kimberlyyeo010198

As a freelance composer, I have a fairly casual relationship to weekends and holidays — yes, the kids are more likely to be underfoot and in need of parental tending, but otherwise I'm in no obligation to not work just because of the calendar.* But I do reserve a special status for one day, Leap Day, a day of catching up on lost time or accumulating some time on credit, a day which seems to me to allow some exemptions to routine, to invite, if not celebrate, the exceptional. Also, because its anniversaries get tucked away into some tiny curled-up dimension of Calabi-Yao spacetime (okay, they don't really do that, but they do get somewhat hidden by the ambiguity of having either or neither an anniversary every one AND/OR four years), there is both a certain freedom of operation and the luxury of a longer rhythm of recall. In any case, the extra day in the calendar is not one to be wasted. Here's a minor example: In one of my pieces, I included an alternative version of one ...

Salon has an article about the " death of chick lit ." I have a certain fascination with genre writing in fiction, less with genre as a commercial strategy and more with fiction that uses genres as surface topics — Joyce did it in Ulysses , Pynchon does it most brilliantly in Against the Day , China Mieville is perhaps the current reigning champ — but watching the product development and commercial markets in adventure, romance, westerns, space opera, fantasy, crime etc. rise and fall and sometimes return, even to challenge the "art" genres on their own terms is engaging on its own terms. Music has its genre repertoires as well, and tracing them is of similar and probably more popular interest. Most musical production, the most popular music, is attached to genres with fairly hard boundaries between them. The kind of music I work with most — my own music, the music I discuss on this blog etc. — is marginal to this, when not essentially inaudible to audiences of ...

I've noted here before my impression that the mainstream "contemporary (post-/ex-/pseudo-/semi-)classical" has gradually become — for better and/or worse — a repertoire music,* a status that in the 20th century was largely associated with genre musics. With this development, we can reckon with more examples of the current Osvaldo Golijov sharing/borrowing/stealing controversy. ( This thread at Sequenza 21 is keeping up with the story.) Now, one of the necessary conditions of the formation of a musical repertoire is that numerous musical elements will be shared. These shared elements can be more abstract or structural in character — certain preferred forms or ensembles, for example — or they can be more immediately material — scales and modes, figures, riffs, sequences, progressions, tunes, scoring patterns, rhythmic tricks, even a characteristic dynamic profile (see Mannheim School ). The identity of an individual work in a repertoire with considerable sharing is o...

What is Renewable Music , anyways? So I'm reading David Antin writing about Marjorie Perloff writing about Ludwig Wittgenstein this evening and Antin — inevitably, as he's writing about the Tractatus — has to use the word "picture" and I'm suddenly thrown back for a moment or two by the look of that word, "picture". It just doesn't look right, the orthography doesn't click, it's as if I've forgotten the spelling and simply can't recognize it, though I damn well know I've been reading and writing that word for four and a half decades. The very shape of those letters in that sequence suddenly looks wrong... is that really a word? Do English words really do that? For that moment, it doesn't look a thing like the word [picture] in my head or match the sound of the word [picture] in my head, but there it is. Picture that. Then, later in the evening, I'm overhearing music, not quite listening, just on the edge of really...