what comes next?
Finally, an opportunity to gratuitously drop in some Hamilton. Anyway, this newsletter has become infrequent, and perhaps also irrelevant, because I started it back in July of 2019 to talk about the process behind writing and completing my book, and that book is written, completed, and has now been available for purchase for more than a month. So, bye bye to Industry-the-newsletter?
Perhaps; I’m still not really sure. I have plenty of thoughts in my head that are worth sharing about the new minimalism book project; about my teaching this semester; and about my podcast, Sound Expertise, which launched its second season last week. (Susan McClary! Braxton Shelley! Next week, Ellie Hisama! Give it a listen.)
But I also have a baby that’s nine months old on Monday and that makes longform written musings a bit harder to find the time to write. So I’m not sure what’s going to happen next with this newsletter; my guess is intermittent smatterings of thoughts when I have something coming out that I want to share, or when I have some rant I want to rant about. Or maybe Substack will give me hundreds of thousands of dollars to keep this going because that’s apparently a thing now? (I remember when no one I knew knew what Substack was. Those were the days, like, 18 months ago.)
There’s been a bunch of nice stuff that’s happened since the book officially came out — a really fun release event at 92nd St Y with Allan Kozinn, a great talk with Anne Midgette for the Prince George’s County Memorial Library System, some very kind and flattering reviews and press coverage. It’s all rounded up on my website here: https://williamrobin.com/industry/
One of the most fun recent things was writing up a book playlist for VAN Magazine, and convincing Michael Gordon to let me share an archival recording of The Tree Watcher, one of his earliest works that caused a minor riot at Yale in 1981, publicly for the first time. You can check that out here — I’m grateful to Adam Cuthbért for cleaning up the recording and making it available. I did a lil’ twitter thread about it:
There are a couple other things in the pipeline that are book-related — another adapted excerpt that will run somewhere in the next couple weeks, and a review or too that I’m really excited about.
And it’s been really, really nice to give a bunch of talks at a bunch of different universities about the book and have some in-depth conversations about it. At this point, now that it’s theoretically been out long enough to read it, I really want to talk to (and hear from) people who have read it, or are reading it, and to really get into it. I have a lot of hopes for the book, but one is that people in the new-music world — composers, performers, administrators, etc — pick it up and it helps them think a little differently about the world they’re a part of. If you have done so, or have read it and have some thoughts, please tell me! I’d love to hear from you. (Also, leave me an Amazon review too! Amazon is evil but it does help.)
I think that’s it for now? More soon, possibly. I leave you with Ira & Georgia: