kimberlyyeo010198

David Foster Wallace had a technique (see, especially, the short story, Oblivion , in the like-named collection) in which the continuity of a passage is punctuated, no, broken, by a number of asides and would-be clarifications, housed between commas, m-dashes, parentheses, or square brackets which, ostensibly in the name of precision, sometimes do indeed have that effect, but just as often create contradictions (in the case of Oblivion , revealing more about the narrator than the narrator should have intended) which may be revealingly comic or tragic and — through their intervention in the nominally principle (i.e. those not comma-, m-dashed-, parenthese'ed-, or square-bracket-jacked) text — actually do the heavy labor in propelling the narrative forward. As it happens, the short story of Wallace's in which this technique appeared to most acute (the fore-mentioned Oblivion ) includes snoring (in the context of a married couple's dispute over whether or not the narrator (the...

Tonality is a normative order.

I was recently roped into playing trombone for small local music-making and, out of practice, grabbed the nearest sheet music which happened to be Telemann's set of 12 Fantasies for transverse flute without bass accompaniment. Not really trombone music, but they're great fun all the same, just add the right clefs and key signatures to get a working transposition, and you're ready to go.  While I was at it, I found that couple of them made even better recorder pieces, and I've enjoyed playing them with tenor, voice flute, and altos in f and g, each with optimal transpositions of their own. One of the interesting features about the set is that it includes movements which are polyphonic, including fugues and a passacaglia.  Now, putting multiple voices (in this case, two) together in a composition for a monophonic instrument requires a minor amount of technical legerdemain, involving some omissions in one or another voice, careful use of registers, and some arpeggiation of...

Ron Silliman, whose blog has become my one stop shop for contemporary and experimental poetry, points to a recorded 1954 talk by poet Josephine Miles on teaching poetry .  Miles was an important figure in the Bay Area, and was, from her tenured chair (later University Professorship) at UCB, the academic point of contrast or even pendant to Robert Duncan (on one hand) and the Beats (on another).  But when she was kind enough to give me a few minutes, a very long time ago when I was a Santa Cruz undergrad, it was to ask her about her Los Angeles High School classmate, John Cage.  She recalled that he had wanted to become a minister and had excelled at oratory, with his high-pitched voice well-suited for public speaking (which makes sense for a time when the microphone was not yet ubiquitous to the pulpit.)  In this talk, Miles recalls a high school class on the Aeneid, in which the text was read and not analysed, as a critical experience in her life. I doubt that Cage...

Here are a couple of recordings that have landed my way of late and I'd like to share, showing some nice extremes of style and means*: A video of James Klopfleisch's   Unplanned Listings . An audio file of a short electronic piece by David Feldman , written in and generated by a Postscript file, btw. An obstinancy of pieces by the well-grounded Jon Brenner . A piece in 7-limit Just Intonation (well, aiming for it) by Daniel Stearns. The first performance of Robert Erickson's Cardenitas '68 , a scena for solo voice and small ensemble for which he built several of the instruments used — stone chimes, stroked metal rods, tube drums. _____ * I don't go out of my way for recordings, preferring live music, but recordings are almost unavoidable — they just show up, it seems, like door-to-door salespeople, missionaries, and those scented pine tree-shaped plastic things that hang in car windows — and of course they are useful, both for music intended idiomatically for record...

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