I am a composer and a musician. What I do is relevant and necessary for the perpetuation of culture. I bring meaning, however small, to a life that is otherwise matte, grey, and dull. I bring a set of skills and a particular knowledge into a world that pays lip-service to "creativity" and little else. I can tell you everything you ever wanted to know about the bassoon, woodwind and brass fingerings, string instrument bowing and positions, how to compose a piece of music in any medium from the ground up, anything about post-war experimental music, most things about phenomenology and aesthetic theory, and give a rundown of Western art music's history in surprising detail, from roughly 800 CE to present, in about an hour, and I can go into even greater detail for the Reformation period, the Ars Nova, the Ars Subtilior, and American, German, French, and Latin American music after 1890. Of all of these, I create works of art the best.
A few ground rules.
No, I won't write you a piece just to get "exposure" - I do have bills to pay. No, I won't perform for free for you "as a favor" - it takes time to prepare. No, I won't get a "real job" because this IS my real job: it takes time, effort, labor, skill, and patience to do what I do. I'm damn good at it, even though I'm continually learning and striving to improve.
Let's observe this differently.
Can I borrow your skills, sir, as an accountant? It will give you exposure to potential clients! Can I borrow your time and well-honed abilities as an architect to design a structurally-sound and aesthetically pleasing building for my friends? I can't pay you, but you should be lucky you get to show off your skills in public with the finished product! What about you, there? Can you, bricklayer, carpenter, and mason dwell over a blueprint for a while and build a house perfectly in front of a live audience that has seen houses built faster and better than what you may be able to do? Pay you? You should be lucky we all get to participate in your gifts!
See? See how stupid that sounds?
Beethoven got to get paid, son.
20.10.10
25.9.10
Easy Things to Consider Regarding Islamophobia
"Nimium altercando veritas amittitur." [Through too much fighting, the truth is lost.]
– Publilius Syrus
After the advance into power by the rather repulsive political party known as Sverige Demokraterna – or, rather, the Swedish “Democrats” – in Sweden over the past few weeks, a party that uses for its motto “Keep Sweden Swedish,"1 and after the continual disgrace in American discourse known as DoBYMoH (Don’t Build Your Mosque Here) based on completely refutable and fallacious logic, I am obligated as a citizen of the world and as, hopefully, a fairly enlightened American to help provide a list and call to action to people as aggravated as I am at the pure, unabashed dichotomization of the world’s population over Islam, the victimization narrative present in especially Western discourse, and the rampant falsehoods about what Islam is and what it stands for.
Mainly, I’m just pissed off and would rather see some sanity restored to this discussion.
The responsibilities of citizenship and the fluidity of nationalism are – by way of understatement – tricky and not-simple things. When a person immigrates to a new country to seek its citizenship on paper, a thorny issue erupts surrounding identity. It is easy to point to American policy and citizenship as a quintessence of this problem: an immigrant takes an oath of citizenship in order to uphold the responsibilities and enjoy the rights and privileges of being an American. But what, I ask, is an American? Is there a solid national identity to which we can point, some sort of totemic standard that dictates American-ness? In a word, no. Why so many Greek festivals? Why the allowance of Día de los Muertos celebrations within our borders? Why Oktoberfest? The cliché is that we are a nation of immigrants, and while it may seem specious, it’s true. The singularity of an American identity is its plurality, and, in essence, it’s the only thing that seems to come close being the only idyllic thing entwined with being American. What, then, are the responsibilities of citizenship within a multicultural nation? What, then, are the responsibilities of citizenship in a place like Sweden where immigrant populations are extremely small? What, then, can we say about nationhood and nationalism? If we are a nation without a nationalist identity, what rights do we have to criticize others who bring their cultures, their faiths, with them? If we have minimal cultural standards – standards that cannot necessarily be defined in universals or in government documents – on what defines citizenship and national identity, what rights do citizens have to dictate and legislate practices that exist peacefully in other parts of the world and do not interfere with, and do not dismantle, and serve to bolster, preexisting cultural frameworks? Turkey is not a Muslim nation – it is a secular state where most of its citizens are Muslim. Indonesia is a secular state. India is a secular state. Egypt is a secular state. Religious plurality is allowed and not criticized as means to destroy the fabric of national identity and it is not targeted as process through which societal downfall will occur. As arguably the most culturally diverse nation in the world, why is it we feel the pernicious need to target one faith, one culture, as the bogeyman set to unravel the American way of life when we cannot point to a solid, basic definition of what American means, outside of being able to say “I live in America?” Nationalism, in this sense, must no longer be used as something internal, as something akin to a birthright or a given. I was born in America, but I may not be American because of my views? This is ludicrous. I must conform to a certain physical and ideological ideal in order to be a Swede? Again, ludicrous, and nothing short of begging for stereotypical epithets rather than a veracious identity.
At various points in history, Judaism, Christianity, and other faiths have been oppressed and faced opposition in their development and migration. Obstacles, and even genocide, did not stop these faiths from becoming rooted, becoming established, becoming loved, accepted, and known the world over. To know that Judaism continues to thrive and flourish despite genocides, to know that Christianity flourishes despite schisms and early persecution, only ensures that Islam – and its 1.5 billion adherents – will survive. Attempts to end it, attempts to garner converts, attempts to vilify it: all will ultimately fail as a means of subverting it as a cultural and religious force. Islam has followed a geographic and cultural path no different from the first two Abrahamic faiths: it arose in the holy land, it took a few hundred years to gain traction, and it moved omnidirectionally from its center. It found a home in multiple lands, became a steering force for law and order, dictated cultural values and ethical standards, but with one exception: a fair amount of higher mathematics arose from Muslim scholars, including algorithmic procedures and Algebra. (Zooks! Maybe this is why so many dumb white people worldwide hate Muslims!) At various points, each of these religions became slightly perverted by those who took some vague or poorly-worded scriptures a little too seriously. And lo, we end up with Zionists, Fundamentalist Christians, and Wahabists.
All faiths have their perversions. Each of the Abrahamic faiths has its outlier groups of people hellbent (pardon the pun) on eradicating the Other or, at the very least, converting everyone into their “chosen” / “right” / “only” faith. Here we have a problem that exceeds logic: clearly, in the realm of belief we can have no absolutes. Perhaps absolute morality issues like murder (it should not be done) do exist, but if we are to view religious ideologies as things of rightness, as items bearing moral positive worth and value, we cannot place perfect, infallible values or glowing positive weights upon the tenets and the sum total of what the faiths preach. Aside from this unsolvable problem, we have an issue of deontology: each of the Abrahamic faiths preaches the necessity for nothing but a total conversion of all unbelievers to their respective faiths. So far as I can tell at this point, only Islam is winning at that – and I honestly chalk this up to the fact that by sheer age, Islam is one fifth as old as Judaism, and only half as old as Christianity. According to the Holy Scriptures – take your pick – adherents to the faith must convert and evangelize. Are Judaism and Christianity miffed that the youngest kid on the block is winning, or is it more a matter of moderation? That is to say, where is the fervor? Where is the zeal? The billions of regular adherents of the Abrahamic faiths are creating disservices to their faiths and not upholding their bargains to make each heathen a true believer, yet the vast majority of mainstream participants in these faiths seem to find perfectly acceptable the fact that they are not upholding a major duty of their religions. If this is the case, there needs to be a radical re-cognition of religious duty. And, in so doing, we valorize the fallacious and the fallible. Which, therefore, eradicates any absolutist claim that one faith supersedes another or trumps a lack of faith.
