Too Many Notes

That's how I feel. I'm probably being annoyingly obsessive-compulsive, but there are just too many notes already. Two notes seem to be just about right; one note aspires toward the condition of 4'33", which hangs over my head as an impossible ideal. That's how I view 4'33": oppressively perfect. It is also the only example of a literal silence, despite Cage's protestations that it's simply an absence of intention rather than an absence of sound. Every act of silence post-4'33" can only be metaphorical now. And even then, it's still too much. But back to two-note music. Feldman's (Madame Press) is the Platonic ideal. Crane's (Sparling) is the shadow dancing on the cave wall. Both are impossibly beautiful. Can there be a third? Or has the two-note ideal been used up, exhausted? Our hands are now forced to write with three notes. And three notes seem to be three notes too many.

Sparling -

Durational Indeterminacy

My favorite works (of others, of mine) are those that leave a certain parameter of music open to chance, open to the spontaneity of a performer performing at a particular point in time, in space. My parameter of choice would be that of duration, and the more I think about it, the more I am convinced that duration is the least understood of all musical parameters, at least in reference to its expressivity, and hence is fair game for the most amount of experimentation. One specific area, however, where I'm open to chance operations but not to indeterminacy in performance is that of pitch. I tend to prefer music where the pitch material is chosen by the composer before a performance rather than by the performer during. I've never been particular convinced that pitch indeterminacy makes sense even when handled by as gifted an improviser as Lukas Foss or Valentin Silvestrov, something always feels amiss, missing, to me. But choosing pitch material via chance operations or through pre-composed processes (like Cage, former; like Eno, latter) never comes across as, never sounds, at least to my ears, random. The only difference between the two methods, I feel, is one of composerly temperament: how necessarily meticulous you are at requiring the exhaustion of your material. That's what the Number Pieces are all about I think: Cage exploring duration. Feldman with his Durations series, with his extended works, similarly explores another side to duration. Music lingers so that we too may stop and linger when our ear discovers something beautiful. Lingering is not an aesthetic choice, it is the only remedy we have to speed, a panacea to immediate gratification. To linger is to ignore utility, and to focus on sound.

Robert Carl on In C

Head over here for a podcast with Robert Carl talking about In C.

And You Ask Me Why I Love New York?

It's the trash dude. It's the trash. It's the fact that the city takes a long time to pick up the trash. And it's because of folks like Joshua Allen Harris, who look at trash bags and see inflatable creatures, breathed into life by exhaust fumes from the bowels of Manhattan.



And here's another reason to fall in love again.

HERB & DOROTHY Trailer from Herb & Dorothy on Vimeo.

5s and 7s

For whatever reason, when I think of Scriabin I think of quintuplets and septuplets, not to mention the very fine art of notated rubato, in the same way one thinks of 'noble' listening to Elgar, or trills when listening to Beethoven. Xiayin's new Scriabin CD is out on Naxos and here's 20 mintues with her live on John Schaefer's Soundcheck.

India's Stonewall

Rational thought finally wins out thanks to the New Delhi High Court.

Sonatas and New Interludes: Review

Of the new interludes the most inviting was Mr. Chan’s Interlude II, a study in repeating, slowly morphing figures built around chimelike tintinnabulations and ending up in a chromatic Minimalist swirl.

The review in the New York Times is out! My heartfelt thanks to pianist David Broome and to the wonderful composers over at Red Light New Music, for their dedication, their hard work, and their inspiring inventiveness. You have my gratitude.

Instead of Water Boarding ...

Music Offers No Solution. It Has No Content.

When I listen to music I'm happy to be in a state of not knowing ... I know I'm listening, but I don't know what to do with it.

Punchline

Best punchline I've read in a long while, courtesy of Steve Smith:

Mr. Guenther noted that three of those long-serving players were born or raised in Brooklyn, “which used to be a hotbed of classical music,” he said, sounding the evening’s only unplanned sour note. Mr. Guenther, too, will depart at the end of this season, and perhaps he will then find time to become acquainted with the many performers, composers and ensembles now thriving in Brooklyn and enriching the entire city.

Transcription As An Act of Subversion