Jacaranda Media

10/01/2026

October Playlist — PORTRAIT OF PETER SELLARS

Opera director Peter Sellars claims me as his first friend in Los Angeles, when he arrived here in 1987 to teach at UCLA and bring the LA Festival of 1990 into existence. This portrait looks back to his 1985 staging of The Count of Monte Cristo which notoriously included a live performance of a string quartet by Alfred Schnittke—although not the movement I’ve included here. Nods to his famous Da Ponte Trilogy of Mozart operas are here, but not before the exciting “Lindas Flores” chorus from A Flowering Tree. That opera serves as a metaphor for Peter’s prodigious output & is the first of five choruses composed by his most important artistic partner John Adams. Two arias from Girls of the Golden West & Doctor Atomic by Adams further detail Peter’s genius at libretto writing in collaboration, his conceptual brilliance, & his deft hand as stage director. Peter is as sensitive to Baroque-era oratorios by Bach & Handel as he was collaborating with video artist Bill Viola and conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen on Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde—showing off what can be done in the Walt Disney Concert Hall with the LA Phil. Find Stravinsky, Debussy and Prokofiev. On an intimate scale his soprano/violin duo Kafka-Fragmente by György Kurtag delivered immense pathos, & his special spoken presentation of the piano/violin duo Phantasy by Schoenberg was poignant & profound. Known more recently for his close collaboration with the late Kaija Saariaho, two excerpts are here. We await his staging of Castor & Pollux by Rameau coming to LA. When? A Schumann oratorio and Bellini opera show the breath of his passions. His work with the LA Master Chorale is represented by clips from Orlando de Lassus & Heinrich Schutz. You can look forward to Peter’s thoughtful pairing of Arnold Schoenberg’s Erwartung & Mahler’s Das Lied von der Erde with the LA Phil this season. The portrait closes with a composer to whom Peter, and I have devoted much of our lives: Olivier Messiaen. This is the 88th and final edition of ULTRA eclectic. It has been my pleasure to share the music that fascinates me and to find the most unlikely transitions of this music-drenched world in which we live.

Click to Listen: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/5FzGNKSH5M58ZLLovle3Xi?si=82340949211a4fd5

Playlist · Patrick · 33 items

09/30/2026

September AstroMusic — STYLE ARBITER: Gershwin’s Libran Tightrope

Almost 90 years since his premature death—in our era of blurred lines & blended realities—the nagging questions about George Gershwin’s status in musical culture seem quaint. Was he a jazz legend, or a cultural appropriator? Should Porgy and Bess be considered an opera? Is Rhapsody in Blue really classical music? Were his Broadway musicals as important as his Hollywood movies? Did Gershwin’s songbook, rooted in his teenage experience as a Tin Pan Alley song plugger, represent his most authentic cultural contribution?

Gershwin’s new Brentwood neighbor, and his faithful tennis partner, the famous Austrian emigre composer Arnold Schoenberg publicly settled this garland of questions—once and for all at the microphone.

Click To Read:

Collaboration with his lyricist brother Ira & fascination with Virgo composer Schoenberg.

09/02/2026

PORTRAIT OF PAULINE SCHINDLER with Inglewood Diary

Pauline Gibling & Rudolf Schindler met outside during a 1918 concert in Chicago’s Orchestra Hall. Prokofiev conducted his brash Scythian Suite. Breathless from its savage rhythms, they both left early to keep the mood intact—and soon married. He apprenticed at Frank Lloyd Wright’s Taliesin atelier in Wisconsin. FLW sent Schindler to Hollywood to supervise Aline Barnsdall’s Hollyhock House. While the marriage didn’t last, they lived together—with newlyweds Dione & Richard Neutra—in a vanguard 1921 space designed by Schindler. The Kings Road House became a vastly influential cultural gathering spot centered on Pauline’s idealism. She was a saloniste, educator, writer, arts journal editor, musicologist, composer, pianist & political progressive. Socializing with Gershwin, Schoenberg, Stravinsky, Ernst Toch, & Rachmaninov, her musical interests ran toward the avant-garde work of electronic music pioneers Leon Theremin & Edgard Varèse. John Cage was her closest companion—they had an affair when he was 19. At the house, Cage often played Gershwin’s 3 Preludes, as well as his own piano pieces inspired by Erik Satie. Composer friends Henry Cowell, & Lou Harrison played 78s of Indonesian gamelan music, which inspired Cage to invent the prepared piano. Pauline was friends with Black artists including composer William Grant Still. Paul Robson songs were her phonograph favorites. Margaret Bond’s 1967 arrangement of Troubled Water stands-in for Pauline’s Civil Rights activism then. Last summer, I visited Inglewood’s Schindler house built in 1940. The night before, its co-owner & FORT’s Russell Brown had been wowed by virtuoso pianist Danil Trifonov’s Rach 3 with LA Phil & Daniel Harding at Hollywood Bowl. Her prized possession is folk art of a fox. Fox is here in Part 1 (2 hrs.), & Part 2 (30 mins). The Beach Boys’s Brian Wilson was born in Inglewood. Good Vibrations touts a simulated Theremin, while Bernard Herrmann’s film score used the real thing. Wilson sets up 2pak’s infectious California Love, shouting out Inglewood. The city’s identity as sports mecca & YOLA home gets a nod with a stadium song, and a Dudamel fave.