The Constitution guarantees the protection of all people of faith; outrage over the existence of a religion is Constitutionally protected; the existence of a religion res ipsa is also protected. Debate and faith are on equal footing nationally and under the UN Declaration of Human Rights, no single one is elevated above another, and all people worldwide should have the ability to criticize and practice whatever faith they so choose. This should be self-evident.
In terms of the infamous “Ground Zero Mosque,” which – if it is not already apparent, is misnamed as it will be a community center, like the Jewish Community Center on the Upper West Side of New York – is being funded privately, transparently, through private hands with private property. Government money and government property are not being exchanged and are not at the center of the debate, yet the rhetoricians from the far right would have us believe that somehow this is being sanctioned by the Federal Government. It is private. Private development is just that, and cannot be subject to public debate or discourse beyond what is already subject to public oversight or transparency; if we as a populace want to dictate how land and real property trade hands, then the entire capitalist system of real property ownership needs to be overhauled so that we micromanage every exchange of money for land. I do not see this happening in human existence any time soon. Further to the point, do we ask for transparency each time a Christian church or community center is built in our neighborhood? Can we be certain that the local Christian church isn’t being backed by a domestic extremist or terrorist group? Do we impose and erect such barriers to the freedom of worship and community outreach when the Church of Latter Day Saints or American Catholic Church plan a new building? Should we? In all fairness, if we are to be selective of where and what faiths do in the public sphere through private means, perhaps we need to insert into the popular imagination a perpetual outcry about all institutions that hold such power and sway – over both our deepest beliefs, and our deepest fears, and how the twain meet.
The topic of what should and should not be built near “Ground Zero” is moot and I will not address it here.
Whether it is simple human nature, or if we as Americans – or we as Westerners – have been conditioned to do so, we seem to fall under the auspices of the binary and instinctively and intellectual have the necessity to find, or conjure, or create a nemesis. Historically, it this has been easy for Americans since the inception and nascence of this country: first, the English. Then, at various points, Native Americans, Chinese, Irish, Polish, Italians, abolitionists, anti-abolitionists, Blacks, Jews, Catholics, Lutherans, Swedes, Norwegians, Mexicans, Cubans, Russians, Germans, Japanese, and countless others. Since 9/11, Islam has been an easy target – a testament to an unbridled and well-embraced fear by the American population, and a further testament to our choice of viscerality and emotion over reason – although over the past few years, popular discontent has shifted to other venues. Popular hatred has regained focus on to the dark spot of Islamophobia, in no short measure aided by the Great Recession, lingering wars in the mid-East and South Asia, and the irascible, irrational fear of a Black President, yet somewhat well-effaced through populist “anger” (viz. Tea Party). We are growing, oddly, either as a species or as a civilization, one, in that we are verily struggling to find a new enemy. We are having difficulty latching on to one subject for derision, one entity to vilify. Perhaps we are finally maturing as an "American" society and, as such, are taking one long, last, brutal swing at an unseen apparition of an enemy that we've created out of our own xenophobia and ignorance.
Furthermore, since popular media and news reporting tend to straddle, if not cross, the line separating “reporting events and allowing the reaction to arise organically” and “creating the reaction in order to promulgate events and evince reportage”, it is ever more difficult to find the truth of a matter and retrieve the heart of causality. It goes without saying that popular media evokes reactions not merely because of what is reported but in the “unbiased” tone through which the mainstream media place “facts” on display.
Finally, we have Islam itself and its practitioners to observe. Dig out an original version of the Quran – not one that adds in the codices of Sharia law, which were added by Muhammad’s aides toward the end of his life and repeatedly reworded over the centuries. At the heart of Islam are messages no different from the other principal faiths of the world: peace, love, kinship, charity, compassion… Then, though, if you wish to read the words about Islamic law, it might be wise to break out the Talmud, or Leviticus and Deuteronomy, and, of course, it would be wise of us who practice these faiths to see the myriad ways we don’t practice these laws, and how Western governments and laws were based upon Judeochristian texts, and how many of these sacred duties were really hygienic and cultural practices: Hallal food? Simple: botulism and salmonella in poorly-cooked meats. No shellfish? Same deal: tough to cook properly. Don’t mix your wool and cotton? Simple: in the desert, it gets really hot, and wool will make you sweat your ass off while cotton breathes and keeps you at least slightly cooler.
So, with this, I say: hug a Muslim. Embrace plurality. Hold on to your faith, but don’t choke it into submission, and don’t let it drag you around. Mankind’s survival – or, at the very least, mankind’s ability not to look like a bunch of screeching, brainless idiots who can live peaceably – depends on it.
1. "Bevara Sverige Svenskt!" - which, literally, means, keep Sweden Swedish. Personally, a nation of 8 million teutonic, blond-haired, blue-eyed beautiful people is not just a false stereotype, but aesthetically and culturally boring.
– Publilius Syrus
After the advance into power by the rather repulsive political party known as Sverige Demokraterna – or, rather, the Swedish “Democrats” – in Sweden over the past few weeks, a party that uses for its motto “Keep Sweden Swedish,"1 and after the continual disgrace in American discourse known as DoBYMoH (Don’t Build Your Mosque Here) based on completely refutable and fallacious logic, I am obligated as a citizen of the world and as, hopefully, a fairly enlightened American to help provide a list and call to action to people as aggravated as I am at the pure, unabashed dichotomization of the world’s population over Islam, the victimization narrative present in especially Western discourse, and the rampant falsehoods about what Islam is and what it stands for.
Mainly, I’m just pissed off and would rather see some sanity restored to this discussion.
