A Famous Composer Agrees With My Interpretation of Ego In Aleatoric and Totally Serial Music

Aleatoric, in the ‘rationalists’ usage, means dependent on chance or, in the usage of the advocates of New Music, set free from the ‘subject’.

Here the subject is clearly meant to be the composer’s ‘ego’.

But even if the ‘integral rationalisation’ succeeds and everything is ‘calculated’ in advance down to the last detail, there must […]

It’s Easy to Pick on Dead People (v. Krenek No. 234362)

I’m combing my way through Krenek’s set of essays Exploring Music, and it’s providing some great insight into the man and his beliefs. His vignette on Milhaud that I wrote about before was really cool. I’m currently digesting ‘New Humanity and Old Objectivity’ and some of his views on vernacular forms of art (pop music […]

Milhaud is Tacky, So Says Krenek (On Furniture Taste)

His house, filled with old-fashioned furniture and family photographs by suburban photographers, is a kind of chamber of horrors, the exhibits being fantastic, tasteless objects from every chance country — particularly bottles, which Milhaud collects with a rare passion and success. He is also madly in love with his old picture postcards showing highly varnished […]

Paranoia and Conspiracy v. Krenek

The opera had not yet been produced at the time of my San Diego lectures. As a postmortem I may add that I had never anticipated the amount of indignation and anguish that the performance, which eventually took place in Hamburg, caused. One could expect the conservatives to be outraged. but they were just as […]