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Author Archives: Sam L. Richards
Beware of Illegitimization Disguised as Categorization
Beware of those who seem seem obsessed with categorization, as their clandestine project (frequently unbeknownst to them!) is often illegitimization, or devaluing something by stripping from it the very categories which empower it.
Posted in Thoughts Leave a comment
ECCE: New Website
Although it has been in use for over a month now, I have failed to mention it here on my own blog:
ECCE (the Eugene Contemporary Chamber Ensemble), the new music ensemble which I currently direct and conduct, has a newly refurbished website that is so hot I think my own servers will fry if I [...]
Posted in Concerts/Events, News/Updates, Other-Links-Etc. 2 Comments
June 19, 1995 — Untitled
This is worth reiterating:
Beach rocks jutting up from liquid churn
pebbles in the sea
Cheek bones beneath my lover’s face
What are they to me?
Hard things shape and hold in place
The softness of the earth.
Bones and stones support the shape
That rends all beauty’s birth.
— John H. Richards, June 19, 1995
Posted in Other-Links-Etc. Leave a comment
Boccherini, Performance, and the Post-Modern Musicology
The composer achieves nothing without executants. . . for while it is pleasing to hear people say, “What a beautiful work this is!” it seems to me even more so to hear them add, “Oh, how angelically they have executed it!”
- Luigi Boccherini[1]
I know that music is made to speak to the heart of man, [...]
Posted in Thoughts, Uncategorized, Writing Leave a comment
Music Composition Pedagogy 101
1. Before anything else (including asking to see what music the student has written that week, monologuing, critiquing, nit-picking, or nose-picking) ask the student if there is anything in particular that they would like to discuss, present, or ask about. Asking simple questions like this can avoid an enormous waste of time for both you and [...]
Posted in Thoughts, Uncategorized 4 Comments
Morning Musing
I am not nearly as concerned with being correct as I am intensely interested in being insightful.
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No Practice More Damning
There is no practice more damning to the reputation and cultural presence of concert music than the insistence that the future must still be dominated by the long-held looming and illusory belief in the precedents of a supposed tradition so thinly contrived to be composed of a long-standing aesthetic line of evolving conventions from the ancients [...]
Posted in Thoughts, Uncategorized Leave a comment
Family Feud, Google Style
This morning, sitting around the breakfast table sucking down homemade blueberry-strawberry-banana-cranberry all fruit smoothies (is there anything better?) my family discovered a fun new pastime. It is a version of family feud, reincarnated as a lens into contemporary culture and its uses of search engines.
Most web browsers come with a built-in search bar that defaults [...]
Posted in Other-Links-Etc., Thoughts 4 Comments
Dance For A Reason — "Tangential" With IfillDance
One of my recent collaborations with choreographer, Valerie Ifill, and her newly forged company, IfillDance, will be featured later this month at Dance For A Reason, slated to be at the Hult Center for the Performing Arts’ Silva Concert Hall on January 23rd.
As stated on Dance for a Reason’s website:
In 1992, Geni Morrow had a vision of [...]
Posted in Concerts/Events, News/Updates, Projects Leave a comment
Music Theory Pedagogy 101