The responsibilities of citizenship and the fluidity of nationalism are – by way of understatement – tricky and not-simple things. When a person immigrates to a new country to seek its citizenship on paper, a thorny issue erupts surrounding identity. It is easy to point to American policy and citizenship as a quintessence of this problem: an immigrant takes an oath of citizenship in order to uphold the responsibilities and enjoy the rights and privileges of being an American. But what, I ask, is an American? Is there a solid national identity to which we can point, some sort of totemic standard that dictates American-ness? In a word, no. Why so many Greek festivals? Why the allowance of Día de los Muertos celebrations within our borders? Why Oktoberfest? The cliché is that we are a nation of immigrants, and while it may seem specious, it’s true. The singularity of an American identity is its plurality, and, in essence, it’s the only thing that seems to come close being the only idyllic thing entwined with being American. What, then, are the responsibilities of citizenship within a multicultural nation? What, then, are the responsibilities of citizenship in a place like Sweden where immigrant populations are extremely small? What, then, can we say about nationhood and nationalism? If we are a nation without a nationalist identity, what rights do we have to criticize others who bring their cultures, their faiths, with them? If we have minimal cultural standards – standards that cannot necessarily be defined in universals or in government documents – on what defines citizenship and national identity, what rights do citizens have to dictate and legislate practices that exist peacefully in other parts of the world and do not interfere with, and do not dismantle, and serve to bolster, preexisting cultural frameworks? Turkey is not a Muslim nation – it is a secular state where most of its citizens are Muslim. Indonesia is a secular state. India is a secular state. Egypt is a secular state. Religious plurality is allowed and not criticized as means to destroy the fabric of national identity and it is not targeted as process through which societal downfall will occur. As arguably the most culturally diverse nation in the world, why is it we feel the pernicious need to target one faith, one culture, as the bogeyman set to unravel the American way of life when we cannot point to a solid, basic definition of what American means, outside of being able to say “I live in America?” Nationalism, in this sense, must no longer be used as something internal, as something akin to a birthright or a given. I was born in America, but I may not be American because of my views? This is ludicrous. I must conform to a certain physical and ideological ideal in order to be a Swede? Again, ludicrous, and nothing short of begging for stereotypical epithets rather than a veracious identity.
At various points in history, Judaism, Christianity, and other faiths have been oppressed and faced opposition in their development and migration. Obstacles, and even genocide, did not stop these faiths from becoming rooted, becoming established, becoming loved, accepted, and known the world over. To know that Judaism continues to thrive and flourish despite genocides, to know that Christianity flourishes despite schisms and early persecution, only ensures that Islam – and its 1.5 billion adherents – will survive. Attempts to end it, attempts to garner converts, attempts to vilify it: all will ultimately fail as a means of subverting it as a cultural and religious force. Islam has followed a geographic and cultural path no different from the first two Abrahamic faiths: it arose in the holy land, it took a few hundred years to gain traction, and it moved omnidirectionally from its center. It found a home in multiple lands, became a steering force for law and order, dictated cultural values and ethical standards, but with one exception: a fair amount of higher mathematics arose from Muslim scholars, including algorithmic procedures and Algebra. (Zooks! Maybe this is why so many dumb white people worldwide hate Muslims!) At various points, each of these religions became slightly perverted by those who took some vague or poorly-worded scriptures a little too seriously. And lo, we end up with Zionists, Fundamentalist Christians, and Wahabists.
All faiths have their perversions. Each of the Abrahamic faiths has its outlier groups of people hellbent (pardon the pun) on eradicating the Other or, at the very least, converting everyone into their “chosen” / “right” / “only” faith. Here we have a problem that exceeds logic: clearly, in the realm of belief we can have no absolutes. Perhaps absolute morality issues like murder (it should not be done) do exist, but if we are to view religious ideologies as things of rightness, as items bearing moral positive worth and value, we cannot place perfect, infallible values or glowing positive weights upon the tenets and the sum total of what the faiths preach. Aside from this unsolvable problem, we have an issue of deontology: each of the Abrahamic faiths preaches the necessity for nothing but a total conversion of all unbelievers to their respective faiths. So far as I can tell at this point, only Islam is winning at that – and I honestly chalk this up to the fact that by sheer age, Islam is one fifth as old as Judaism, and only half as old as Christianity. According to the Holy Scriptures – take your pick – adherents to the faith must convert and evangelize. Are Judaism and Christianity miffed that the youngest kid on the block is winning, or is it more a matter of moderation? That is to say, where is the fervor? Where is the zeal? The billions of regular adherents of the Abrahamic faiths are creating disservices to their faiths and not upholding their bargains to make each heathen a true believer, yet the vast majority of mainstream participants in these faiths seem to find perfectly acceptable the fact that they are not upholding a major duty of their religions. If this is the case, there needs to be a radical re-cognition of religious duty. And, in so doing, we valorize the fallacious and the fallible. Which, therefore, eradicates any absolutist claim that one faith supersedes another or trumps a lack of faith.
The Constitution guarantees the protection of all people of faith; outrage over the existence of a religion is Constitutionally protected; the existence of a religion res ipsa is also protected. Debate and faith are on equal footing nationally and under the UN Declaration of Human Rights, no single one is elevated above another, and all people worldwide should have the ability to criticize and practice whatever faith they so choose. This should be self-evident.
In terms of the infamous “Ground Zero Mosque,” which – if it is not already apparent, is misnamed as it will be a community center, like the Jewish Community Center on the Upper West Side of New York – is being funded privately, transparently, through private hands with private property. Government money and government property are not being exchanged and are not at the center of the debate, yet the rhetoricians from the far right would have us believe that somehow this is being sanctioned by the Federal Government. It is private. Private development is just that, and cannot be subject to public debate or discourse beyond what is already subject to public oversight or transparency; if we as a populace want to dictate how land and real property trade hands, then the entire capitalist system of real property ownership needs to be overhauled so that we micromanage every exchange of money for land. I do not see this happening in human existence any time soon. Further to the point, do we ask for transparency each time a Christian church or community center is built in our neighborhood? Can we be certain that the local Christian church isn’t being backed by a domestic extremist or terrorist group? Do we impose and erect such barriers to the freedom of worship and community outreach when the Church of Latter Day Saints or American Catholic Church plan a new building? Should we? In all fairness, if we are to be selective of where and what faiths do in the public sphere through private means, perhaps we need to insert into the popular imagination a perpetual outcry about all institutions that hold such power and sway – over both our deepest beliefs, and our deepest fears, and how the twain meet.
The topic of what should and should not be built near “Ground Zero” is moot and I will not address it here.
Whether it is simple human nature, or if we as Americans – or we as Westerners – have been conditioned to do so, we seem to fall under the auspices of the binary and instinctively and intellectual have the necessity to find, or conjure, or create a nemesis. Historically, it this has been easy for Americans since the inception and nascence of this country: first, the English. Then, at various points, Native Americans, Chinese, Irish, Polish, Italians, abolitionists, anti-abolitionists, Blacks, Jews, Catholics, Lutherans, Swedes, Norwegians, Mexicans, Cubans, Russians, Germans, Japanese, and countless others. Since 9/11, Islam has been an easy target – a testament to an unbridled and well-embraced fear by the American population, and a further testament to our choice of viscerality and emotion over reason – although over the past few years, popular discontent has shifted to other venues. Popular hatred has regained focus on to the dark spot of Islamophobia, in no short measure aided by the Great Recession, lingering wars in the mid-East and South Asia, and the irascible, irrational fear of a Black President, yet somewhat well-effaced through populist “anger” (viz. Tea Party). We are growing, oddly, either as a species or as a civilization, one, in that we are verily struggling to find a new enemy. We are having difficulty latching on to one subject for derision, one entity to vilify. Perhaps we are finally maturing as an "American" society and, as such, are taking one long, last, brutal swing at an unseen apparition of an enemy that we've created out of our own xenophobia and ignorance.
