October 2nd, 2008 in Theory | Comment on this Post »
One of the great things about composition in today’s world is the vast social library of styles and media. In a short span of about 100 years, we have gone from mere national stylistic differences to “isms” for any and everything that comes along.
I recently read a passage written by The New Yorker music critic, Alex Ross that made clear to me the value of these enormous stylistic differences. In preparations for translations of his popular book The Rest is Noise His task was to include all quotes in their original languages in order to obtain the best translation. Here is an example:
“Il y a trop de musique en Allemagne,” Romain Rolland wrote, back in the heyday of Mahler and Strauss. Something was lurking, the French writer suspected, in these humongous Teutonic symphonies and music dramas—a cult of power, un “hypnotisme de la force.” Germans themselves recognized the demonic strain in their culture. During the First World War, the not yet liberal-democratic Thomas Mann wrote a manifesto titled Betrachtungen eines Unpolitischen, in which he praised all the backward German tendencies that he would later come to lament in the pages of Doktor Faustus. In the earlier work, Mann states that die Kunst “hat einen unzuverlässigen, verräterischen Grundhang; ihr Entzücken an skandalöser Anti-Vernunft, ihre Neigung zu Schönheit schaffender ‘Barbarei’ ist unaustilgbar…”
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August 14th, 2008 in Theory | 1 Comment »
Engraving is a production step that went from the individual to the pros and is now creeping back to the responsibility of the composer.
Early-music composers had quite possibly the most difficult job: engrave each piece AND develop a system with which to notate. It wasn’t until around at least 800 that music began to be notated in any systematic way and it was a long time (about another 800 years) before the modern system became fairly well developed.
Around 1500, shortly after Gutenberg developed a movable type printing system, music engraving became the job of professionals. Notation was more or less becoming standardized and composers were more easily able to produce multiple copies of a piece of music by handing it over to an engraver.
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July 22nd, 2008 in Theory | Comment on this Post »
My recent activities have included a great deal of research in the area of psychology in terms of the concept of creativity. Here is a term that has been lost due to modern usage. For example,
- The word “creativity” in popular culture has, at best, an ambiguous definition
- No one, not even any psychologist, knows exactly what happens in our minds when we are creative
- Furthermore, some people just seem to be more creative than others, just because of who they are
I don’t know exactly how we got here, but this is where we are.
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