kimberlyyeo010198

If dissonance and noise, or more precisely, the emancipation of dissonance and noise formed the contested ground of music in the first half of the 20th century, continuity was the central issue of the second half and we're still wrestling with it. ***** After the very brief moment of radical serial technique (part of that line that goes from Webern and Messiaen to the early numbered works of Goeyvaerts, Boulez of the first book of Structures etc. through the first (gorgeous failures that they were) attempts at synthesis with superimposed sine waves) in which discrete events were the focus, several competing approaches emerged for "connecting the dots." The place of John Cage in this chronology is important (and it's also important to insist that Cage's music was, in part, parcel of the serial program with his charts equivalent in many ways to 12-tone arrays, including, in some cases, insistence on full 12-tone aggregates (although said aggregates may not have...

As it happens, this evening a friend pointed out one of these irresistible online clips of the Sun Ra Arkestra; many things can and have been written about the Arkestra, but their survival into the 21st century as a functioning live performance big band — and a big band with such a heterodox style and world-view — is one of the most endearing bits of evidence of music's potential to act as a counterforce to prevailing musical style and economics alike. Baumol's cost disease: salaries in jobs that have had no increase in productivity rise in response to the rises in salaries of jobs that have had increases in productivity. We need ever less labor to produce ever more goods and provide many services, but a string quartet still requires four bodies to produce the same quantity of music which a string quartet produced with four bodies two hundred years ago. And the orchestra? The large "romantic" orchestra is one of the — if not the only — examples of mass skilled man...

A (Javanese) gamelan rehearsal this afternoon, the first after a break of several months, with a group of Indonesian nurses and orderlies with whom I've now played for more than twenty years here in Frankfurt. Today, I played bonang panerus , the higher pitched of a pair of double-rowed small kettle gongs. I like playing bonang panerus because I can play repertoire that is unfamiliar (or forgotten) without notation, just by following the audible cues of other instruments, mainly the larger and lower bonang barung , with which part my instrument interlocks, and also because panerus plays continuously in the loud repertoire, among the instruments with the busiest or — more precisely — most dense, parts. One of the characteristic textures of the bonang is imbal , with the two bonang playing a repeated pattern, usually a scalar melody of four tones within the individual piece's pathet (a tonality within the pentatonic pelog or slendro tone system*), the tones distribute...