Composition Today

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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 ...
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Plate of Shrimp

Although my own reserve of faith is modest and my religious interests mostly ethnographic, I do have a special pocket of conviction in the power of the lattice of coincidence. (Don't know about the lattice of coincidence? See Miller in Alex Cox's film Repo Man : "A lot o' people don't realize what's really going on. They view life as a bunch o' unconnected incidents 'n things. They don't realize that there's this, like, lattice o' coincidence that lays on top o' everything. Give you an example, show you what I mean: suppose you're thinkin' about a plate o' shrimp. Suddenly someone'll say, like, "plate," or "shrimp," or "plate o' shrimp" out of the blue, no explanation. No point in lookin' for one, either. It's all part of a cosmic unconsciousness. ") On the one hand, this is mostly surprising but ultimately trivial connections that are, statistically seen, bound to happen,...
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Further Excerpts from the Minority Report

(1) "... nothing wrong with failure.  Experimental music is all about accepting the risk of failure.  And I'm not just talking John Cage-experimental.  You want to know an experimental musician who failed?  Wagner failed, that's who.  Wagner failed bigtime. He wrote music dramas that are unsingable and unstageable.  You don't believe me?  Name one production in which the singing and staging get all-round praise.  I'm talking praise from card-carrying Wagnerites.  When the vocal and orchestral writing demands voices that don't exist, and probably, without some form of amplification, will never be able to exist and the staging requires old-fashioned stage magic that no one believes in anymore, you've got a big recipe for failure... ...being a Wagnerite, even a Perfect Wagnerite , means not just the ordinary operatic suspension of disbelief, it means the perpetual suspension of complete satisfaction, the Tristan chord extended forever, having to be satisfied ...
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