Category Archives: Thoughts

Richard Taruskin’s Wisdom

By Sam L. Richards | Published: February 25, 2010
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

By Sam L. Richards | Published: February 24, 2010
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

By Sam L. Richards | Published: February 12, 2010
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

By Sam L. Richards | Published: January 31, 2010
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

By Sam L. Richards | Published: January 29, 2010
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

By Sam L. Richards | Published: January 29, 2010
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

By Sam L. Richards | Published: January 28, 2010
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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Family Feud, Google Style

By Sam L. Richards | Published: January 16, 2010
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 [...]
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More Metaphors, Creativity, and thank goodness for Einstein's Honesty

By Sam L. Richards | Published: January 6, 2010
I’m fairly certain that any valuable artistic work or insightful idea I’ve ever come up with is the result of understanding one thing—sometimes naively, sometimes intentionally—in terms of another. It is as if conceptual metaphors are the basis of (all?) creativity (if creativity is defined as being the construction of original ideas that are of [...]
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Similes are Simple but Metaphors are Masterful

By Sam L. Richards | Published: January 3, 2010
I’m fascinated with, and entirely dependent on, understanding and experiencing one kind of thing in terms of another. (A big thanks goes out to Lakoff and Johnson for the insight required to generate this rather concise and potent definition). We tell ourselves stories in order to make sense of and ultimately improvise and live with [...]
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