kimberlyyeo010198

I've recommended some talks by David Antin previously, but overlooked this Q&A session following his "line music counterpoint disjunction and the measure of mind".   About a third of the way into this recording, Antin gives the most concise and on-target critique of Cage's working methods — both his question about the division of labors (here, between composition and listening) and the use of chance and indeterminacy — that I have encountered.  (The talk itself, and several others, all worth your while, can be found here .)

A friend and I were recently talking about John Cage and his close relationships to important contemporary innovators in other art forms (Cunningham, of course, but also several generations of visual artists (Duchamp and Miro to Tobey and Graves to Rauschenberg and Johns to Anastasi and Bradshaw), and writers (from Jackson Mac Low to Chris Mann) as well as some major unclassifiables (like Fuller, MacLuhan or N.O. Brown) and how these relationships gave a wonderful charge — without superficially or arbitrarily mixing ideas, forms, media — to his own work.   While almost every composer I know among my contemporaries has some non-trivial, indeed deep and productive, interests in the extra-musical,  few, if any, composers working today can claim a wealth or variety similar to that enjoyed by Cage.  In part, this is because of a simple management issue: there's so much going on, in music alone, that it's tough to have any overview here, let alone to have real bearings out there in l...

This article , subtitled Much of what investment bankers do is socially worthless is well worth the read.  As new and experimental music all too frequently gets placed in a similar category (heck, by- the-book Marxists will dismiss it as superstructure — and an insignificant fraction thereof, at that — so we're pretty much used to getting disrespect from all sides), it's a bit refreshing to see the captains (and admirals, and commodores) of finance in the light of their costs and benefits to society.  On balance, I think, new and experimental music comes out looking pretty good in comparison: we produce something real, if a perishable good — sound waves do dissipate — and our rent is, in real terms, cheap.  But that small investment in a musical good has proven potential, if very tiny, to provide returns for centuries.  Next time you join some friends to sing some Josquin, just think: Wall Street, which of your recent investments is going to be paying off like this in 500 year...

Someone pointed me to this presentation by Lawrence Lessig, all about the present copyright mess and the use of existing materials in new creative work (in particular the question of fair use with creative methods based on recycling, parody, plundering, mashing, remixing and all that.) It's not a surprise that Lessig, a law professor, is addressing this as a primarily legal issue, and the fact that the everyday practices of a good portion of the population are not legal is a real problem, so Lessig's clear articulation of this problem is welcome.  (This topic is also fascinating as it is essentially a conflict between two liberal positions, the first which recognized that creators have a right to claim forms of meaningful ownership over their work, and the second which views access to forms of information as a universal and necessary — to the production of new work — right.)   However, in the larger debate, it's once again disappointing to find that the legal and economic ...

I've been in and out of electronic music studios since 1978, when I was part of an effort to lobby my school board to approve a course in electronic music, the first to be offered in California at the High School level.  (The course was approved when an elderly member of the board was assured that "no, we wouldn't be making disco music like those BeeGees.")  We had a very simple monophonic synthesizer, a few tape recorders, an 8 channel mixing board, and almost enough cable and mics to make interesting music.  We spliced a lot, a skill I still value highly (this post, for instance, is a product of splicing), but the most valuable experience was learning to listen closely to recorded sounds, to hear and become more articulate about each of the parameters represented, and then to imagine how these sounds could be presented in larger ensembles and continuities.  Later, in two different Universities, I got to work in two very different studios, each with its own distinct ...

Composer Laura Karpman has completed the late Robert Hilferty's Milton Babbitt: Portrait of a Serial Composer video documentary. It's viewable on line here . It nicely ties in all of the odd connections that make Babbitt such an improbable and interesting figure — from his childhood in Jackson, Miss., to Princeton and the merry old RCA Synthesizer, to teaching Stephen Sondheim or Stanley Jordan — and, with the old battle lines within the East coast avant-garde somewhat forgotten, I think it's become much easier to separate Babbitt's music from that of his camp followers and recognize how good he is when he's at the top of his game, which, in his case, is talking about music as well as musicking proper. BTW, the best parts of the video, for me, are of Babbitt holding forth before family and friends in a Chinese restaurant; it's in these moments that the film really becomes something close to ethnographic film recording a micro-musical culture that is quite e...

