November 25th, 2008 in Theory | Comment on this Post »
The current issue of Spectrum (vol. 30 no. 2) opens with a line by medieval music theorist Jennifer Bain:
Since the nineteenth century, analytical studies and discussions about music often have arisen either explicitly or implicitly from organicist roots. In its most extreme form, the organicist model states that in order for a work to have aesthetic value, it must have arisen from a single musical idea or concept.
This was perhaps the most beautifully worded summary of so many of the discussions I have been a part of in recent days. Here, I will illustrate only a few.
Schenker’s theories have been a central topic of interest among my colleagues in recent days. There are some postulates of his that everyone seems fairly willing to accept and others which are either so limited as to be of little value or simply seem inaccurate. One such agreement is the idea that a Schenkerian understanding of a piece can positively inform performance. A disagreement lurks around the dubious explanation for the Neapolitan chord.
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October 24th, 2008 in Theory | 1 Comment »
I have to admit that I am only now reading through the theories of Heinrich Shenker for the first time. I am reticent to mention this in an atmosphere of assumed understanding. This is not to say that I have been oblivious; rather, quite the opposite. What may be more accurate is that I have never taken the time to read the theories from the horse’s mouth/pen (the mixed metaphor clearly falls apart.)
One tenet that keeps sticking out in my mind as I read is the connection between analysis and performance in Schenker’s mind. Perhaps he takes it a bit far to suggest that there is only one true performance of each piece, or, even more so, that performance is superfluous to the music that exists in the score. He does, however, demonstrate that performers can lead the listener through each piece by performing an analysis (not the literal graphs that so many recognize, but rather the resultant understanding.)
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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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September 9th, 2008 in Politics | Comment on this Post »
Some surprising figures:
“For years, [William Weber] has been gathering data on late-eighteenth- and nineteenth-century performances, and he summarizes his findings in graphs showing how works of dead composers came to dominate concerts in Paris, London, Leipzig, and Vienna. In 1782, in Leipzig, the percentage was as low as eleven. By 1830, it was around fifty, going as high as seventy-four in Vienna. By the eighteen-sixties and seventies, the figure ranged from sixty-nine to ninety-four per cent (in Paris). Matters progressed to the point where a Viennese critic complained that ‘the public has got to stay in touch with the music of its time… for otherwise people will gradually come to mistrust music claimed to be the best,’ and organizers of a Paris series observed that some of their subscribers ‘get upset when they see the name of a single contemporary composer on the programs.’ These quotations come from 1843 and 1864.”
This summary comes from Alex Ross of the New Yorker in an article called, “Why So Serious?“
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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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