kimberlyyeo010198

A thoughtful post ( here ) by physicist Sean Carroll on the rules of morality and games.  His argument that rules of these sorts are not based on the laws of the universe nor handed from some deity but are nevertheless not arbitrary, invented and refined over time by real, fallible human beings is usefully applicable to music as well, with musical repertoires and styles hewing closely to the received rules but receiving a shock of  invention from time-to-time with extensions and refinements of the rule. Now music does play against a certain immutable physical and physiological background — sensory consonance and dissonance, for example, with fairly clear correlates in physical and neurological domains — but the evidence presented by the diversity of existing musical repertoires suggests that there are plenty of alternative strategies for optimizing local musical rules to take into consideration these aspects to a greater or lesser (including no) degree. And yet, for all this d...

An unplanned pause (caesura/gap/absence/rest/fermata/tacet...) due to an out-of-service right hand (a small operation on the index finger is scheduled, annoying and inconvenient but not serious). Ironically appropriate to the moment, I suppose, as I had planned, drafted, edited, tossed out, redrafted, and retossed a long item about John Cage's music today, as a way of filling in this curious gap between the 20th anniversary of his death and the 100th of his birth. I tried to write about my unsettling over Cage performance and reception today, the sense that there are very many very fine and spirited performances of the works and that it is very good for music in general that Cage's music has become an institutional concern and is now played at Juilliard or the Proms, representing an opening for music rather than closure and, in the best circumstances, changing the institution more than the institution changes the music, but with the reservation that many Cage performances are (...

The popular musician Beck has just released his new album. Not as a cd, nor as downloadable files. As sheet music . (To be published in cooperation with McSweeney's .)  Yep, interpretable sheet music. Notated music is the new vanguard. ***** Composer Richard Winslow's law:  if you want to repeat some music precisely, you ought to transmit it orally, while if you want to guarantee that the music will change over time, you should write it down. ***** The recent news of a shakeup at the owner of notation program Sibelius and a possible buy-out of the company which produces Finale has caused some anxiety over the future of both programs.  (If one of the companies goes under, for example, how will owners of the software be able to register their programs when moving to new computers?)  It has also caused some useful meditation over the nature of musical notation in general and engraving in particular.  What are the advantages and disadvantages of music notated by h...

Linguist Mark Liberman of Language Log has a great post about the anatomy of vocalizing, here ., including a link to John Fink's video "Glottal Opera."   This is vivid stuff; I don't think I'll ever look at a singer in the same way again.