper interpretation of musical style with respect to sexual politics...
Meanwhile, experimental, non-tonal sounds ran rampant in the work of gay composers Henry Cowell, John Cage, Harry Partch, and Lou Harrison — Partch and Harrison with their alternative scales and systems of tuning; Cowell with his violently dissonant "cluster chords"; Cage with his chance procedures.or Stirling Newberry on the proper role of the metropolis in music...
Thus, to answer the obvious, it isn't that there is a "gay" sensibility to American music, it is that there is a metropolitan sensibiilty to American life and art in the 20th century, and one of the outcast groups that colonized it first were young homosexual men - from Cole Porter forward.
Speaking of the metropolis, I remember my Urban Sociology professor making the point how the scale and complexity of a city leads to diversity and specialization. The example, bogus for all I know, was a store in Manhattan that could sustain a business selling only busts of Nefertiti. I wonder if I can buy a bust of say, Henry Cowell or John Cage; obviously not here in Menlo Park but maybe on the net? Alas, ebay only has European composer busts.
I also admire the mundane battles e.g. Ian Fieggan (via del.icio.us/popular) on proper shoelacing technique (from what could charitably be called a specialist website):
Most people go through their whole lives only knowing the one shoelace knot that they learned as a child, having been taught by either a parent, a sibling, a relative, a teacher or even another child.
Although born in the US, the composer Janet Maguire lives in Europe and has been influenced by the European avant-garde. The 30-second sample on Amazon of Lace Knots sounds a bit like Krzysztof Penderecki's Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima, although I just heard on Sunday night John Clare's KCNV public radio show which featured Penderecki. From the Database of Recorded American Music about Lace Knots:
An array of glissandos, wobbling glissandos, and portamentos connect clear pure pitches, quarter-tone wobbling slow trills, fast trills, and tremolos.
Also related to fighting, I made a point to watch MTV's TRL show this evening to see Eminem's new Mosh video. Disturbing and powerful and a surprisingly positive ending. Comments from the director Ian Inaba.
Comments