by Benjamin Williams ⋅ December 8th, 2008 ⋅
“The DJ is the custodian of aural history.”
—Paul D. Miller, a.k.a. DJ Spooky
DJ Spooky sparks some interesting thoughts with the DJ posed as a “custodian of aural history.” Is that a fair statement? I would say so, with some qualifications. Sampling tends to include music from all realms, including classical. In this sense, it is much more inclusive than much of the classical version of quotation music. Jayson Greene wrote an article in Stylus magazine in which he listed the “Top Ten Classical-Music Samples in Hip-Hop.” Angus Batey referenced this list as he argued that Hip-hop is not inferior to classical music.
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by Benjamin Williams ⋅ December 4th, 2008 ⋅
On my drive home yesterday, I was listening to NPR, as I am usually apt to do. I was struck by some thoughts presented in a report by Andrea Shea, “Conceptualizing Sol LeWitt’s ‘Wall Drawings’.“
Although Sol LeWitt died last year at 78, one of his biggest installations, “Sol LeWitt: A Wall Drawing Retrospective” will open to the public soon, at MASS MoCA in North Adams, Massachusetts and be on view for 25 years. LeWitt hired a number of artists to execute his ideas over the past several years, including the time after his death.
LeWitt was one of the pioneers and masters of the “conceptual art” movement. For him:
In conceptual art the idea or concept is the most important aspect of the work. When an artist uses a conceptual form of art, it means that all of the planning and decisions are made beforehand and the execution is a perfunctory affair. The idea becomes a machine that makes the art.
Sol LeWitt, “Paragraphs on Conceptual Art,” Artforum, June 1967.
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by Benjamin Williams ⋅ November 25th, 2008 ⋅
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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by Benjamin Williams ⋅ October 24th, 2008 ⋅
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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by Benjamin Williams ⋅ October 2nd, 2008 ⋅
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 goal 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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