Furthermore, since popular media and news reporting tend to straddle, if not cross, the line separating “reporting events and allowing the reaction to arise organically” and “creating the reaction in order to promulgate events and evince reportage”, it is ever more difficult to find the truth of a matter and retrieve the heart of causality. It goes without saying that popular media evokes reactions not merely because of what is reported but in the “unbiased” tone through which the mainstream media place “facts” on display.
Finally, we have Islam itself and its practitioners to observe. Dig out an original version of the Quran – not one that adds in the codices of Sharia law, which were added by Muhammad’s aides toward the end of his life and repeatedly reworded over the centuries. At the heart of Islam are messages no different from the other principal faiths of the world: peace, love, kinship, charity, compassion… Then, though, if you wish to read the words about Islamic law, it might be wise to break out the Talmud, or Leviticus and Deuteronomy, and, of course, it would be wise of us who practice these faiths to see the myriad ways we don’t practice these laws, and how Western governments and laws were based upon Judeochristian texts, and how many of these sacred duties were really hygienic and cultural practices: Hallal food? Simple: botulism and salmonella in poorly-cooked meats. No shellfish? Same deal: tough to cook properly. Don’t mix your wool and cotton? Simple: in the desert, it gets really hot, and wool will make you sweat your ass off while cotton breathes and keeps you at least slightly cooler.
So, with this, I say: hug a Muslim. Embrace plurality. Hold on to your faith, but don’t choke it into submission, and don’t let it drag you around. Mankind’s survival – or, at the very least, mankind’s ability not to look like a bunch of screeching, brainless idiots who can live peaceably – depends on it.
1. "Bevara Sverige Svenskt!" - which, literally, means, keep Sweden Swedish. Personally, a nation of 8 million teutonic, blond-haired, blue-eyed beautiful people is not just a false stereotype, but aesthetically and culturally boring.
a confession
I enjoy college football. A fair amount.
There. I feel cleansed, and I'm happy I shattered some of your expectations.
There. I feel cleansed, and I'm happy I shattered some of your expectations.
18.9.10
project status almighty-uh
Never fear! I am working on an essay about the "experimental" epithet I'll post here sometime soon, but for now, I'll regale you with some projects I'm working on in the actual-writing-music part of my existence.
gravity express for standard orchestra (3222-4231-Hp-Timp-2-Strings):
On my website, it says that the piece is already done. I call it: extrinsic motivation. At any rate, I haven't composed an orchestral piece in eight years, and I've never composed a good one.1 I figured it was time. It's a train piece, alright, with some requisite effects and train-y sounds, but it veers a little more closely into tonal-reference category and is more likely than not to be seen as a "crowd-pleaser" type of piece. (I don't have many of those, either.) I estimate the finished product will probably be around 11 to 12 minutes long, which should be safe territory for a lot of contests and hopefully a few performances. To wit: I'm writing it in a less-challenging style and leaving out some of my rhythmic idiosyncrasies that seem to damn a lot of my pieces to a one-performance-and-done existence. I project that the work should be done within two weeks.
deep cover for pre-recorded electroacoustic sounds
Some time back, I posted here about a fixed-media piece I wanted to write based on the numbers station phenomena, and it actually came to fruition. I'm in the last stages of work on that piece and it ended up taking quite a different path (duh) from what I originally anticipated. It became, in the words of a colleague and friend, a "musical short story" with a number of narratives threading through the work. The piece is currently 14 minutes long - which makes it quite iffy when it comes to unsolicited performances and conferences - and while I'm typically fine about writing long pieces, this one actually feels somewhat long for what I want in the piece. I imagine there will be some editing, some remixing, and some fussing with Vegas to make it glitch-free before 2033.2 I also expect it to be done within two weeks or so since it, more than anything else, is in the final stages of birth.
resemblematics for wind quintet
"But, Tom!" you cry, "You've already written this!" I can explain.
Back in 2004, I, a little bassoonist-composer, decided I needed to write a wind quintet. I did. It has sat on a shelf. Deemed too hard by a lot of undergrad performers, I decided that I wouldn't revise the existing movements but, by fiat of necessity, instead add two more. I laid out sketches for movements 4 and 5 some years ago but never finished them. I could never figure out if the piece was strong enough as a three-movement work, and I finally decided: no. I'm balancing out the long-scale form of the work, extending some idioms I was toying with while composing it initially, and wrapping up what I see as thematic loose ends. I don't have a firm end date on this, but I'll try to get this done by the middle of October. I don't realistically have much to add to the sketches, other than decide among the material.
seven selected points of reference for a lingering spectre for violin and piano
I dug out an old sketch, from 2006, of a violin-piano piece I wanted to write. Multi-movement, short movements, reduced materials and rather simple approaches. I had one movement written already: for some reason, I called it the 5th movement, and in its previous form, it clocked in at just around 22 seconds long. I plan to add about 8 seconds of music to it and I finally got around to sketching some things for the other six (!) movements. It follows an arch form (cf: Brahms Requiem) and has a rather minimal approach to pitch material. The vicissitude of the lone written movement is a guiding principle for the rest of the work - none of them can be more than a minute long, except for the 4th movement (the keystone), all must have very simple forms, and use the same kinds of pitch material. I get around this by excising certain pitch classes for certain movements and toying with my interval sequence structure.3 I want to get this one done by the end of October; seems like it could be a strong festival entry, or at least feasibly performable by good performers - and by that, I mean, if a seven-movement piece is only 9 or 10 minutes long, it stands a much better performance chance. It's also been years since my last piano-and-instrument work -- I'm guessing around seven or eight.
Oh! Before I forget, the violin/piano work (should it get performed) will be curiouser in that the movement titles are the program notes. Observe!
On deck:
violin/clarinet/piano (mid-late Novemeber 2010)
wind ensemble (mid-late November 2010)
saxophone orchestra/sextet (no, really, it can be both) (mid-late December 2010)
solo piano work (finally) (mid-late December 2010)
I've also been tempted to dig out some of my older, underperformed chamber pieces and arrange them for wind ensemble and/or orchestra. I see potential in at least a few of them.
