Miscellany

John Darnielle, of the Mountain Goats, has a long, fascinating meditation on the Halberstadt John Cage project in Harper's. This, of course, is the performance of Cage's Organ2/ASLSP (As Slow as Possible) that began in 2001 and is scheduled to continue until the year 2640. Right now the organ is playing the notes D-sharp, A-sharp, and E, and will hold them until 2020.... I can't quite bring myself to rank Strauss above Mahler, but I concur with Ethan Iverson's points in praise of the Sorcerer of Garmisch. Yes to the Parergon, and even more to the Panathenäenzug, one of whose variations skates dangerously close to Gershwin.... The violinist Michelle Ross has been playing Bach's sonatas and partitas in spaces all over New York and recounting her journey in a series of perceptive, affecting blog posts. This week she'll be at the Holy Apostles Soup Kitchen, among other places. On Dec. 22 she'll play the entire cycle in a Pied Piper Marathon.... The SEM Ensemble will give its annual Paula Cooper concert on Dec. 19, presenting the American première of Alvin Lucier's Orpheus Variations, alongside works of Xenakis, Eli Greenhoe, Liisa Hirsch, the seventeenth-century Czech composer Pavel Vejvanovský, and Petr Kotik, longtime leader of SEM. Hirsch, not to be confused with the proprietor of Iron Tongue of Midnight, is a discovery for me; she has some beautiful, ghostly pieces on her Soundcloud.... The lineup for the Peter Sellars edition of the Ojai Festival has been announced. It consists almost entirely of female composers: Kaija Saariaho, Pauline Oliveros, Caroline Shaw, Carla Kihlstedt, Dina El Wedidi, Aruna Sairam, Tania León, Sharon Hurvitz. Tyshawn Sorey, Claude Vivier.