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One-Line Bio
Just another ex-Texan living in New York.
Biography
This blog's title is derived from a quotation by Dan Bennett in the Saturday Evening Post (1963):
"How monotonous the sounds of the forest would be if the music came only from the Top Ten birds."
Born in Princeton, New Jersey, Bruce Hodges grew up in Texas, where he studied voice, piano and violin (favorites: Ives’ Fourth Violin Sonata and Hindemith’s Five Pieces for Strings) and art. Play list, age 16: Berio: Sinfonia, Reich: Violin Phase, Riley: A Rainbow in Curved Air, Nancarrow: Studies for Player Piano, Partch: Castor and Pollux, Kagel: Der Schall.
At Antioch College he studied visual arts with Jonathan Ahearn and music composition with David Stock, then received a B.F.A. in drawing and painting from the University of North Texas, where he studied with Claudia Betti and Henry Whiddon. He moved to New York in 1981. He is President of the New York Consortium for New Music (Continuum, Da Capo Chamber Players, ModernWorks, The New York New Music Ensemble, and Speculum Musicae), which from 1991 through 2002 produced Sonic Boom, “considered by some to be the country’s leading contemporary music festival.” (The New Yorker)
He is also President of the board of directors of Ensemble Sospeso (www.sospeso.com), and writes about music and visual arts for MusicWeb International, based in London. In 2005 and 2006 he appeared as a panel moderator at the Look & Listen Festival (www.lookandlisten.org).
In September 2007 he began a monthly column on recordings for The Juilliard Journal.
Interests
Contemporary music, art, film, Robert Altman, György Ligeti, quotations, tequila, South Africa, baseball, Margaret Atwood, communications, word puzzles, Amsterdam, cheese, the Cleveland Orchestra, Mexican food, the Museum of Modern Art, David Cronenberg, poetry, gin, Donald Barthelme, psychology, mid-20th-century design, fountain pens, old maps, Campari, Shostakovich, Frank Gehry, reference books, ethics, 24-hour restaurants, unusual animals, red wine, the Concertgebouw, satire, vintage postcards, magazines, New Orleans, talking with friends until 2 in the morning.
