For some reason I can't stop listening to Eric Whitacre's October recently. I mentioned this to Bill Wakefield, and he said, "It's a very emotional piece," and that may be part of it - I get mental images of the farm in the fall, football saturdays, overcast days with leaves blowing around, and so on. But for about a week, I just put iTunes on "repeat one" and listen to it 6, 7, 8 times in a row. It's a six-minute-plus piece, too, so I'm really not getting tired of it.

Eric Whitacre had his site redesigned in Flash (ugh), so there are no links to anything. This strategy has a price - Google for "October" and you won't come up with the composer's site at all. Google can't crawl the site because there are no links to anything, just a home page with a big Flash movie. (Contrary to what Macromedia says, SWF is not a "standard" just because the company publishes the file format.) The link above is to someone who mentioned the piece over a year ago in a comment on Dean Esmay's site.

I don't know if it's the same recording; mine has no provenance, though I had thought it was on the Noisy Wheels of Joy album, it is not. Perhaps it's from this UNLV album. Either way, I'm hearing a lot of it lately.

(Yes, I'm still working on RedLine, but that's a long-term project for me.)