This Monday at Rutgers University I'll be presenting a short paper on the Triadex Muse, an algorithmic melody generator invented in the early 1970s by Marvin Minsky and Edward Fredkin. It's part of a one-day symposium called Expressive Engines: Musical Technologies from Automata to Robots.

I'm thrilled to announce an event celebrating the release of my book Instruments for New Music this Friday at the wonderful <fidget> space in Philadelphia. The event will feature a brief set of readings from the book, live music for electronics and Disklavier by Jesse Kudler and Roger Martinez, and a cash bar and conversation to close out the evening. There will also be a raffle to win a free copy of my book!

Free admission. Please consider a donation to support the hosts.

For more info: http://www.thefidget.org/events/thomas-pattesons-book-launch-party/

UPDATE: Here are a few photos from the event, which was a huge success!
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My book Instruments for New Music: Sound, Technology, and Modernism is now scheduled to appear in November! Published by the University of California Press, it will be available as both a hard copy and a free, open-access e-book. 

I'll be giving a presentation entitled "The Trautonium: Electro-Music and Steel Romanticism" at the 2015 annual meeting of the American Musicological Society this November in Louisville. Centering on the early electronic instrument called the Trautonium and its role in debates about technology and music in Germany during the 1930s, the talk will be based on a chapter in my forthcoming book Instruments for New Music.

Deirdre Loughridge and I have published a new essay in the Public Domain Review based on our Museum of Imaginary Musical Instruments. Check it out, and please support the wonderful work of PDR!

I'm thrilled to be part of a new project that centers on the problem of building a Philadelphia-based new music ensemble. After a group of us had a number of minimally productive brainstorming sessions, we decided that the best way forward was to JFDI and start planning some concerts. The result is "Begin Anywhere: A Concert Series About Starting New Things," which combines great music and casual conversations with people who have started things of their own. The first event was on April 11; three more are slated for May 3, May 15, and June 5. 

I will be presenting a paper on "Public Musicology and the Problem of New Music" at the conference "The Past, Present, and Future of Public Musicology," which will take place from January 30 to February 1, 2015, at Westminster Choir College of Rider University in Princeton, New Jersey. My paper will address the role of musicology for those involved in presenting and curating the diverse and often challenging world of contemporary (post-) classical music. 

I'm excited to announce I'll be organizing a concert called "The Open Work" as part of <fidget>'s 2014 Fall Experimental Music Festival, taking place from November 7-9. The concert, scheduled for Saturday, November 8, will feature works involving various forms of indeterminacy, structural branching, and unconventional notation, from the 1950s until the present.

I'm thrilled to announce that I'll be teaching two additional courses this year, on top of my regular duties at the Curtis Institute. In the fall, I'll be teaching an upper-level course for music majors at the University of Pennsylvania called "Experimental Music in Theory and Practice," while in the spring I'll have an elective at Curtis on the history of American popular music.

Deirdre Loughridge and I just spoke about our Museum of Imaginary Musical Instruments at "Bone Flute to Auto-Tune," a conference on music and technology organized by Deirdre at the University of California, Berkeley.

We plan on developing our thoughts further and eventually publishing them in the not-too-distant future. We're also hoping to add some new entries to the museum this summer.

Meanwhile, MIMI has been getting some lovely press on the web. Check it out!

• "Un fabuloso catálogo de instrumentos musicales imaginarios" (Pijama Surf)
• "Imaginary Musical Instruments: The Joys and Wonders of 'Fictophones'" (Obscura)
• "The Museum of Imaginary Musical Instruments" (Dressing the Air)