“Dear Mother: I have written to tell you my worrying secret. Now don’t cry when you read it because it is neither yours nor my fault. I suppose I will have to tell it now, without any nonsense. To begin with I was not meant to be an athlete…” Sounds like the beginning of a coming out letter (and a life of shame) doesn’t it? Actually, the 9-year old Samuel Barber wrote these words to his mother and...

Ten years ago pianist Christopher O’Riley needed something to play as filler for the “station identification” breaks during the first season of “From the Top,” the weekly syndicated radio show about young musicians.  He started dabbling with piano arrangements of songs by Radio Head, the alternative rock band.  His imaginative treatments of the music — ruminative, stirring and colorful — opened up an...

Let me be honest. I “read” OUT Magazine for the pictures.  And the March issue is particularly sexy with more photos (in ads and editorial) of shirtless young men than usual.  This month’s cover boy is a gritty Ewan McGregor. But the issue actually has something worth spending a bit of time and thought on – a 22-page spread called “80 American Classics” celebrating “the spectrum of queer talent...

“The Other Mendelssohn” is the name of musicologist R. Larry Todd’s latest book, a thorough-going biography of Fanny Mendessohn Hensel that uncovers lots of unknown material, perhaps most importantly about the large number of her own works as a composer. If you’re currently busy surfing the web, then you may be like me and not have sat down, turned off the media and read a good music biography in more...

Where would church music be without the centuries of contributions from gay men? Actually where would the church itself be, including the priesthood… but that’s another discussion. Virgil Thomson wrote his share of sacred music and a big batch of it is included in the new collection “Heaven is Music,” (Albany Records).  The performances by the Gregg Smith Singers are from throughout the choir’s long history, presumably...

Cellist Eric Edberg trained at the North Carolina School of the Arts, the Juilliard School, SUNY Stony Brook, and Florida State University and is a faculty member at the DePauw University School of Music in Greencastle, Indiana. He writes a marvelous blog about whatever musical matters are on his mind and sometimes they also involve being gay. That caught My Big Gay Eye and I reached out to him by email. Little did I know...

On the night of January 12 in Minneapolis, Jeffrey Brooks had a dream in which his friend and fellow composer Eleanor Hovda appeared, informed him that she had died, and urged him to pass on word to David Lang, another close friend and the co-founder of Bang on a Can in New York. Hovda had indeed passed away, exactly two months prior, after eight years of declining health and a three-month stay in a hospice in northern Arkansas. ...

It’s been talked about for months.  The 28-year old composer Nico Muhly has been at work on a new opera with playwright Craig Lucas for the Met.  The project is one of several pieces in development but not yet scheduled for debut by playwrights/composer teams. On Thursday, the Met committed to the piece for the 2013-14 season.  It will be co-produced by the English National Opera in London where it premieres next June. ...

One morning a month or two ago I was in the car and “The Writer’s Almanac” with Garrison Keillor came on the radio.  After the list of birthdays and such, the short segment ended, “And here’s a poem by Ricky Ian Gordon…” I wanted to shout out, “Wait! He’s a composer! He’s ours!” But the plain spoken sentiment, as well as the unique name, meant it had to be the same guy.  (“The Tulips,” the poem...

Disappointed that the Naxos recording of Bernstein’s Mass with Jubilant Sykes as the celebrant and Marin Alsop conducting the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra didn’t win a Grammy last Sunday. I heard the performance at Carnegie Hall in October 2008 and loved it.  But it was a weird weekend in Manhattan, with the joy of Mass one night followed by the deadly experience of Adam’s Doctor Atomic the next (full review). Mass...