These videos of some very cool solo viola studies composed and played by Garth Knox are vivid illustrations of what a virtuoso performer with some serious compositional chops can do. I look forward to hearing more from Knox in forms beyond the technical etude. The rich diversity of composed music is due in part to the wide range of experience and imagination that each individual composer is able to bring to writing for particular instruments, voices or ensembles.  Of those composers who write particularly well for instruments (let's be honest: not all do), many are generalists, with broad knowledge of each of the instruments they compose for, while others are themselves are more specialized — often as both performers and composers — on particular instruments.  I don't think either generalists or specialists have an edge here, but rather that our musical lives are livelier because we have both.  We benefit from the virtuoso pianist- or violinist- or percussionist-composers, but...

Some late, loose items: (1) China Miéville has a new-ish blog, rejectamentalist manifesto .  It's aperiodic, often fragmental or pictoral, but reliably interesting.   The recent posts on the the UK coalition government's plans for cut-and-burn reductions in cultural and social spending are on the mark, and much of what is noted in the UK applies equally well to the Netherlands, the Republicans in the US, and the German coalition government. (2) Here's a recent small item at The Eastside View , Charles Shere's blog, which is a model of engaging and useful critical writing: honestly sorting out opinion and taste from just-the-facts-ma'am reporting, making interesting connections, and not treating the musical as an autonomous category of cultural activity.  Charles, a fine composer as well as critic, is a treasure in the musical landscape.  (3) Pliable notes that 95% of Gramophone magazine's readers are male .  Why is this the least surprising factoid of the week?...

Always on the right path, Pliable has been following the story of EMI's descent .  With the latest successful claims by creditor Citigroup against EMI, what can we expect will happen to the back catalogue in classical music? I suspect that there is a real opportunity to be had here in picking up that catalogue at fire sale prices and immediately turning it into digital goods.  Sure, the amortization may be long-term — and in terms longer than any major financial concern is now willing to consider — but these goods are reliably durable audibles. (If the present UK coalition government really had their capitalist chops about them, they would find some way to claim these as assets of national interest, make the modest investment to create the platforms required to sell downloads, and then reinvest the income in contemporary music making. Unfortunately, I suspect that there are interests in the present government who actively hold any engagement by the state in culture in such low rega...

In principle, I'm on the "side of the noises" (as Cage put it), but I'm not altogether certain that that is actually saying anything particularly significant or interesting anymore.  I remember being thrilled to read, in the pre-Sokal-discount days of Social Text , the first excerpts of Attali's Bruits to appear in translation.  Attali's use of the Breughel Battle between Carnival and Len t remains a brilliant metaphor, AFAIC, but when I finally put paws on the whole little book of Noise , it was serious disappointment time, as he really took things no further than the equally deterministic schemes of either Weber or Adorno.  And, more critically, he seemed not to have anything particularly deep to say about how music is actually put together.*  (A more useful, it seems to me, treatment of the topic of noise, and largely because its discussion is not exclusively or even primarily about musical noise, is in Bart Kosko's Noise .)   An identification of one...

I propose the design of a comparison survey of the present music notation/engraving program landscape; should there be interest in such a project, this is an open invitation to make suggestions as to its form and content. This is an interesting moment for notation software in that we are not limited to Finale and Sibelius, for — as good/bad/ugly/useful/useless as those two programs may be — no single program has (or even should have) universal functionality or flexibility and having the additional options provided alternative or auxiliary software is a very good thing. At the moment, there are some interesting new-ish programs available as free or commercial software and a couple of older programs with useful features have become available as legacy items. The comparison ought to have two components, the first a comparison chart (this program can or cannot do this) with some evaluation (how easy or well the program does this or that) and the second, if possible, a comparison of outpu...

Artist Aram Bartholl is embedding usb drives into walls, buildings and curbs for public but anonymous data up- and downloads. Not surprisingly, the comments focus in on the risks of acquiring viruses or having your equipment sabotaged, making this media equivalent of anonymous sex or sharing used needles; sad how modern public life gets stuck with such risks. In any case, it's certainly one way to try to get your music out there via sound files and sound-playing applications.