I sometimes forget that there are people who think of music theory as “boring”. Are you one of them?
Think about a child first learning to sound out words, not able to string together a sentence. That’s what I hear when a person just starts learning to sing or play some notes without understanding how one might relate to another.
This post is an open letter of sorts to David Tomasacci, composer and theorist, in response to his request for my thoughts on how a particular new music ensemble could be improved. However, I will make my recommendations in a generalized fashion and refer to particulars only infrequently.
This is the second post in a series addressing the idea of a ‘composition app’ and, more specifically, Joseph Freeman’s recent opinion pieces in the NYTimes: “Compose Your Own” and “Compose Your Own, Part 2.” The first post, “Composition? There’s an App for That… (Part 1)” involved the issue of sequence in music. [Note: While I initially had other topics I wanted to address, I will most likely end with this post.]
As the academic year comes to a close, I realize it has been a quite while since I have written a post. Initially, I thought I would just share some fun music-generating web-links that I ran across:
But then I got to thinking about the music-making involved and started asking myself questions such as “What does it to take to make an application that can generate more-or-less pleasing music regardless of musical ability on the part of the ‘composer’?” That’s just about when I began reading Jason Freeman’s NYTimes opinion piece “Compose Your Own, Part 2” and its prequel “Compose Your Own.” This led to a number of other questions that I will address in separate posts in the upcoming week.
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.