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The Rambler, Tim Rutherford-Johnson, has investigated a recent Proms score by Mark-Anthony Turnage, discovering that it is, in part, an amped-up transcription of a recent pop hit  ( here and, most astonishly, here ).   Between this and the 800% slowed down Justin Bieber tune, noted on this page a few days ago, one starts to wonder if we are moving into a new era in which art music parodies of popular material become a central genre.  While I'm certain that there are some intellectual property thickets to cross through here, if this phenomenon establishes itself, it would seems to be placing the relationship between commercial and art music production back onto a more comfortable plain, and a plain long familiar to composers.  Just think of all those masses built around the Renaissance pop song L'Homme Armé , many of them stretching the melody or hiding it in a dense texture beyond immediate recognition, or the complexes of remembered tunes and landscape in Ives (and, to some ...

I really like this list of ten lost technologies .  How do good ideas get forgotten? Often because they have been kept secret (typical in family-run enterprises or with military technologies, in which secrecy has a commercial or strategic value.)  Sometimes, however, good ideas wear out their usefulness and get replaced by alternatives.  There has been a great exchange on this process in economic theory among some prominent social science bloggers ( here is a good place to start).  Among music scholars, ethnomusicologists have long been occupied with the process of theoretical change and the so-called new musicologists took up this theme in the '80s (and now, having become institutionalized itself, the new musicology is increasingly confronted with an offense by a more traditional musicology).  Curiously, it is in music theory proper (and its speculative counterpart, composition) that discussion of the patterns of theoretical change seems to be handled at greatest distance.  I sus...

So... two composers, a hard-core complexist and an equally hard-core experimentalist, happen to meet in the lumber department of a hardware store, waiting in line to get some plywood cut to order. The experimentalist asks the complexist why he's there. The complexist answers that he's "working on a very big piece, and I'm using so many oversize charts and graphs and tables and arrays" that he needed a piece of plywood so he could add an extension to his desk in order to accommodate all his paperwork. "Why are you here?" asked the complexist in return. The experimentalist smiled: "I like the sound of plywood going through a really big table saw."

What bacon is for food, stretching is for electronic music.  It can make anything sound better. Here's a prime example, made with Paul's Extreme Sound Stretch .   Slowing things down, widening the perceptual frame, was one of the initial impulses in the minimal side of the radical music.  La Monte Young's goal was to be able to "get inside the sound", to bring out all of the detail and complexity of acoustic events which on first impression may appear to  be simple, minimal.  (The ability to slow down music without altering pitch was also one of Steve Reich's initial concerns; not satisfied with the technical possibilities in the analog electronic studio of his day, this kind of process was eventually realized by real live players in Reich's Four Organs .)  Now that stretching has become so ubiquitous, has it already achieved the status of a cliché?  In film music, I suspect that this is already the case. Fortunately, in experimental music, there are no c...

In 2007, I wrote a post here about the Aerophor, a device designed in the early 20th century to assist wind players with sustained passages.   While controlled reservoirs of air have long played a part in creating a sustained tone for certain wind cap and free reed instruments, the foot pedal-operated Aerophor appears to have been a unique machine as it was intended for standard orchestral winds.   I was able to find little further information about this until, recently, Mr Jacob Polak, of Amsterdam, visited this site and communicated that the inventor of the Aerophor was, in fact, his grandfather, Bernard Samuels, of the Netherlands, for a time conductor at the Royal Opera in Schwerin. (Following other web sources, I had misspelled the inventor's name and misidentified him as Belgian rather than Dutch.)  Mr Polak was kind enough to send some fascinating documentation about the Aerophor which he has permitted me to share here (click on individual images below to enlarge.)  Based o...

There has been a thoughtful discussion at Amusicology about the relatively small number of musicology blogs  (a number substantially reduced Ithinks by the recent end of Dial "M" for Musicology ) .   The reasons are, of course, manifold and complex, but I believe that a major reason has been an attitude towards publication which has come to dominate the practice of academic musicology.   This attitude focuses  on publication directed towards fellow and sister academics rather than to a more general public, and is carried out through the publication forms most likely to be credited in hiring, tenure, and promotion decisions (and — coincidentally or not — the ones you can access only if you have the independent wealth to afford a subscription or have access to a good University library or JSTOR).   While there are, indeed, advantages to these publications, the quality filters of peer review among them, and the necessity of some filters given the terrific strain placed on the p...

Perhaps unique for a 1983 graduate of the University of California at Santa Cruz, all of my experience with drug-induced expansions of perception were vicarious in nature and — to date — I've smoked exactly one cigarette, which had nothing but ordinary commercial-grade tobacco in it*. Nevertheless, I was wildly interested in the possibility of be able to hear more, going so far as to replicate John Cage's famous visit to an anechoic chamber and even spending an essentially Santa Cruz evening floating in the warm salt water of a sensory depravation chamber, but these experiences were enhanced by nothing more chemical than perhaps a room temperature can of Mountain Dew or a chocolate-covered expresso bean, my then-favorite means for pulling study all-nighters. I twice started dissertations about prominent experimental music composers only to get hung up by the fact that I had no idea how to deal with their drug use. The composers in question were active in an era in which dru...

Alex Ross has a pair of posts ( here and here ) about a harmonic progression with some significant history, moving, for example, from F# Major to d minor, two chords with no common tones. As it happens — the lattice of coincidence being what it is —, in Budapest last week, I picked up a copy of Ernő Lendvai's Verdi and Wagner , a volume intended to be the first of several on "Bartók and the 19th century". Lendvai is best known to musicians for his thesis that major structural divisions in Bartók's music correspond to Fibbonaci proportions and the golden section. I've never been convinced that this thesis is precisely true, but find it unremarkable that such proportions in a rough form are present as it simply makes sense that major events in the course of a musical work would be successfully programmed to maximize our attention by appearing somewhere between the half-way point and the end, and a sequence like 1:2, 2:3, 3:5, 5:8, 8:13, ... hovers right in that r...