I haven’t written anything of substance here in a while, but today I read an article in the Times today and it fired me up. The article is by Michael Kimmelman, who recently also wrote about, among other things, how people walk absently through art museums instead of looking at the art. This museum article actually gives a pretty good context to the impression I get of Kimmeleman’s point-of-view: he’s trying to get at the purpose that art serves in these crazy modern times we live in. In the Louvre article, he posits that art’s role has degraded with the advent of technology - hardly a unique argument but framed nicely in the Louvre’s non-Western art room. In the Dresden article, he’s coming up with, well…

To summarize what you’ll read when you read the article, a pregnant Egyptian woman was murdered in a courthouse in Dresden by a Russian man who apparently is a racist psychopath. They were in a room together awaiting his trial for insulting her because she wore a veil. Kimmelman goes on to note that East Germany, and especially Saxony (Dresden is the capital of Saxony), has more problems with racially-motivated crime and especially racially-motivated violent crime than the rest of Germany. He then observes that Dresden is a marvelously beautiful city, now fully restored from the firebombing at the end of World War II.

Finally, Kimmelman accuses art of having not sufficiently altered the character of Dresdeners. If the city’s trove of architectural and artistic treasures had done its job, he implies, this terrible murder would not have occurred, and indeed all Dresdeners would live together in blissful multicultural harmony. (more…)

Do motives that gain their power from a tonal context work in a mostly-atonal setting?

I’m onto the second straight piece in which I have to confront that question.

The opening bars of Omie Speaks go like this:

(listen here)

See that A-sharp in the first chord and that A-natural in a different voice in the second? (a voice is defined by its left-to-right motion and how high it is) That’s called a cross-relation. (more…)

“Imperfection is the mother of style.”

From My Name Is Red by Orhan Pamuk.

See also last month’s post and this one, too, for context.

a fried hard-drive at the server farm later, and my posts since Nov. 1 are gone. I found the three I’d posted on happy Google-cache, so I’m about to repost them. But the Doctor Atomic discourses are missing, probably for good. I’ll try to get an abbreviated version done soon.

So, lesson: write everything on my own computer. Do not trust the server. Not learned.

I brought the tentative instrumental opening of the saxophone quartet + electronics that I’m writing to my computer music class on Wednesday. My teacher and my classmate each had a look and both said, this looks a lot like that recorder quartet.

I guess I’m to take this as evidence of a personal style forming? That’s good on its face, as an individual voice is supposedly what we’re all looking for out here in composition land. I hadn’t meant to write another wedge, but as soon as they said it, I realized I had, though this time it moves by skips instead of chromatic steps, and it covers an octave-and-a-half instead of only a perfect fifth, and it’s shorter.

But then I look at that and think, well, I should do something different. At least formally - I’m sick of starting each piece with a bare-bones statement of a small geometrical fragment that “is the root material for the whole work.” No way to get around the first bars being the root material, but in the piece after Omie (that’s what the sax quartet’s called), I’m planning to kind of start with a bang, throw it all out at once and break it down as the piece continues instead of building up.

I guess that’s called “growing,” but as I’m about to post in another ramble, it’s weird to feel the need to rebuild from scratch each time. But I also don’t want to get predictable, I mean, I’m only 30, there’s no reason to start repeating myself yet, and I’ve already written two long pieces based on a wedge shape…

I reacted to Doctor Atomic, which I’m very happy to have seen at the Met, well, a long time ago (Nov. 8, specifically), now, in three main ways, which I’ll explore in the next three posts:

1. As politics
2. As music, with a digression on the nature of genius
3. As theater, or more specifically, as words as they relate to music, plus a conclusion

These will appear soon, I swear! They’re 3/4s written already! [note: given server issues, well, maybe they won’t, or rather, it’ll be shorter]

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I persistently remember the title of this post as “unfaithful” - Batter my heart, unfaithful God. Or sometimes, it’s “three-fingered.” What does that mean?

Well, I’m back from Japan. It wasn’t a particularly explicitly musical visit, we only made it to one performance of anything and that was kabuki at the kabuki-za, which had some musical features (excellent use of the woodblock, for example) but the act that we saw was not predominantly musical. I also completely failed in my endeavor to hear some live gagaku (more…)

well, for whatever reason, it’s a reasonable excuse to advertise that I will be in Japan for the next few weeks.

In the mean time, does anyone else feel like there’s something creepy about the following quotation, like that it’s trying to tell us to forget about the past, and for that matter, anything ugly about the present, too?

“There is still only a short list of “safe choice” composers, most of whom grew up in the shadow of WWII, which has left a dark spot in music for the last 50 years. No question a lot of this music will never speak to audiences of any kind. I basically started Magnum Opus to find out why, and if there was anything to be done about it! And what I have found out is that there is something to be done, but it takes money and effort and the ability to introduce new ideas into the system. My positive revelation from the last few years is that there is actually a little bit of great new music being written. Most of that music is being written outside the academic circles, it seems, and much of it by younger composers—not because they are young, but because they did not grow up with teachers who grew up in the dark musical shadow of the World Wars. For a lot of reasons the spiritual and physical dislocations of those wars destroyed art music for a long time. I think we’re over it—that’s the good news for me!—but we need to rebuild our ability to discover and perform new music of merit. I’m optimistic, but we have a lot of recent history to overcome.”

(That’s Kathryn Gould in an interview with Molly Sheridan at newmusicbox.)

Last Friday, La Villette showed The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly at their no-longer-free outdoor film festival. There a lot of different ways I could go with this, but for the sake of concision, I’m going to zero in on Morricone. I was excited to see the movie because of its cinematic reputation, of course, but doubly so because of the score. I don’t think I’ve seen many Morricone-scored films - The Mission comes to mind, but that was back in middle school, on VHS - so I was curious to hear, as an adult and a relatively mature musician, how he approaches film scoring.

(I should mention that if you do not want to know what happens in the film, you shouldn’t follow after the break)

I have to say, I found the music altogether weird, which is to say, beyond the famous whistling motive, not altogether appropriate. (more…)