***
1. I don't count the viola concerto in this. The viola concerto, while an orchestra piece, is totally soloist-driven. It's also 40 minutes long. It's a good piece, but, damn, I retrospectively got a little too Mahler - or Feldman - on that ass.
2. I run Win7 on my primary soundmaking machine, and for years my multitracker of choice has been Cubase. Steinberg, Cubase's parent company, has been extremely, painfully slow about releasing Win7 compatible upgrades; I fear Steinberg will, if they haven't already, just dump their old platforms, scrap upgrades, and make a new, expensive version of Cubase for Win7. So, I've been stuck running Vegas - a good program for what it is - in compatibility mode, and I get inexplicable glitches here and there in complex renders. No fun. It leads to lots of swearing and panic and surgery.
3. Don't make me explain it. It's a homegrown algorithm based on fairly simple probabilistic math.
gravity express for standard orchestra (3222-4231-Hp-Timp-2-Strings):
On my website, it says that the piece is already done. I call it: extrinsic motivation. At any rate, I haven't composed an orchestral piece in eight years, and I've never composed a good one.1 I figured it was time. It's a train piece, alright, with some requisite effects and train-y sounds, but it veers a little more closely into tonal-reference category and is more likely than not to be seen as a "crowd-pleaser" type of piece. (I don't have many of those, either.) I estimate the finished product will probably be around 11 to 12 minutes long, which should be safe territory for a lot of contests and hopefully a few performances. To wit: I'm writing it in a less-challenging style and leaving out some of my rhythmic idiosyncrasies that seem to damn a lot of my pieces to a one-performance-and-done existence. I project that the work should be done within two weeks.
deep cover for pre-recorded electroacoustic sounds
Some time back, I posted here about a fixed-media piece I wanted to write based on the numbers station phenomena, and it actually came to fruition. I'm in the last stages of work on that piece and it ended up taking quite a different path (duh) from what I originally anticipated. It became, in the words of a colleague and friend, a "musical short story" with a number of narratives threading through the work. The piece is currently 14 minutes long - which makes it quite iffy when it comes to unsolicited performances and conferences - and while I'm typically fine about writing long pieces, this one actually feels somewhat long for what I want in the piece. I imagine there will be some editing, some remixing, and some fussing with Vegas to make it glitch-free before 2033.2 I also expect it to be done within two weeks or so since it, more than anything else, is in the final stages of birth.
resemblematics for wind quintet
"But, Tom!" you cry, "You've already written this!" I can explain.
Back in 2004, I, a little bassoonist-composer, decided I needed to write a wind quintet. I did. It has sat on a shelf. Deemed too hard by a lot of undergrad performers, I decided that I wouldn't revise the existing movements but, by fiat of necessity, instead add two more. I laid out sketches for movements 4 and 5 some years ago but never finished them. I could never figure out if the piece was strong enough as a three-movement work, and I finally decided: no. I'm balancing out the long-scale form of the work, extending some idioms I was toying with while composing it initially, and wrapping up what I see as thematic loose ends. I don't have a firm end date on this, but I'll try to get this done by the middle of October. I don't realistically have much to add to the sketches, other than decide among the material.
seven selected points of reference for a lingering spectre for violin and piano
I dug out an old sketch, from 2006, of a violin-piano piece I wanted to write. Multi-movement, short movements, reduced materials and rather simple approaches. I had one movement written already: for some reason, I called it the 5th movement, and in its previous form, it clocked in at just around 22 seconds long. I plan to add about 8 seconds of music to it and I finally got around to sketching some things for the other six (!) movements. It follows an arch form (cf: Brahms Requiem) and has a rather minimal approach to pitch material. The vicissitude of the lone written movement is a guiding principle for the rest of the work - none of them can be more than a minute long, except for the 4th movement (the keystone), all must have very simple forms, and use the same kinds of pitch material. I get around this by excising certain pitch classes for certain movements and toying with my interval sequence structure.3 I want to get this one done by the end of October; seems like it could be a strong festival entry, or at least feasibly performable by good performers - and by that, I mean, if a seven-movement piece is only 9 or 10 minutes long, it stands a much better performance chance. It's also been years since my last piano-and-instrument work -- I'm guessing around seven or eight.
Oh! Before I forget, the violin/piano work (should it get performed) will be curiouser in that the movement titles are the program notes. Observe!
i. she appeared at my door wrapped in snakes
ii. a capricious spirit she seemed to have
iii. i could barely hear her whisper
iv. she held her glass up to my visage
v. and then the ghost descended lengthwise
vi. and proceeded to flash a tender iris
vii. before it shuttered and hissed away
On deck:
violin/clarinet/piano (mid-late Novemeber 2010)
wind ensemble (mid-late November 2010)
saxophone orchestra/sextet (no, really, it can be both) (mid-late December 2010)
solo piano work (finally) (mid-late December 2010)
I've also been tempted to dig out some of my older, underperformed chamber pieces and arrange them for wind ensemble and/or orchestra. I see potential in at least a few of them.
***
1. I don't count the viola concerto in this. The viola concerto, while an orchestra piece, is totally soloist-driven. It's also 40 minutes long. It's a good piece, but, damn, I retrospectively got a little too Mahler - or Feldman - on that ass.
2. I run Win7 on my primary soundmaking machine, and for years my multitracker of choice has been Cubase. Steinberg, Cubase's parent company, has been extremely, painfully slow about releasing Win7 compatible upgrades; I fear Steinberg will, if they haven't already, just dump their old platforms, scrap upgrades, and make a new, expensive version of Cubase for Win7. So, I've been stuck running Vegas - a good program for what it is - in compatibility mode, and I get inexplicable glitches here and there in complex renders. No fun. It leads to lots of swearing and panic and surgery.
3. Don't make me explain it. It's a homegrown algorithm based on fairly simple probabilistic math.
7.9.10
In the year 2000...
Future blog posts may include but are not limited to the following:
- Why I may never write an opera
- My (semantic) quibbles with the moniker "experimental music"
- A screed about the concept of regret and why it's good for us
- Corporate Empire Building vs Academia vs The Great Recession
- A screed about composition prizes and why they mean little to nothing
- and more!
Grunt.
- Why I may never write an opera
- My (semantic) quibbles with the moniker "experimental music"
- A screed about the concept of regret and why it's good for us
- Corporate Empire Building vs Academia vs The Great Recession
- A screed about composition prizes and why they mean little to nothing
- and more!
Grunt.
