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On Milton Babbitt
by Steve Hicken “I dare suggest that the composer would do himself and his music an immediate and eventual service by total, resolute, and voluntary withdrawal from this public world to one of private...
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Listen To Steve Hicken
Burning Ambulance contributor Steve Hicken is a composer as well as a writer about music. In the third issue of the magazine, he described his compositional process in a lengthy essay that’s well worth...
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Burning Ambulance #4: Out Now (And Available For Kindle!)
The fourth issue of Burning Ambulance is out. The cover story is an interview with jazz saxophonist JD Allen, and the issue also includes interviews with Melvin Gibbs, Brandon Ross and J.T. Lewis of...
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Burning Ambulance #5: Out Now!
Just in time for the holidays, Burning Ambulance #5 has arrived! (In fact, if you order by tomorrow, you can save 25% off your order with the checkout code COUNTDOWN.) This issue includes: a mammoth...
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Listen To Steve Hicken Some More
Steve Hicken is not just a Burning Ambulance contributor; he’s also a composer. His essay in issue #3 goes into his creative process in some detail, and is well worth your time. We’ve previously posted...
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Xenakis @ 90
by Steve Hicken Most of what you can read about the life and music of Iannis Xenakis (29 May 1922 – 4 Feb 2002) is centered on how the remarkable facts of his biography and his expertise in a wide...
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Elliott Carter In The 1960s
This is a portion of a larger piece, by Steve Hicken, that explores the responses to the social and political turmoil of the 1960s of three composers—Iannis Xenakis, Luciano Berio, and Elliott Carter,...
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Nico Muhly
Drones (Bedroom Community) by Steve Hicken Nico Muhly composed his Drones “as a method of developing harmonic ideas over a static structure. The idea is something not unlike singing along with one’s...
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Steve Hicken
Composer and frequent Burning Ambulance contributor Steve Hicken had his piece “Intertwining Geometries,” a duet for alto flute and bass clarinet, performed last summer in the UK, as part of the...
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Steve Hicken On Composition
This piece, by composer Steve Hicken, originally appeared in Burning Ambulance #3 (available physically and digitally from Lulu.com). The percussion concerto he discusses had its premiere this past...
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Lee Hyla
My Life on the Plains (Tzadik) Buy it from the label by Steve Hicken The three sections of Wallace Stevens‘ lyrically epic (or epically lyric) “Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction” are titled “It Must...
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Steve Hicken – Percussion Concerto
Burning Ambulance contributor Steve Hicken wrote about the process of composing his Percussion Concerto in issue #3 of the print magazine—you can read that article online here. The piece recently had...
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Darcy James Argue
Brooklyn Babylon (New Amsterdam) by Steve Hicken Darcy James Argue’s Secret Society made an impressive debut with Infernal Machines in 2009. Machines features tightly-written and expansively-played...
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Éva Polgár and Sándor Vály
What I learned from Gilgamesh, the second collaboration between Éva Polgár and Sándor Vály (I haven’t heard 2012’s Mondrian Variations), is that there is no historical person, event, or idea that can’t...
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Vijay Iyer
Jazz (I hesitated using that adjective, but jazz is what he’s known for) pianist Vijay Iyer‘s new ECM album, Mutations (buy it from Amazon), opens and closes with a few solo piano or piano with...
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Miranda Cuckson & Blair McMillen
The history of American expressionism (as opposed to expressionism in America) is long and storied, as well as, to my mind, greatly and deeply misunderstood. Despite the fact that American poets have,...
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Rough Fields
Photos: Sarah Faraday James Birchall, an “electro-acoustic composer, lo-fi/noise/folk artist and electronica producer” from Manchester, England, records under the name Rough Fields. His one-man...
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Miranda Cuckson
Miranda Cuckson is a violinist of tremendous technical and expressive power. In recent years she has increasingly devoted herself to the music of High, Post-, and Neo-Modernism, creating, through her...
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Jason Eckardt
The music of Jason Eckardt (b. 1971) posits complexity and technical difficulty as core expressive and artistic values. That is, Eckardt’s music is (in part) a celebration of the physical and...
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Interview: Jason Eckardt
Last month, Steve Hicken reviewed composer Jason Eckardt‘s CD Subject (get it on Amazon). He wrote, “Eckardt’s music is (in part) a celebration of the physical and psychological acts of performance at...
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