kimberlyyeo010198

Sometimes a piece should be finished, all done, but something — and it's usually something very small — still irritates, calling attention to itself as not quite, or not yet, right.  My recent set of Compositions 2012 #s 1 - 7 on this blog provides a good example.  These are prose scores, written in text rather than a conventional staff and note graphic notation, and they are a parody (in the musical sense) of some famous pieces by one of my teachers, La Monte Young, which use the text "Draw a straight line and follow it."  I admire La Monte's straight line, which is a consistent element in his very consistent music, but I've never quite been able to stick to straight lines myself. For better or worse, I tend to meander, and my first Composition 2012 was simply a one-off, lightly affirming this. And then — for better or worse — I realized that I had to make a set of these, and in the Youngian spirit it had to be a set of seven, which I completed over the next w...

Hector Berlioz: Les Troyens (1856-58) Opera is not really a presence in this list of landmarks, although I readily recognize that opera, as conservative as it has become, was, for most of its history, the central field for musical innovation.  If something new happened with regard to tonal practice, orchestration, texture, or form and continuity, chances are that it happened first in a theatrical context while concert music, with its repertoire of fixed ensembles and forms, was traditionally the more conservative field.  It's no wonder that Stravinsky was, first and foremost, a composer for the theatre (although dance was his genre more than opera) and many more contemporary innovators, among them John Cage, La Monte Young, Robert Ashley or Philip Glass have been at their essence as theatre composers, particularly when they test the extent and limits of the theatre as well as music.  But even with such innovation in music theatre taken broadly most opera has become rathe...

We know, more or less, what music is and we know, more or less, how to make more of it.   We recognize music as music when we choose or happen to hear it, and we can judge — to some reliable level of agreement — if music is well played or well sung.  There are established and known repertoires, some of which steadily add new elements, without much disturbing the identity of the repertoire as a whole. Most music works that way, certainly the kinds of music that sells well in recorded forms, gets radio play, wins prizes and gets commissioned by big institutions. (Yes, our School of Musical Quietude.)  But if this is the case, then maybe I'm not actually interested in most music so much as in the musical , or more exactly, in the extent and limits of the musical. And, I'm optimistic enough to insist that the extent and limits of the musical are an unknown, that we're not altogether sure how to make more of it, and the only way to find out is to compose, accepting the risk ...

Works & Days is a very promising new online journal, collecting a diversity of good things under that great Hesiodic title. I especially liked Luke Cissell's essay Against Specialization and Arturas Bumšteinas's piece My Own Private Bayreuth .

Draw pictures, curtains, blinds, baths, distinctions, conclusions. Draw down ambitions, weapons, expeditions, adventures. Draw up schemes, plans, and plots. Draw in lovers, auditors, spectators, investors, insects. Draw through errors. Draw out features, hidden desires, blood, tears. Continue drawing through until the action is exhausted and/or complete.

Plant a straight row of black broken tulip bulbs. Wait.

Draw lines in the sky and follow them with buskers, marching bands, minstrels, bicycle bells and horns, hunting horns, and pipers in fields, etc.. Cattle and bells optional.

Draw (or find) broken lines and connect them.

With maximum amplification without feedback, draw lines in sand, dust, rice, small stones etc.. Follow them as they drift, erode, blow, wash, or get pushed, kicked, or tossed away.

Favorite Song: (at the moment) Douglas Hein: Orlando, He Dead . Favorite Sonata: Mozart No. 15 in F major, KV 533/494. Favorite Symphony: Ives Fourth Symphony. Favorite Sandwich: Monte Christo. Favorite Story: "Byron the Bulb" (from Gravity's Rainbow .) Favorite Sound: Snowfall. Favorite Season: Fall. Who's next?

Erase your neighbor's line.

Draw a meandering line and follow it, or cross it, or run parallel to it, or ignore it altogether.

As diverse and dissonant as the community of composers can sometimes be, sometimes we are able to come together, to step up in order to assist when a colleague is in composerly need. Oswaldo Golijov has been having problems of late fulfilling all of his commissions in a timely and original manner, so a number of composers have come to his aid, each composing a few measures of their own, made freely available to orchestras to substitute for the missing Golijov.* The Golijov Bailout Movement now has its own website, here . _____ * BTW, I am presently preparing an Erased Golijov violin concerto, to replace the Golijov work which has now been twice postponed from its healthily-commissioned premiere.

The Louisville Orchestra was once one of the most important sponsors of new music in the US, through its commissioning and recording program. That was a long time ago and now the orchestra has been particularly hard hit by the great recession. Negotiations between management and the players have long been at an impasse, despite the players agreeing to significant concessions, and now the management has shut the players out altogether and have announced plans to replace the entire orchestra with non-union players, that's right, scabs. The players have agreed to binding outside arbitration, but one of the management's two stated objections to arbitration is, tellingly, that " it would have given an arbitrator the power to make decisions regarding management ." Unfortunately, there is a plausible scenario in the US in which only a small handful of major cities will have large professional orchestras whose players have reasonable compensation, security of employment, ...

The battle between Carnival and Lent*, or: between the market and capitalism, or: between live music-making and recordings. The dynamics of the market are information and noise on one hand, supply and demand on the other, always seeking meeting points, moments of stability, agreement. No market is perfect, but the alternatives are less so, and capitalism, hedging markets, is a fundamental modification of, if not an alternative to, not necessarily the same as a market. N.O. Brown: The dynamics of capitalism is postponement of enjoyment to the constantly postponed future . (D.J. Wolf: The dynamics of late tonal music is perpetual postponement of the resolution of dissonance to the constantly postponed cadence. ) Capitalism presupposes continuous growth, regardless of its likelihood, sustainability or desirability. Capitalism presupposes an unequal distribution of information, and manufacturing noise is a strategy. The advantage of capitalism is that it makes possible, through debt to ...

In a book review , Freeman Dyson recalls his encounters with Arthur Eddington, an important astronomer who also held some heterodox (read: wrong) ideas in theoretical physics and Immanuel Velikovsky who famously held unorthodox (read: so off as to be not even wrong) views on cosmology, earth science and world history. Dyson nevertheless finds much to value and cherish in the memory of both men. Dyson: "The fringe is the unexplored territory where truth and fantasy are not yet disentangled." ~~~~~ Now, in music we certainly have had our share of heterodox and unorthodox composers and in many cases, it is the music of these that we treasure the most. (For me Berlioz, Ives, and to some extent Skryabin are among the counterforce composers who most reliably produced work of this level.) Music doesn't work according to the kind of criteria with which a physical theory, in contrast, might be falsified or superseded, and I honestly don't have the least idea how one might...

David Graeber : I always say one of the great advantages of the academic life, as opposed to working in the creative industries (being a writer, musician, artist, etc) is that universities never, ever pretend they just forgot to pay you. Yes, the recognition is appreciated, but... I have several friends teaching in the states who have recently been paid in the form of IOUs and several who have had their salaries cut, effectively, through fictional furloughs. Also, in my (tiny) music publishing business, I've watched the payment morale of US university libraries decline so badly, with payments sometimes a year or more behind (in four cases, two years and counting), that I'm close to saying no more to University purchase orders. In those worst cases, they don't even pretend that they forget to pay, they just ignore their post!