This post is an extension of the original Music Theory Pedagogy 101. 1. Music, an artistic discipline which is already struggling socially and economically, ought not further burden itself by educating its future professionals in such a way that its adherents treat ideas as stagnant insipid a priori givens as opposed to fluid and questionable [...]
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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“Well, in Oregon we like to be different, so we set aside an entire week to honor trees. The Oregon State Legislature has decreed that the first full week of April shall be designated as Arbor Week.” Click repeatedly in the box below to generate some random arbor beauty.
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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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 [...]
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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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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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