26.8.10
Longer Questions That May Never Be Answered
If we were to put a moratorium on creative arts – that is, if we were to actively stop the creation of “new” artworks across disciplines – for a full generation, 25 to 30 years, what would be the result? How would the creative spirit thrive during that interstice? Would people create works subversively? Would the populace that survived the silence awaken with a deeper appreciation and understanding of dance, or art music, or poetry, or sculpture? Would we forget how to create? Would we forget our techniques? What of the children born during the silence – how would they cope? How would they be able to reinsert themselves into the world of artistic creation? Would they be startled or appalled at the idea of people freely expressing themselves through scores or canvases? Would we subsist on previously-created works for a full generation? If so, how is that truly different from the mainstream artistic world as it is now? What would happen to pop music? Would we enter a new Renaissance period where years of ideas accumulated creates a driving push into The Next Phase of creation? Or would we go backward?
Is there such a thing as a musical avant-garde anymore? Have we succeeded in shocking everyone into complacence, or is cultural literacy that advanced and uniform – that is, has a critical mass of understanding been met? I find it difficult to believe that either is true, but this creates a dangerous cosmic interplay of relativistic thought. A soybean farmer in Arkansas may never have heard of Xenakis or Lady Gaga – would either matter to him or her? Do we enter the dark chambers of "it’s new to you but not to me, and that’s acceptable"? Gravely seriously, though, what constitutes the New in music – other than having been just composed?
Is the term “experimental music” anymore just a marketing gimmick or a way to appeal to an already self-selected audience of cognoscenti, the pretentious, and/or gallery-hoppers? When we parse the semantics of "experimental," do we end up with the unified pluralism that all new music is in some way experimental and we need some degree of musical literacy to label something truly Experimental or more in line with Conventional models? Should we rather just make way for history and deem Experimental Music its own subgenre from the mid 1950s until the early 1980s when “experimental” veered into (or was concretized as) Performance Art?
Is there such a thing as a musical avant-garde anymore? Have we succeeded in shocking everyone into complacence, or is cultural literacy that advanced and uniform – that is, has a critical mass of understanding been met? I find it difficult to believe that either is true, but this creates a dangerous cosmic interplay of relativistic thought. A soybean farmer in Arkansas may never have heard of Xenakis or Lady Gaga – would either matter to him or her? Do we enter the dark chambers of "it’s new to you but not to me, and that’s acceptable"? Gravely seriously, though, what constitutes the New in music – other than having been just composed?
Is the term “experimental music” anymore just a marketing gimmick or a way to appeal to an already self-selected audience of cognoscenti, the pretentious, and/or gallery-hoppers? When we parse the semantics of "experimental," do we end up with the unified pluralism that all new music is in some way experimental and we need some degree of musical literacy to label something truly Experimental or more in line with Conventional models? Should we rather just make way for history and deem Experimental Music its own subgenre from the mid 1950s until the early 1980s when “experimental” veered into (or was concretized as) Performance Art?
Labels:
composing,
philosophy,
questions
21.8.10
They never taught me how to focus
Throughout graduate school -- the part of it where I had direct, weekly, and human contact with my mentors -- I was encouraged to have one main project on my docket at any given time but to dabble and keep working on sketches and other works-in-progress. One composition instructor actively challenged me to write as much as possible and find ways to write material quite different from the primary endeavor for the month / term. Retrospectively, this was to force me into modes of thinking to divorce my first responsibilities from any other ideas or brainstorms and to collect a back-catalog of sketches I could use for other, later projects without being tempted to work on too many things at once.0
If I were a visual artist, there is no conceivable way I could have just one easel set up in my studio; no conceivable way for me to keep simply trucking away upon one idea. Part of this is a long-standing problem I have with artistic patience. Part of this arises from the high lack of feedback necessary to younger composers on works of music: it doesn't necessarily matter how it looks, and if I'm composing a work for large forces, I don't get the luxury of hearing whether some element "works" until rehearsals -- or in the case of some dormant, unperformed works, not at all. Part of this also stems from my natural knack to be engaged in many activities at once, despite my quiet and easy-going (typical) behavior,1 a curse from being a "Jack of all trades" personality.
How soon I forget the lessons of past instructors; how soon (and for the past 15 years) has this become a perfect storm.
Many years ago I was relatively prolific. In 2008, by contrast, I didn't finish a single piece I was composing.2 I finished (I think) four pieces last calendar year. While I would love to become more like Villa-Lobos and less like Henri Duparc in terms of compositional output (minus the "Frank O'Hara syndrome" of not revising anything), I don't think it is going to come to pass any time soon.
At last count, I have sketches for nearly 20 pieces in my notebook, most in the very early stages with only a few measures. Some works have several pages of notes, but all rather rudimentary -- and I get into a habit of criticizing and analyzing my sketches (my sketches, for crying out loud!) and putting them aside after I've made my dour notes and changes and called into question what it is I'm doing. I have pieces that I know must take priority: an orchestral work, a wind ensemble work, a few chamber works. I have older pieces in various states of "completion" that need to get revised before I foist them upon an unsuspecting performer or choral director -- that is to say, I want them up to my standards: right now, they're not, and I hate putting my name on something inferior, much less opening myself to criticism for it.3 I have a commission for a saxophone orchestra piece I seriously need to get started on.
But all the possibilities seem endless and too tempting.
And too crippling.4
And I wonder how much of a composer's "voice" is bound up with how many pieces she is working on at one shot, how many ideas are on back burners yet sneaking in...
A lot of my old sketches came about as sporadic, or better impulsive, attempts to capitalize on an upcoming conference, contest, or performance call. (Case in point: I have a cello-piano piece sitting 10% finished in my notebook, a sketch I haven't looked at in over two years) I realize, of course, this is a foolhardy approach to writing. But with so few people asking me to compose works for them, and with a lot of time on my hands, this is the ultimate result: a lot of aphorisms when there should be a philosophical exegesis; charcoal sketches when there should be a 20'x80' mural. This is also due to the fact that my catalog, while quite large in some respects, leaves out some standards and staples: I have one standalone orchestral piece; I have no string quartets or quintets; I have no Pierrot-like ensemble pieces; I have no percussion-only pieces; my piano-and-instrument catalog is fairly thin; most of my chamber music has odd or non-standard instrumentations (bassoon, tenor saxophone, and bass clarinet, for instance, or trombone and violin). So, submissions to things come and go and I scramble. Sometimes I succeed in completing a work (my clarinet quintet -- didn't win the prize I submitted it for, but it's a good piece, still waiting on a performance); other times, like the aforementioned cello-piano work, I get caught up with other pieces, with life, with people, and that October 1st deadline quietly eludes me.
So, I don't know what to do. I don't know how to focus on writing just one piece at a time. Something has been lost in mental translation since the days of composition teachers hovering over my work; something has been amplified in the liberty I've received as a free-lancer; something is missing in the fact that I don't have the immediate resources (peers on a performance faculty at a music school, to wit) to run a piece by someone and get their response. I do have Facebook and all and I occasionally post my scores or send scores to acquaintances and friends -- but there's a frustration level there, as well, in that I rarely get feedback, or at least critiques beyond the topical (of course, many of my friends are busy with spouses, jobs, careers, and the like, so I can't blame them for letting a solo trombone work, for instance, fall through the cracks). I have no ideas on how to focus and I'm left with basically the notion that writing as much as possible as quickly as possible couldn't feasibly include sticking to one work at a time.
