kimberlyyeo010198

P was first going to be for Passacaglia , because I like writing them and they have a profound and useful relationship to other self-contextualizing musical processes (canons and loops or delay lines, for example), but as a description of my own work, it could as well have been Ground (but not, AFAIC, Ciaconne , which is another story altogether)  which would not have made it an honest stakeholder for P in this alphabet.  I then thought that P might stand for Pattern .  This sent me on a research trip, through Thompson's On Growth and Form and Alexander's A Pattern Language and through numerous but not-tawdry-enough-to-keep-this-poor-soul-engaged mathematical accounts of Pattern .   I soon realized that I know next-to-naught about Pattern .   Pattern is a very important topic and I should learn more but someone else had better handle it, perhaps in an alphabet of their own.  And then again, P could have been for Process .  Back in the days in which the label "minimal/i...

The radical music has often been focused on the extremes — of pitch, duration, amplitude, perception, attention, memory, from the micro, minimal and miniature to the macro, maximum, and epic — but it has also always been just as much about the familiar, the middle, the ordinary. When Stravinsky reduced his written-out dynamics to piano and forte in the Octet, he was at once pointing to older repertoire for which such a binary pair sufficed but also indicating that there was a lot more music to be found within those familiar confines.  Or this: that sudden all-white-key-dominant-something-without-a-tonic-in-earshot-chord in Cage's Water Music .   Or this: those wonderful and wonderfully disconcerting post-Boulangerie pieces of Glass: Music in Parallel Motion , Music in Contrary Motion , Music in Fifths ... all the way through Another Look at Harmony .    

Aside from my dips into the early music world, where an A of 415 or 466 Hz is common (and, conveniently, about a half-step down or up from 440), my A of reference has always been 440. But now, with instrumentalists-in-training in the household, we can put off no longer raising the living room piano to the 443 which is now basically standard for strings and winds in much of Europe  That's a bit less than 12 cents, but still a noticeable difference.  In general, I dislike pitch inflation of this sort, which is generally promoted as being done in the name of increased "brilliance,"  an effect I find slight and even then not in balance with the cost of extra strain in upper registers for singers or brass, but if the rest of the band or orchestra is tuning up to 443, you're more or less stuck with the increase. One great additional practical disadvantage of this comes, of course, with existing works involving combinations of instruments and electronics or using tuned percu...

I've been stuck in the middle of this alphabet for some days, trying to write something useful about music and nature.  Without much success, as it turns out, for the terms "nature" or "natural" seem mostly more distracting than useful. Now, the time was when a Beethoven or an Ives could treat "nature" as a musical topic.  And whether in Beethoven's pastoral bird-song imitations or in Ives' transcendental contemplations of rocks and whatnot, we don't really buy such a distancing to the natural anymore or, likewise, a division of nature from culture and artifice.   Such a distinction hinges on a segregation of human activities from the rest of natural history that is unsustainable.  Yes, there is still a charge to be found from looking to natural phenomena for new musical resources and models, but there is no more illusion that our "acts of new music" are executed in a nature-free preserve. In musical theory and aesthetics, the dis...

Wayang kulit (Javanese shadow puppet) figures of Barack and Michelle Obama, commissioned by Indonesian President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono from wayang artist Ki Ledyar, pictured, of Yoyakarta, in advance of next week's state visit.

Walter Zimmermann's Desert Plants: Conversations with 23 American Musicians , published 1976, long time out of print, is now accessible again on Walter's website, here .  If you who don't know Desert Plants, you should.  It's a landmark both for American experimental music and for its account of a young West German composer discovering his own musical sensibility, grounded in a relationship to history and geography, through an encounter with a musical "other", in this case a collection of American musicians who, at the time, received almost as little attention at home as they did abroad.  While several of the musicians interviewed remain less well-known or well-known only in niches, with the passage of time the music of many of those included in Desert Plants has attained a prominence that sometimes makes it hard to recall how great a challenge their music posed to the then-establishment (and, to some extent, still-institutional) avant-gardes, American and Eur...

How come the topic of concert-going etiquette — and applause, in particular — is always framed as a zero sum game?  It's as if our choice is either black ties and perfect decorum and funereal silence between and during movements or it's dress-down with cheering, beer, and popcorn like at a hockey game.  Doesn't that leave out the greater part of the field of both real and possible listening environments?  Even sporting events offer such a real range, with expected and tolerated behavior gauged to the particular features of the individual sport.  Just consider the contrast in dynamics and decorum between a snooker match and a pro football game, with golf, tennis, cricket, baseball, basketball, hockey and European or Latin American soccer lined-up, more or less, on the continuum in-between.   If a maximum of control over ambient and audience noise is what you or the music requires, there is always the privacy of your own home, whether making the music yourself or listening vi...

Voices, instruments, resonators, amplifiers, processors, mixers, loudspeakers, air, architecture, ambient noise, ears (auricles, canals, membranes, cavities, fluids, ossicles, cochleas, nerves), brains, bodies.*     Memory, imagination, notation, recording, training, practice, habit, preference, style, ideology, belief, taste, commitment.   Authority, institution, impressario, arranger, librarian, contractor, section leader, conductor, manager, bookkeeper, banker, producer, presenter, sound designer, editor, publisher, copyright holder, licensor, lawmaker, lawyer, broadcasting authority, censor.**  _____ * Not to mention bone conduction, cochlear bypasses and direct electrical stimulation of the brain with transduced acoustical signals;   Maryanne Amacher advocated a "post-cochlear listening". **Not to mention parents, teachers, scholars, reviewers, critics, polemnicists.

An active line on a walk: so begins Paul Klee's Pedagogical Sketchbook .  I want to write a counterpoint book that begins the same way.  The musicians' convention is that line = melody. Everything becomes melodic : Christian Wolff  (see Wolff's Lines ).  So great is our rage for connecting single sounds into lines that "pointillist" or "punctual" music is inevitably heard a melodic.  Connect the dots.   Fellini's lines, beginning somewhere unlikely, ending up somewhere else improbably.  A line can describe a journey, movement from here to there.  Or a thread, a path taken or a map to be followed. La Monte Young: Draw a straight line and follow it.  Straight lines, wandering lines. The long line, a center of attention continuing through a large work, can defeat — push into the background — the most animated ensemble polyphony.   ***** Musical lines differ from graphic lines in that they are embedded in time, which moves only one way. (Which is often r...