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“The dry knock of an idiotic hammer penetrates the utter stillness. One, two, three, ten, twenty strikes, and afterwards a wild whistling and squeaking as if a ball of mud was falling into clear water; then follows a rattling, howling and screaming like the clamor of a metal pig, the cry of a donkey or […] REALLY COOL! The conditions for minimum and maximum bow force can tell us something interesting about the difficulty of playing the violin. When a simple analysis is done of these two conditions, it turns out that they both depend, among other things, on the position of the bow on the string. Suppose the length of […] Now that I’m done with Mr. Sacks, I’ve moved on to Levitin’s This is Your Brain on Music. While Musicophelia was much more focused on anecdotal discussions of evidence, Levitin gets much deeper into details of music theory and research. In a way, this was the book I was hoping to read when I picked […] Deborah speaks of the “momentum” of the music in its very structure. A piece of music is not a mere sequence of notes, but a tightly organized organic whole. Every bar, every phrase, arises organically from what preceded it and points to what will follow. Dynamism is built into the nature of melody. And over […] I am finally working my way through Musicophilia by Oliver Sacks, about four years after I received the book as a gift. While the reading is mostly anecdotal, there are also some general ideas that I find are spot on and others that are wildly inaccurate. I’ll start with the end of the opening chapter […] 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 […] Whatever music might do, it does only when one approaches it with an open heart and shares actively in its being. ~Ernst Krenek Today I was reading a blog post about Minimal music and boredom by Andrew Lee on icareifyoulisten.com and some good points were made. Last May, I had the wonderful opportunity […] Many years earlier Adorno had convinced Krenek that music might be moving toward the condition of extemporaneous speech, developing its subject matter on a line through time as a thought is developed in speech. Forward movement was achieved by exploration, confrontation, interlocution, contradiction—perfect process for piecing together his interesting cells. Such an open form did […] 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 […] |
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