I'm dating my music, perhaps. Moving back and forth between sketches, getting somewhat familiar with them, but not profoundly so, and not committing to any singular entity. I did manage to do so with my dissertation and a few other larger works, but those were important works for deadlines or merit. I guess I used those pieces, then. But then, perhaps -- if we extend this gruesome analogy further -- I'm nothing more than a man-whore of composing. And all composers, then, probably fit into this scheme, of moving on from piece to piece after various levels of intimate understanding of each musical world. We're a lascivious, insatiable bunch.
All of us, except maybe Henri Duparc.5
0. This was supposed to be a chronicle of what works I'm attempting to create; instead, this happened. I'll keep this instead.
1. No, really. It's true. My natural demeanor is very quiet, borderline-boring, and not easily provoked. Wasn't always so, to be sure.
2. Admittedly, I started a few pieces in 2008 that I finished in 2009 or am still working on; I also dedicated a fair amount of time to updating and revising some pieces, and I also had this thing called a dissertation (and, at the time, a serious romantic relationship -- despite the discussion above, the two were not mutually inclusive) that took up a lot of my time.
3. As it stands, I have difficulty taking existing works and extracting new pieces from them. I know it would increase my exposure and performance chances, but I'm on principle opposed to taking a movement out of a work to make it stand alone. I also don't relish the idea of more work or finding errors or rehashing old blunders. I should probably change this perspective.
4. cf. Erich Fromm, Escape from Freedom
5. Henri Duparc was a French composer who, along with Samuel Rousseau, Chabrier, Massenet, d'Indy, and Franck, represents the French late-Romantic and post-Romantic traditions (prior to Debussy/Ravel). Despite his lasting reputation, or maybe causative of, his output is one of the smallest and paltriest of any "established" composer. Villa-Lobos, on the other hand as we all know, wrote what seemed like a piece a week -- he himself admitted that a lot of the hundreds of works he cranked out were not very good. Frank O'Hara was a poet who, while I adore his work, could have stood to reread a lot of his poems.
If I were a visual artist, there is no conceivable way I could have just one easel set up in my studio; no conceivable way for me to keep simply trucking away upon one idea. Part of this is a long-standing problem I have with artistic patience. Part of this arises from the high lack of feedback necessary to younger composers on works of music: it doesn't necessarily matter how it looks, and if I'm composing a work for large forces, I don't get the luxury of hearing whether some element "works" until rehearsals -- or in the case of some dormant, unperformed works, not at all. Part of this also stems from my natural knack to be engaged in many activities at once, despite my quiet and easy-going (typical) behavior,1 a curse from being a "Jack of all trades" personality.
How soon I forget the lessons of past instructors; how soon (and for the past 15 years) has this become a perfect storm.
Many years ago I was relatively prolific. In 2008, by contrast, I didn't finish a single piece I was composing.2 I finished (I think) four pieces last calendar year. While I would love to become more like Villa-Lobos and less like Henri Duparc in terms of compositional output (minus the "Frank O'Hara syndrome" of not revising anything), I don't think it is going to come to pass any time soon.
At last count, I have sketches for nearly 20 pieces in my notebook, most in the very early stages with only a few measures. Some works have several pages of notes, but all rather rudimentary -- and I get into a habit of criticizing and analyzing my sketches (my sketches, for crying out loud!) and putting them aside after I've made my dour notes and changes and called into question what it is I'm doing. I have pieces that I know must take priority: an orchestral work, a wind ensemble work, a few chamber works. I have older pieces in various states of "completion" that need to get revised before I foist them upon an unsuspecting performer or choral director -- that is to say, I want them up to my standards: right now, they're not, and I hate putting my name on something inferior, much less opening myself to criticism for it.3 I have a commission for a saxophone orchestra piece I seriously need to get started on.
But all the possibilities seem endless and too tempting.
And too crippling.4
And I wonder how much of a composer's "voice" is bound up with how many pieces she is working on at one shot, how many ideas are on back burners yet sneaking in...
A lot of my old sketches came about as sporadic, or better impulsive, attempts to capitalize on an upcoming conference, contest, or performance call. (Case in point: I have a cello-piano piece sitting 10% finished in my notebook, a sketch I haven't looked at in over two years) I realize, of course, this is a foolhardy approach to writing. But with so few people asking me to compose works for them, and with a lot of time on my hands, this is the ultimate result: a lot of aphorisms when there should be a philosophical exegesis; charcoal sketches when there should be a 20'x80' mural. This is also due to the fact that my catalog, while quite large in some respects, leaves out some standards and staples: I have one standalone orchestral piece; I have no string quartets or quintets; I have no Pierrot-like ensemble pieces; I have no percussion-only pieces; my piano-and-instrument catalog is fairly thin; most of my chamber music has odd or non-standard instrumentations (bassoon, tenor saxophone, and bass clarinet, for instance, or trombone and violin). So, submissions to things come and go and I scramble. Sometimes I succeed in completing a work (my clarinet quintet -- didn't win the prize I submitted it for, but it's a good piece, still waiting on a performance); other times, like the aforementioned cello-piano work, I get caught up with other pieces, with life, with people, and that October 1st deadline quietly eludes me.
So, I don't know what to do. I don't know how to focus on writing just one piece at a time. Something has been lost in mental translation since the days of composition teachers hovering over my work; something has been amplified in the liberty I've received as a free-lancer; something is missing in the fact that I don't have the immediate resources (peers on a performance faculty at a music school, to wit) to run a piece by someone and get their response. I do have Facebook and all and I occasionally post my scores or send scores to acquaintances and friends -- but there's a frustration level there, as well, in that I rarely get feedback, or at least critiques beyond the topical (of course, many of my friends are busy with spouses, jobs, careers, and the like, so I can't blame them for letting a solo trombone work, for instance, fall through the cracks). I have no ideas on how to focus and I'm left with basically the notion that writing as much as possible as quickly as possible couldn't feasibly include sticking to one work at a time.
I'm dating my music, perhaps. Moving back and forth between sketches, getting somewhat familiar with them, but not profoundly so, and not committing to any singular entity. I did manage to do so with my dissertation and a few other larger works, but those were important works for deadlines or merit. I guess I used those pieces, then. But then, perhaps -- if we extend this gruesome analogy further -- I'm nothing more than a man-whore of composing. And all composers, then, probably fit into this scheme, of moving on from piece to piece after various levels of intimate understanding of each musical world. We're a lascivious, insatiable bunch.
All of us, except maybe Henri Duparc.5
0. This was supposed to be a chronicle of what works I'm attempting to create; instead, this happened. I'll keep this instead.
