kimberlyyeo010198

Pliable gets it exactly right : A critic writing a savage review of a concert is considered to be doing his job, not being anti-classical music. But a commentator writing critically of the BBC's output is considered to be an anti-BBC heretic. Which suggests parallels between the BBC and the established Church. Both have been flattered for decades by unquestioning believers. Both are now in terminal decline. And the loss of both will be a great tragedy. Unfortunately, it appears that this is far too subtle for the management of many of our institutions: criticism, when expressed because one finds the work or the institution so important that one wants it to be done better , simply gets heard (and used) as a vote against all such work or institutions of the sort.   This problem is far from confined to the U.K.. New music programming in German radio stations faces exactly the same problem, exacerbated by ratings competition from private broadcasters and the budget pressure put on by t...

In this Chopin year, we're going to be hearing a lot about idiomatic instrumental composition, and in particular, the ways in which the physical, tactile acts of playing interact with aural considerations.  Most of the talk will, of course, be about the keyboard, from Bach (see here ) to Chopin and on to Bartók and Ligeti (tactility is also a hot topic among the complexers).  But here is also a new article about the complex handedness of Jim Hendrix and his choice of a left-handed guitar.* _____ * Playing "wrong-handed" is a minor fascination of mine.  From time to time, one hears about pianos with inverted (right-to-left bass-to-treble) keyboards, which can be emulated with a good midi keyboard and are, at turns, frustrating and fascinating to play.  Also, there is the example of the violinist Rudolph Kolisch, a close associate of Schoenberg, who played left-handed, which offered an acoustic advantage in quartet playing and some advantage in teaching as well, as he coul...

Variety, contrast, change. The liveliness of music is bound up with dynamism. La Monte Young is fond of saying that "contrast is for those who can't compose", but with all due respect to my teacher, contrast is essential — Young's own music is full of contrast — and the critical issue for composers is management of contrast, within the scale and scope of a given musical environment. To my ears, there is more dynamic variety within much Q'in or clavichord music — instruments which can never rise above the dynamic level of piano — than is available on the best made and played Steinway. The absolute range of dynamic contrast may be smaller, but the degree of differentiation, the scaling within that range, is much greater by being much more refined.* Even the most disciplined performance of Young's Any Integer (for Henry Flynt) , a piece in which a single piano cluster is repeated as precisely as possible for a number (often a large number) of time soon bec...

Sometimes you have to just throw things away.   Notes.  Riffs.  Phrases.  Movements.  Whole pieces.  Big ideas.  Repertoires.  Let go of that impulse to save and use and reuse everything, to make everything important.  Just toss 'em.  Listen to Sinatra leave those notes out.   Or Carlos Kleiber rehearse a gesture so close to perfection that you don't have to, like, pay it any more attention.  These bits and stretches of music are more valuable — more musical — in their absence than in their presence.  Even more than that:  they are more present as music when they are unplayed, unheard, physically absent.  Every composer is uneven, not every piece is a masterpiece, and not every piece needs to be visited, let alone revisited.  Cast a cold ear.   Learn that being unsentimental, practicing unattachment, is often more musically sensitive than trying to own every last detail. 

John Cage — this is from memory, so this is a paraphrase — said that "we need an avant-garde, otherwise nothing would be invented."  His tone was urgent,  it was for him a question of human survival,  and for Cage there was no meaningful distinction between physical and aesthetic survival, concerns that are made articulate in writings from his series of Diary: How to Improve the World (You Will Only Make Matters Worse) to the late Overpopulation and Art .   Cage well knew inventors focused on physical survival: his father and Buckminster Fuller, for example, and he cheerfully accepted his teacher, Schoenberg's, identification of Cage as an inventor in the field of music; likewise, he was always enthusiastic about the musical inventions of his colleagues.   In Houston, many years ago, I was supposed to do a radio interview with Cage about his Ryoanji ; instead, we spent an hour in his hotel room discussing the frequency response of PZM microphones and the Piano Mechanics ...

This is brilliant.*  I rather hope that Dennis Báthory-Kitsz goes on to organize a similar competition for arts administrators.  _____ * please note the ethical policy here — unfortunately not practiced by all competitions — of guaranteeing a refund of the entry fee should a prize not be awarded in a given category.

The late Heinz-Klaus Metzger like to quip that Webern was the "last composer before the advent of air conditioning", as Webern's music presupposed an acoustical background absent a layer of aero-mechanical noise, sometimes constant, other times punctuating events with turnings-on and -off. But Metzger's quip wasn't quite right, as there isn't a concert hall anywhere or of any age that doesn't emit creaks and groans that have nothing to do with climate control. Foundations are forever unsettled, wooden parquet and panelling crack, light fixtures give off whole concerts of their own, and all these noises are joined by the breathing and wheezing and coughing and sneezing and fidgeting and what-not made when real live people are present. This was brought home to me Friday night during a performance by the hr-Symphonie under Lucas Vis of George Crumb's early Variazione . As is to be expected with this pairing of orchestra and conductor, the performance w...