Aesthetics
June 2nd, 2010 in Aesthetics, Theory | Comment on 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.
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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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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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September 8th, 2008 in Aesthetics | Comment on this Post »
Artie Isaac, a Columbus native, who works at an award-winning, creative marketing strategy and advertising agency, recently made a presentation to City Year Columbus on the topic of ethics in speech.
One of the great questions of the day was, “What’s the hardest part of maintaining ethical speech?”
The answer? Silence.
He writes quite brilliantly on this topic in his own blog at Net Cotton Content, and therefore, I won’t retell the whole story. I will just repeat his closing thoughts about a time in which he showed tact by staying quiet:
But, man, that moment is still awkwardly quiet. Because there are certainly things that could be said.
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August 11th, 2008 in Aesthetics | Comment on this Post »
About three years ago, when my then-future-wife was just moving to Akron in preparation for graduate studies, her grandmother said that some distant relatives happened to live in northeast Ohio. Over the course of the next two years, she—and subsequently we—became great friends with these “cousins” (actually a much more complicated relationship, but this is how we refer to it for simplicity).
Last night we had the pleasure of visiting with them and taking in a concert at the Copley Bandstand. It was a fun night of big band music, courtesy of Swing Machine. Great memories of playing second tenor in a big band came rushing back to my mind as I listened to charts such as Basie’s “April in Paris.”
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