Bona nox!


I sometimes think that catches, like limericks, divide into two categories: clean ones and good ones.(Click image to enlarge.)

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Discipline and Belief

So, I've initiated a project — the details of which will be hush-hush until the end of January — which involves at least 18 composers and an equal number of ground basses.  For my own contribution, I decided to compose first and notate later, getting the music I wanted in my ear, mind, hands, and tongue (it's wind music) before committing it to paper or monitor, as a way of increasing discipline in a musical environment that is, for me, both so rich and so familiar that going on auto pilot and just writing something out was simply too easy. (Sounding easy, which I might want, is not the same as composed easy, which I don't necessarily want.)  At the same time, knowing that I was going to commit some notes to paper put a powerful  — and powerfully useful — constraint on my paper- and screenless composing, in that I was not going to accept just some more noodling-around-out-of-habit improvisation.  When it came time to notate, this discipline had turned into a serious ...
Read more

Full Cage

There has been so much material about John Cage online of late that it is difficult to sort through it all. Let me just point to two very smart items, this , by conductor and percussionist Steven Schick, and this , by composer and critic Matthew Guerrieri. I'm singling these two out because they both focus on Cage's work in perhaps its most critical moment.  There is a tendency — due more to later Newmusicland politics than to the music itself in its own era — to disassociate Cage's project from the larger avant-garde musical project of the time, in particular accentuating the differences and distances from both the post-Schoenbergian American 12-toners and the European serialists.  Recovering those connections does not mean ignoring the differences (indeed, those differences — Cage and Eastern thought*, Babbitt and positivism, Boulez and French literature, Nono and romantic Marxism, Stockhausen and Hesse's Magister Ludi... — are the spice rack in the compositional kitc...
Read more

The Whole Enchilada

In the middle of one of the recent drive-bys of the death-of-classical music trope, someone smartly observed that a good portion of the youth (and no-longer-so-youthful)  who would otherwise have been deeply engaged by music — whether as performers or listeners — had probably had their time and attentions and pocket monies siphoned off by some form of gaming, electronic or otherwise.   I think this observation is a smart one because gaming done well does more than resemble the kind of immersion in pseudo-encyclopedic synthetic worlds that thoroughly absorbed generations past and the raw numbers plotting the growth in the gaming market against the simultaneous decline in recorded music sales are quite convincing. Richard Wagner's success, for one, was in turning a mix of complex and ambiguous myth and fiction into musical stage works which worked simultaneously at broad narrative and local detail levels, and at both literary and musical streams, allowing for multiple paths to their ...
Read more