Click to Listen: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/4e2rwd8a3GcT7eZV9QI5Jl?si=332b32a790c94d74

Playlist · Patrick · 46 items

08/14/2026

FIRE IN THE HOLE—There’s a Leo in the Room

The ultimate Leo, Karlheinz Stockhausen’s face appears on the Sgt. Pepper’s album in the top row, 5th from the left, between the foul-mouthed comedian and provocateur Lenny Bruce and W.C. Fields, a serious boundary pusher in his own comedic way. He was the only composer to appear in this crowd of imaginary fans and friends of the “Lonely Hearts Club Band”.

The final track of The Beatles 1966 Revolver album includes tape loops thanks to the fiery atom-splitting composer. Paul McCartney and John Lennon were entranced by his overdubbed mix using a 12-year-old boy’s voice, sine waves, white noise, and musique concrete—extremely painstaking razor blade manipulation of audio tape sources in the spirit of surrealist collages. The careers of Miles Davis and Frank Zappa were also changed by hearing the LP. Just 13 minutes long, Gesang der Jünglinge is electronic music’s first masterpiece.

Read Here:

Karlheinz Stockhausen embraced astrology & found a crossover audience (thanks, Beatles!)

08/06/2026

July ’26 Diary 250: Protest, Shame, & Meditation

The American Revolution was as much a civil war as it was a war of independence. The hard times were as intense as they ever would be in the USA—despite the current estimate of as many as 850,000 casualties by the effective end of the Civil War in 1870. We start this diary with self-taught Stephen Foster (July 4, 1826-January 1864), the well-named young “father of American music”. Not only was he born on the 4th of July, but his moon was also in Cancer! Jesse Welles, the “Tik Tok Woody Guthrie”, is a Scorpio with a razor-sharp tongue and the passion to speak his mind uncovering hidden realities. He picks up Foster’s narrative thread. “Slavery”, perhaps Welles’ most powerful indictment, reveals Alabama’s slave labor economy embedded in an entirely corrupt prison system masked by Governor Kay Ivey, aka “MeMaw”, (see The Alabama Solution on HBO)—alongside a global corporate culture of enslavement. Playlist contributors include the most daring rugged individualists of American piano writing—John Cage, Henry Cowell, Frederic Rzewski & John Adams—alongside the extraordinary violin artistry of Randal Goosby & cello wizardry of Matt Haimovitz. Surrounded by cool waves of sound, floats the late Eva Cassidy’s deeply felt and uniquely successful interpretation of “Imagine.” Brian Keene’s haunting orchestral music for the incomparable PBS series “New York” adds depth. For me, Stravinsky’s 1966 “Requiem Canticles”, his last major work, was written for the fallen in the Vietnam War. He died in 1971. Stravinsky’s haunting woodwind interlude recalls his earlier masterpieces for winds. Here it serves as a prelude to “Rothko Chapel”, a 1971 capstone by Morton Feldman who turned 100 this year. Written to honor his friend the painter Mark Rothko, this lightly scored choral music was premiered in the meditative non-denominational home of his 14 monumental paintings in Houston, Texas. Outside is a pond reflecting “Broken Obelisk”, a sculptural tribute to Reverend Martin Luther King by Barnett Newman. I hope you will find Feldman’s 26 minutes of serenity helpful in processing the hard times—such as they are—that so many face today.

Click to Listen: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/0MF7DdfSTynGiwaZnRpD9h?si=wBhJIeydTVajoDzXFhQouA

Playlist · Patrick · 33 items

07/17/2026

MOON CRAB CANCER: Balancing feelings with boldly intricate forms

Yes, astrology applies to nations—and the USA is in every way a 250-year-old Moon Child! I address this lightly in the Drag Zodiac, a page available only to subscribers. This month’s edition of AstroMusic will favor music over astrology. It doubles as program notes for ALTITUDE—a new release from Jacaranda Live Recordings, that features these great living Cancerians—best friends Magnus Lindberg & Esa-Pekka Salonen who were born 3 days apart in the final week of June—two crabs in a Finnish bucket called Helsinki.

