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Prosaic is more than Academic

This is a fascinating confluence of activity:  The composers James Saunders and John Lely have begun a major project about prose scores ( here ) and Phil Ford of the Dial M for Musicology has been using text based exercises in his teaching and there's some interesting discussion about this at the blog ( here ) . Also, Frog Peak Music has recently placed Christian Wolff's very influential Prose Collection online ( here ) and, of course, there is Upload...Download...Perform, which is just chock full of textual/musical excitement ( here ). Such text-based exercises or pieces or scores were central to the teaching (in music and extra-departmentally)  of the extraordinary pianist and theorist Jon Barlow at my grad school, Wesleyan, with immediate connections to Cage, Wolff, Oliveros, Lucier, Young, Fluxus, but also to Barlow's other interests, which ran to Euclid, C.S. Pierce, Wittgenstein, Ives,  Baseball, Blake, Faulkner, Joyce, and Stein.  Barlow's student, Kenneth Maue,...
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Think Again

Repetition is opportunity. A nice line from Xenakis: When you say repetition, it is "thinking again about the same thing." This is what I think of as the meaning of "repetition." (from here ), reminds me  ( once again ) of my favorite Lewis Carroll verse, The Mad Gardener's Song : He thought he saw an Elephant,   That practised on a fife: He looked again, and found it was   A letter from his wife. "At length I realise," he said,   "The bitterness of Life!" (...) and, of course, John Cage's advice: If we are suffering, and we are able to recognize it, we have the opportunity to change our minds.   
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Rote Politics

Ron Silliman points to this post with the statement Why memorizing poetry is inherently right wing .   The question of memorization is, of course, sometimes an important one for musical performance as well and sometimes we musicians also make a similar distinction between rote and "by heart" memorization.  Generally speaking, the pro-memorization camp is our conservative party and it is typical for competitions and recitals on the establishment circuit to insist that musicians play without sheet music visible on stage.  (This insistence comes with that same weird macho-but-prissy swagger that only conservative pseudo-intellectuals carry.)  While there are cases  in which getting rid of the paper is unavoidable — in opera, for example, or with some percussion instruments for which visual contact with a music stand cannot be maintained —, I side decidedly with the opposition party here.  This is because when playing notated music one can too frequently discover that notation ...
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