kimberlyyeo010198

(This is the third in a series of items which begun with The Raw and The Cooked and continued with From Honey to Ashes ). When a rule of etiquette first appears in the historical record, it enters as a corrective, not yet a norm: an instruction to use a knife and a fork indicated that people were eating without the use of knives and forks; an injunction against unpleasant noises indicates that meals were once taken in the company of conspicuous sounds. It's actually the other way 'round with composing.  Our rules of etiquette, found in treatises by Fux and Morley and Schenker and Hindemith and dozens of MacHoses and others even more deserving of obscurity, have to be read — if read at all — as invitations to misbehave: every rule represents a path not taken, but damn likely a path worth revisiting if we are at all to move forward.  The etiquette for table manners is all about ever-more narrowing the range of possible behaviors; the etiquette of composition, in contrast, is all...

So, I've initiated a project — the details of which will be hush-hush until the end of January — which involves at least 18 composers and an equal number of ground basses.  For my own contribution, I decided to compose first and notate later, getting the music I wanted in my ear, mind, hands, and tongue (it's wind music) before committing it to paper or monitor, as a way of increasing discipline in a musical environment that is, for me, both so rich and so familiar that going on auto pilot and just writing something out was simply too easy. (Sounding easy, which I might want, is not the same as composed easy, which I don't necessarily want.)  At the same time, knowing that I was going to commit some notes to paper put a powerful  — and powerfully useful — constraint on my paper- and screenless composing, in that I was not going to accept just some more noodling-around-out-of-habit improvisation.  When it came time to notate, this discipline had turned into a serious ...

Christopher Shultis has a terrific post about interpreting John Cage's work for amplified plant materials, including a pod rattle and, typically, cacti, Child of Tree , here .  "Interpreting", in this context, means not (or, at least not in a conventional sense) following a score and eliciting some expressive content, but, on the basis of a set of verbal remarks, assembling the instrumentation and amplification, developing playing techniques, and devising a playing score, a project which begins with an apparently very open situation and develops, through practice, into a distinctive musical work with real constraints and recognizable features.  Above and beyond the attractive richness and gentleness of the piece for listeners I don't think that it can be emphasized enough how much Child of Tree is enhanced by the project-like character of its score, drawing players into discovery of its qualities, extents and limits. The experimental tradition offers a wealth of piec...

With the current election, many Americans are getting lessons in statistics these days, and the focus has obviously been on trying to elicit strong signals from noisy information sources.  Many composers also use statistical methods in our work, but it strikes me that the intention is subtly different, as it's more our interest to introduce noise into otherwise orderly circumstances.