October 18th, 2009 in Aesthetics | Comment on this Post »
Last night the Ying Quartet played the opening concert of the 2009–2010 Season of Chamber Music Columbus. If you live in central Ohio and have not availed yourself of the opportunity to go to one of these performances, I highly suggest that you make efforts to get to one (I will hopefully be at many, if not all).
Before the performance began, Emily and I were looking over the schedule for the season and in particular discussing one of the upcoming CMC concerts featuring John O’Conor on piano (3/6/10). One of the potential difficulties of listening to an evening of piano music is that it can become tiresome with the lack of variety in terms of timbre and dynamic envelope available to the pianist. Whereas many other instruments and the voice can vary these parameters in a variety of different ways, the pianist makes musical gestures out of a different set that, for example, includes intensity of attack, but not dynamic envelope.
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September 3rd, 2009 in Politics | Comment on this Post »
As I read through various reports on Arts this morning, I found a common thread through three articles:
“Love the Art; Hate the Artist?” by John Schaefer
In Israel you still won’t hear the music of Richard Wagner in concert. The music sounds just as glorious there as it does anywhere else, but the Nazi’s appropriation of his music and of some of his anti-Semitic writings make it a painful listening experience for many Israelis who survived the Holocaust and settled there.…
If we remove all the art by artists of bad character from our lives, who are we hurting? Not a long dead composer… We’re just denying ourselves the good—in some cases, perhaps the only good—that these people did.
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September 2nd, 2009 in Politics | 1 Comment »
Don Aucoin of The Boston Globe recently wrote an article in which he explains “How parents can fill the void when schools cut arts and music programs.” In summary:
“The first art to develop is the art of looking.…
The next step is to take them to a museum, so they can see how the pros do it…”
Or, in the case of music specifically:
“The next step is to take the children to a ’starter show’ like ‘Shear Madness,’ then graduate to ‘Blue Man Group,’ and then on to more challenging fare.”
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July 15th, 2009 in Politics | Comment on this Post »
I’m always fascinated by reports of current trends in music consumption. An article in The Atlantic, “Why Aren’t Kids These Days Downloading Music?” by Derek Thompson was cited by Frank J. Oteri in “You Can’t Take That Away From Me” remarking on the latest trend: moving away from downloading and keeping tracks toward visiting streaming sites such as Pandora and YouTube where you listen in a less committal way.
This new structure is changing the economy of music as noted by Alexandra Topping:
Even though users of streaming services are not necessarily buying more music, the industry benefits by learning more about fans’ tastes. Steve Purdham, CEO and founder of We7, a music streaming service and download store, said: “They may not buy an album, though they have that opportunity, but you can sell them tour tickets and a T-shirt of their favourite band.”
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June 16th, 2009 in Aesthetics | Comment on this Post »
No matter how much composers wish to be noted for their tendency to think outside-of-the-box or to be on the cutting-edge, it is apparent that composers are also unlikely to compose without drawing on some form of external (whether intentionally imposed or not) inspiration.
One likely source of inspiration is that a similar generator; in the case of composers, another composer. One composer with whom I studied, Nikola Resanovic, made it evident that he drew some of his inspiration from other musicians; namely, The Beatles. He made no attempts to hide such inspiration, but rather made it evident with occasional titles such as “Igor’s Pet Walrus” alluding to the source of a harmonic progression (as well as components from Stravinsky). It became apparent, however, that such preferences leaked into his music even when he hadn’t necessarily consciously intended to do so, e.g. preferences for particular progressions typical of pop music, and became part of a wonderfully engaging personal style.
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