Click to Read:

Altitude: Music of Magnus Lindberg, Kaija Saariaho, and Esa-Pekka Salonen

07/03/2026

THE GREAT AMERICAN SYMPHONY Vol. IV

Road-testing this playlist, and the 3 before it, helped me to know these 16 symphonies so well, with your feedback, that one symphony could be declared our nation’s pinnacle achievement in that European form—first successfully adopted in 1840 by Gottschalk & premiered in Havana! Our 250th birthday jamboree may have been bungled in Washington DC, and it’s spirit mostly lost in the headlines, but this music is worth our time & appreciation now. Some of you asked about the absence of Copland’s Third, Harris’s Third, & Bernstein’s “Age of Anxiety”. Copland was not a symphonist, and his collection of patriotic tone poems didn’t make the cut. Harris’s structural weaknesses are ultimately unlistenable. Bernstein’s hybrid piano concerto/symphony was undercut by this medium. All recordings on Spotify break the composer’s intended continuous flow with annoying track pauses. Sadly, “Age of Anxiety” didn’t pass the road test. Its haunting eloquence is very worthwhile. Many other notable symphonies were eliminated because they were unrecognizably American. I have selected the thirteen most striking movements to make a sonic stairway lasting 180 minutes. Honorable mention goes to Still’s first movement of the “Afro-American.” This newly discovered vintage recording & conductor were a revelation. First runner-up is Thompson’s “Hymn Tune” symphony, called “strong as hell” at its premiere for reasons that can’t be argued—its 100% American! Second runner-up is the ruggedly enduring American neoclassicism of Schuman’s Third. It delivers thrilling impacts every time. Third runner-up is Adams’ Harmonielehre for the ultra-American last movement based on his crazy dream set in San Francisco’s bay. The late MTT’s recording of the Ives Fourth Symphony may be this quintessentially American conductor’s finest achievement. Ives’s improbable assembly of four radically different movements played by multiple orchestras, organ, and chorus, is the ultimate statement of the composer’s reconciliation of Transcendentalism with the violence hard-wired in us by the American Revolution, and the break-the-mold crazy quilt modernity that makes America unique.

https://open.spotify.com/playlist/1Hi8YTS45WxFuXhRmLydJm?si=aaf967cf00b54714

Playlist · Patrick · 18 items

07/02/2026

June Substack ~ Shadow Twins: the Gemini Genie in a Bottle

My hope is that every installment of AstroMusic emphasizes the uniqueness of each person’s astrology, while contemplating the eternal archetypes that shift, shuffle, and come to bare—using composers and their music to sort these ideas out. Enigmatic composer Gyorgy Ligeti’s story illustrates the point and purpose of such exploration, as does the many-splendored public career of Igor Stravinsky—and the world’s most famous un-musical Gemini displaying his “big three” for all to see.

Igor Stravinsky, Gyorgy Ligeti & Donald Trump—profiles in audacity, duality & cringe

06/18/2026

ALTITUDE Available Now!

After its successful Ojai Music Festival launch, we are thrilled to make available to you our newest album ALTITUDE: Music of Saariaho, Lindberg & Salonen as a CD with download included, or download only. Once more, the album’s stunning cover art is by acclaimed artist and internationally renowned architect Scott Johnson—our close friend and longstanding supporter. Opening soon is the 37-story glass tower Johnson Fain-designed Century City Center, headquarters for Creative Artists Agency. This building has been awarded the highest possible rating for sustainability, environmental efficiency, and resource conservation. Scott’s artwork is praised for his ability to translate complex structural concepts into stunning visual media. Reviewers have admired his bold lines, confident use of mixed media, strong colors, and subtle variations within a cohesive system to evoke deep spatial dreams. As such, the music of Jacaranda Live Recordings resonates with these qualities—and we are proud of this partnership.

Click to Purchase: https://jacarandaliverecordings.bandcamp.com/album/altitude

06/04/2026

JACARANDA LIVE RECORDINGS IS BACK!

Thursday, June 11, 2026, Jacaranda Media’s new album “ALTITUDE: Music of Saariaho, Lindberg & Salonen” officially launches with the beginning of the Ojai Music Festival. Join us Saturday 3pm at the rustic Ojai Arts Center to hear music samples, meet the artists, and purchase a CD for autographs. The digital download code is included.

Recorded live at Jacaranda’s former home First Presbyterian Church of Santa Monica, October 29, 2016, “Five Images of Sappho” was supervised by Esa-Pekka Salonen who attended the concert with the late Frank Gehry. The composer writes, “Sappho reveals to us secrets of the female soul like nobody else. There is no subject more interesting.” Lyris Quartet gave the Los Angeles premiere of “Terra Memoria” by Kaija Saariaho, for whom it now serves as a memorial tribute. The composer wrote “I love the richness and sensitivity of the string sound. I feel when writing for a string quartet that I’m entering into the intimate core of musical communication.” Magnus Lindberg’s “Jubilees” celebrated the 75th birthday of Pierre Boulez, a Diamond Jubilee, and the so-called Millennium, or Great Jubilee in 2000. Pianist Gloria Cheng gave the LA premiere of these six virtuosic miniatures for Piano Spheres in 2002. Upon listening to this recording, she marveled at the music’s astonishing construction and expressivity. This Jacaranda Live Recordings album was made possible through the generous help of Frank Gruber & Janet Levin, Raulee Marcus, and Abby Sher.

“ALTITUDE” will be available for purchase for $15 at the Ojai Music Festival store June 11-14.