Brad Bettis

I was listening to Pandora the other day and realized that I have begun to like music by composers that I had glazed over in college. I suppose music school is, by its nature, unable to capture both depth and breadth, so an undergrad education is mostly about the overview. We covered hundreds of years in a matter of weeks, so it’s no wonder that after four years of it my mind and ears had reached a kind of saturation. I’ve also noticed that, in an academic setting, the musical tastes are skewed toward the intellectual, the ivory tower and all that. While that isn’t true of every teacher I had, it occurred enough to be kind of unpleasant…

I currently have stations for Arvo Part, Thomas Tallis, Phillip Glass, and Henryk Gorecki – at least for my classical stations. There’s a fair amount of overlap, but that actually works to my advantage (I can just switch stations when I’ve skipped too many on one).

The ironic thing is that I had loads of time in college for listening to music, but usually didn’t spend my spare time that way. Now that I don’t have the extra time, I’ve made up for it with the profound desire to deepen and expand my musical horizons. I guess it’s one of those things that most students don’t believe when they hear, but you really do have more time for everything in college.

Welcome to the redesigned version of my web site – I’m sure that it’s an improvement over previous (Site Under Construction) verisions . Hopefully you’ll be seeing regular improvements and updates, like links to my work and something other than the default wordpress layout.