Hundreds of gay composers–and a few straight composers who write gay music–gathered for a “kiss-in” at the headquarters of New World Records in New York City this past weekend.  Their purpose was to persuade the classical music record label to produce additional installments of Composers Recordings International’s (CRI’s) series of albums celebrating gay and lesbian composers.

In the 1990s, CRI released the compilation albums Gay American Composers and Lesbian American Composers.  CRI went out of business in 2003, and the rights to its recordings were transferred to New World Records.

But some protestors have no faith that New World Records will carry the LGBT torch.  In fact, one group is starting its own grassroots record label, Agenda Recordings, headed by gay composer icon Robert Moran.  According to Moran, Agenda Recordings will “secretly recruit employees of New World and other mainstream labels to pose for semi-nude photographs on the album covers.”

Forget H1N1, a few weeks back, we learned via Soho the Dog about an even more disturbing mutation of the flu virus. Matthew recalls the trauma, “I spent a sleepless hour or two imagining ethereally audience-friendly Eric-Whitacre-esque five-part choral settings.” That’s enough to put anybody on their backs for a good week.

Like the regular flu, the disease is usually self-limiting, and characterized by nausea, vomiting, diarrhea, and abdominal pain; and in some cases, loss of taste. General lethargy, weakness, muscle aches, headache, and low-grade fever may occur. Symptoms may persist for several days and may become life-threatening in the young, the elderly, and the immune-compromised if dehydration is ignored or not treated. When a person becomes infected with norovirus, the virus begins to multiply within the small intestine. After approximately 1 to 2 days, norovirus symptoms can appear. It has also been reported that the virus will cause ones hair to grow into a long flowing mane in just a matter of days.

The most disturbing fact about the Eric Whitacre Norovirus as Matthew discovered is that “transmission is predominantly faecal-oral but may be airborne due to aerosolisation of vomitus.” So if you happen to catch the virus, we know how you got it.

Painstaking research indicates that the term “bandsemble” as it relates to the “new music” zeitgeist was first used in a September 12, 2008 broadcast of WNYC’s New Sounds in reference to the group Signal Ensemble though we credit the term’s meteoric rise to prominence in the lexicon of music journalism to New York Times and Time Out New York critic Steve Smith, who first used the term on his blog, Night After Night, to describe Missy Mazzoli’s girl-group Victoire. The term “indie-classical,” on the other hand, seems to have emerged from within the “scene” itself possibly as a ploy to attract more women in short skirts with small white tank-tops and black bras to shows.

Regardless of why these terms were invented—practical or perverted—they are illegitimate and need to be banished from contemporary musical discourse immediately. Sign the petition to show your support.

The New York Philharmonic recently announced a $10 million donation to support new music. The gift allows the New York Philharmonic to award a $250,000 grant every two years to a working composer.  The Cereal List has obtained a partial draft of the guidelines for this grant:

HOW TO APPLY:

Please send a completed application form along with work samples to the address below.  Applications will be accepted via FedEx only.  Applications delivered via USPS or UPS will not be accepted as these institutions are not sponsors of the NY Philharmonic.

There is a $250 application fee which will be refunded if and only if your application is awarded.  An additional donation to the NY Philharmonic is strongly encouraged but not required.

WORK SAMPLES:

Composers should submit one “Fanfare”-style work and one “Encore”-style work.  All submitted works must be completed final drafts and MUST NOT HAVE BEEN PERFORMED in public.  A recording of the submitted works is required, but it must be a private recording (as per previous sentence).

IF AWARDED:

Should your submission be accepted, the Artistic Advisory Board of the NY Philharmonic reserves the right to stipulate any number of changes to your composition before it is commissioned by the NY Philharmonic.  You will also be required to meet with each musician in the orchestra (at their convenience and at your expense) for advice on how to better extract individual players’ parts from your score and to consider any compositional changes they request.  If a musician requests a compositional change that conflicts with the Artistic Advisory Board’s stipulations, you must report the musician’s requested change to the Artistic Advisory Board before proceeding.

Apart from the changes requested and stipulated by the musicians and Artistic Advisory Board, there should be no difference between the work sample submitted and the commissioned composition.

An incident on August 8, 2009, at the Monadnock Music concert series in Peterborough, New Hampshire, has forced organizers to hire security guards for their future concerts. A man identified as William Kostric was seen with a handgun strapped to his thigh and a sign that read, “It is time to silence the belltree of Marxism.” Kostric’s sign was likely referring to “Song and Dance,” a 1976 piece by the Marxist composer, Frederic Rzewski. “Song and Dance” was part of a percussion-oriented concert entitled “On the Beaten Path.”

It’s no secret that contemporary music is outside the lexicon of most music critics at the New York Times. Critics are very busy, and they simply do not have time to evaluate a piece of music with which they are not familiar. That’s why it’s up to composers to generate a pre-written paragraph and send it to the critic assigned to review their performances.

Fortunately, The Cereal List has created the Automatic Review Generation Helper (ARGH)! All you have to do is fill in the forms below and click the “Create Review” button.

The Cereal List has uncovered some surprising information about David T. Little, the composer from Princeton who has built his entire musical career on leftist politics and anarchistic subversion.

According to our sources, Little deeply regrets voting for President Barack Obama in the November 2008 election and wishes John McCain had won the presidency.

Although we had assumed that Little’s ironically titled compositions — Red Scare Sketchbook, Soldier Songs, and sweet light crude — employed the smugly detached, anti-American attitude of the average Princeton graduate student, we now believe that he intended no irony whatsoever.

Speaking on condition of anonymity, one of the members of Little’s ensemble, Newspeak, told us, “David confided in me about this. He wishes the McCain/Palin ticket had won. He said he’d rather have a foreign-born veteran than a foreign-born community organizer as his Commander in Chief.”

Our source went on to say that Newspeak will no longer perform their cover version of “War Pigs” by Black Sabbath. Instead, Little has composed an accompaniment for John Ashcroft’s “Let the Eagle Soar” and hopes to convince Mr. Ashcroft to appear in a performance with Newspeak.

Our source sent us a recording of Little (who plays drums) practicing with a video of Mr. Ashcroft:

Violinist Hilary Hahn has started a video series of extremely intimate interviews with composers. Hahn’s first two subjects–Judd Greenstein and Harold Meltzer–may reveal something about her taste in men. The dark-/curly-haired, bespectacled, Jewish literati of classical music would like to think so.