Late this summer I received a grant from the Indiana Arts Commission to do a text-sound laptop performance piece based on Interlochen author Michael Delp’s “Coast of Nowhere.” It’s a beautiful piece of prose that describes the lakefront that my family and I lived on for two summers while teaching at the Interlochen Arts Camp.

I’m up in Interlochen right now, doing field recording, recording Delp, giving some master classes, and seeing some old friends. The field recording process has been revelatory so far. With sensitive microphones on high gain, and in the middle of the night, I’ve heard things in ways I’ve never heard before. Cliche, I know, but fun.

I’m off to record the author now at Interlochen Public Radio, one of the best public radio stations in the country, tucked far away from even the hint of large city.

I might be more interested in this than most, since I was also a student there, but I tend to see the development of institutions as being similar to composition. Both are combinations of planned decisions and serendipitous discovery. You try things out, you revise along the way. Sometimes you don’t move on to new material soon enough. Some institutions are monothematic; others diverse collages of style and idea that you can navigate.

Wells’s talk reminded of how much international exposure the university has provided to the community, and for how long. As a high school student Wells heard a talk by Karlheinz Stockhausen in 1963, and said that listening to Kontakt “blew my mind.” He studied with Stockhausen in 1968 and 1972.

I’ll be posting more about the festival during and afterwards, and posting pictures to my Flickr stream, as well as the Facebook event page.

On Friday, March 14th at 3pm (ET), Elliott Carter and Phil Lesh will be interviewed together on Counterstream radio, the online radio station of the American Music Center. On Sunday, March March 16 at noon PT (3pm ET), UCLA radio will feature experimental electronic(a) composer Carl Stone.

The show should be interesting, and more than a little mind-bending for people who rarely venture outside of their personal pleasure genres. Carter is a titan of 20th/21st-century modernism, whose music features beautifully layered material highlighted by complex metrical relationships. Lesh is best know as the bass player for the Grateful Dead, whose live shows spawned legions of faithful “Dead Heads” that followed the band across the country. But Lesh has a significant background in contemporary art music, studying with Luciano Berio at Mills College in the early 1960s. Along with classmate Steve Reich, he formed an improvisation group that blended acoustic and electronic music with theater. According to Alex Ross in The Rest is Noise, he dropped out of composition to play bass for a band the would become the Grateful Dead after listening to Mahler’s Sixth Symphony while tripping on LSD.

Albert Fert and Peter Grünberg, both working independently in 1988, discovered “giant magnetoresistance,” an effect in which tiny changes in magnetic fields can produce a huge change in electrical resistance. Note the discovery date: 1988! Unlike the Grammies, which might shower awards on “one-hit wonders” that quickly drop off the map, the Nobel Foundation spends some time reflecting on the true significance of the development.

And don’t feel bad for Fert and Grünberg having to share the cash prize. Dividing US $1.4 million two ways provides a significant amount of party money for both.