Posts by Alan Pierson
Artistic Director, Conductor, Keyboards

INTERACTIVITY, TECHNOLOGY, and the AWS / GOOGLE COLLABORATION

One of my great joys as Alarm Will Sound’s conductor is that when we perform John Luther Adams’s Ten Thousand Birds, I have absolutely nothing to do. We perform the piece is a kind of environmental installation, with players all around the audience playing bird songs that John has imaginatively realized for instruments. It’s not […]


Maneuvering in the Classical Cloud

There’s an interesting Alex Ross article in this week’s on classical music’s migration to the cloud and what might be lost in the process. My transition to conducting off of a tablet has been part of a bigger digital-migration project this year, which has also involved transferring all of my CDs (liner notes included) to digital. With all […]

September 6, 2014 | , , ,

Derek Bermel interview

Our latest album, Canzonas Americanas, is of music by Derek Bermel, who is a long time collaborator of ours. Our conversation about the album covered a lot of ground, which is no surprise given Derek’s eclectic approach to composing: we talked about Nancarrow, Latin music, Ives, African music, Messiaen, blues, Brahms, and the European avant-garde. Even astrophysics worked its way in: I don’t know if I’ve gotten to talk about different types of equilibria since my undergrad days.

November 17, 2012