Quoting from a recently published NY Times review of a Locrian Chamber Players Concert: "At its concert on Thursday evening at Riverside Church, the ensemble took a parting look at a few works composed in 1992 and offered some newer pieces as well. It also celebrated Pauline Oliveros's 70th birthday (which was on May 30) by devoting the second half of the program to her works. One of Ms. Oliveros's pieces, "Sound Fishes" is listed as having been composed in 1992, but a listener had to wonder whether the date has any relevance for a piece that is more a set of conceptual instructions than a notated score. What Ms. Oliveros came up with in 1992 was the idea of having the instrumentalists wander around the room and "pull the sound out of the air like a fisherman catching fish": that is, feel the unrealized sound in the atmosphere and play it. The performance on Thursday was, in a sense, composed on the spot, as much by the players as by Ms. Oliveros. Was the piece the audience heard a decade old, or brand new? It was, in any case, entertaining. The ensemble, along with Ms. Oliveros, who played the accordion, surrounded the listeners and produced an interesting splattering of timbres before seamlessly moving to another work, "Sound Piece" (1998), which required them to make sounds with objects other than their instruments. They were inventive: some zipped and unzipped (or snapped and unsnapped) their instrument cases, or produced percussive sounds of other kinds. One scraped a rubber plunger along a wall Ms. Oliveros's half of the program began with "The Heart of Tones" (1999), in which a small ensemble of strings, flute and piano played a single, unison note but varied the dynamics, timbre, mode of attack (bowed or pizzicato, for example) and balances to create a constantly shifting texture. And Ms. Oliveros closed her part of the program by leading "Heart Chant" (2001), an audience-participation ritual in which listeners were asked to feel their heartbeats and send out good vibrations." Honestly now, haven't we yet gotten beyond this kind of non-creative, no-brainer 60's vintgage schlock? It insults my intelligence for a "composer, " no matter how famous to put his or her name on a notebook page of improvization instructions. This simply isn't composing music. Rather, it's a set of gimmicks to convince a duped audience that they have just witnessed something marvelous. These so-called composers (Oliveros and her ilk being the worst offenders) have been collecting perfectly good grant money for years to sit around and dream up the kind of crap that I and my fellow kindergartners created 35 years ago when we were given rhythm sticks and told to play some music. "Feel your heart-beat and send out good vibrations???" Honestly! I can do that in my bathtub. I don't need to take up space in the Riverside Church as 30 or so dollars a ticket to participate in some ridiculous new-age ritual concocted by a left-over Hippie. It's no wonder that the many think that the last great composer was Stravinsky. He and Britten seem to me to be the only people in the last 40 years who were capable of sitting down and actually creating something that was original, and that stood a chance of lasting beyond the first performance. By the same token, what can we say of "musicians" who "specialize" in this kind of nonsense. Does it take a conservatory education and years of preparation to be able to zip and unzip your damned instrument case? Even if you can do it in some sort of tempo and rhythm, you're still an idiot to call it music. I miss the days when composers wrote music, and musicians played it. Kevin Sutton