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Category Archives: Thoughts
My Articulation Engine
I like feeding ambiguity through my mind’s articulation engine, like routing disparate threads through a loom; what was once detached and meaningless becomes interwoven and enriched by its now sensical and codified surroundings.
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Conglomerate
My favorite kind of rock is conglomerate. All sorts of stuff butted up against each other to make a unique whole. What a great aesthetic. Too much music assumes that to be of any import it must consist of a single type of rock within the conglomerate. “Can’t have too many ideas in one piece!” [...]
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Richard Taruskin’s Wisdom
To composers imbued with a 19th-century world view, artistic traditions are transmitted ”vertically.” Nineteenth-century music historiography is an epic narrative of texts arranged in single file. It assumes that artists are primarily concerned—whether to emulate or to rebel—with the texts of their immediate precursors. These assumptions have led to an obsession with lines of stylistic [...]
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Music Theory Pedagogy 101
This is in follow up to my previous post titled Music Composition Pedagogy 101. Comments, criticism, corrections, suggestions, and overall beefs are more than welcome in the comments below.
1. There are no rules, only conventions. The language that you use in order to communicate the subject to your students essentially defines the students’ relationship to [...]
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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.
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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, [...]
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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 [...]
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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 [...]
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Some poetic residue