1. No, really. It's true. My natural demeanor is very quiet, borderline-boring, and not easily provoked. Wasn't always so, to be sure.
2. Admittedly, I started a few pieces in 2008 that I finished in 2009 or am still working on; I also dedicated a fair amount of time to updating and revising some pieces, and I also had this thing called a dissertation (and, at the time, a serious romantic relationship -- despite the discussion above, the two were not mutually inclusive) that took up a lot of my time.
3. As it stands, I have difficulty taking existing works and extracting new pieces from them. I know it would increase my exposure and performance chances, but I'm on principle opposed to taking a movement out of a work to make it stand alone. I also don't relish the idea of more work or finding errors or rehashing old blunders. I should probably change this perspective.
4. cf. Erich Fromm, Escape from Freedom
5. Henri Duparc was a French composer who, along with Samuel Rousseau, Chabrier, Massenet, d'Indy, and Franck, represents the French late-Romantic and post-Romantic traditions (prior to Debussy/Ravel). Despite his lasting reputation, or maybe causative of, his output is one of the smallest and paltriest of any "established" composer. Villa-Lobos, on the other hand as we all know, wrote what seemed like a piece a week -- he himself admitted that a lot of the hundreds of works he cranked out were not very good. Frank O'Hara was a poet who, while I adore his work, could have stood to reread a lot of his poems.
Labels:
2010,
composing,
post-structuralist dodderings
18.8.10
Slowing the Phenomenon Down
I come quietly out of the still and silence of the shadows to ask the eternal question:
who the hell cares if someone slowed down a Justin Bieber song 800, or 900, or 1327 per cent to turn it into an "ambient" piece of music?
The more important question, here, is:
why is this a fad? why has this, in the past few days, received more Internet-based attention than the BP Saga or the horrendous natural atrocity at work in the flooding of Pakistan?
The obvious first criticism from you, then, is: "well, you're giving it attention." That may be true, but I do so without hesitation and without any artistic credence. I have also not listened to this super-slow version simply because I not only know what it would sound like, but I know precisely the technique used to change the duration (without reading about it other than seeing it exists or listening to it).
My criticisms are fairly straightforward, and I blame you, the Internet-loving public, for making this a much bigger deal than it ever needed to be.
The technique (well, the primary technique) used to slow down (or speed up) a sound without altering pitch and without radically altering timbre is a little gem known as phase vocoding (pvoc, for short). I won't get into the heavy mathematical fundamentals of it, but pretend for a minute that a sound is a series of pictures. Let's say a one-second sample of my voice can be divided in 1,024 discrete windows, and each window records three things: the pitch spectrum (the amount of energy present at a series, in this case harmonic in design, of frequencies); the intensity (or volume, which is dependent upon the amount of energy in the pitch spectrum); and, the physical location of my voice: since my voice moves in a continuous wave, each of the 1,024 windows will capture whether my wave is in a positive or negative phase. What pvoc does is take measurements of the information in windows 0 through 1023. Depending on what I want the algorithm to do, pvoc takes the information in window n and compares it to window n+1 up to n+n and compares each window to each other. When I want to, let's say, slow my voice sample down but retain the pitch, pvoc looks at window 0 and then window 1, retains the frequency information as much as possible as well as the intensity information, and using the location of the wave's phase as a guide, inserts x windows in between old windows 0 and 1, overlapping the windows as to prevent discretion and render the new, lengthened section as continuously as possible to provide the illusion of continuity. If I want to slow down a sound and change its pitch, it's a lot easier: I just change the frequency information proportionally, phase values remain the same, and my voice an octave lower, therefore (unless I constrain it otherwise), becomes a sample twice as long.
Sounds complicated. It isn't. Not by a mile. It's one of the easiest things to do with any audio editing software, and one of the stand-by techniques for soundscape artists. As an electroacoustic composer, it's one of my top three processes when I'm sculpting sounds and out of ideas. The famous Mac audio processing software SoundHack -- so famous that it's been around since Mac 8.1 and has been free for over a decade -- is nothing but a pvoc processor with additional features. Sony's SoundForge suite has over 20 options of pvoc processing. Cross-platform, free audio editing software Audacity has a respectable pvoc processor built-in. Hordes of composers/programmers make objects for pvoc for MAX/MSP, pd, jMAX, and CSound just to tweak and alter the method behind the pvoc madness. Anyone with an Internet connection, Adobe Reader, and a few minutes of time to learn the mouse clicks and a few dozen more to wait for the file to render can do this. Computer music composers have been using the technique for 25 or more years, but we don't stop there.
This easily segues into the next realm of contention: could it be a little more obvious? Justin Bieber is an insipid, cheap target, and using as unsophisticated a formula as slowing the song down to lampoon Bieber-Lieder is equally obvious and cheap as a means to transform the song into something else. The end result may be something trippy or not necessarily identifiable as Bieber-songs, but it is fundamentally the same. Congratulations, Internet-fame-seeker! You've taken a six-inch-long fruit rollup and made it 18 inches long! (And we say fame isn't phallic. Ha!) On a deeper level, if such can be said, "Bieber's" "music" (look, even I'm a satirist! Hah!) represents the epitome of the mechanized, the zenith of a cultural industry: an androgynous boy, barely pubescent, singing songs from someone else's brain and pen about love and loss and whatever it is 12-year-olds get gaga over these days. He is a product to be consumed, a marketable commodity to be bought and sold, a totem of profit, an icon of the emptiness of a popularized culture where the target demographic doesn't fully grasp the nature of the messages of the songs yet has lucre endowed by liberal-guilt, allowance-granting parents who don't care about the message so long as it quietly remains within the confines of good taste, moral and political authority, and renounces hazardous independent inquiry, fomented and fostered by a central doctrinal authority (the record company) to capitalize as quickly and as profoundly as possible. Cultural daguerreotypes like Bieber -- those icons that will fade over time and be forgotten -- are easy targets for the antipathy-filled section of the dichotomized audience; note the recent "vote" to send Biebz to North Korea to tour. So, it bothers me on an intellectual level that the perpetrator of SLOW BIEBER did not attempt to, I don't know, rework Breitbart interviews or selectively edit a Lady Gaga song -- or something less in the crosshairs. But then, the obviousness is the capitalizing point: the only reason to satirize Biebz in this way is to gain notoriety from notoriety. Which in itself is lazy as it manifests a desire to be heard, a desire to paradoxically rise above the fray of commonality simply by engaging the most common, the most prevalent, the easiest target. Furthermore, if something truly novel or radical was supposed to be the end result of this experiment, then surely the purveyor of snail-justin-music could have taken more artistic liberties and chopped up the piece and processed it and made something out of a cultural nothing. That would have more cultural resonance and much more lasting power in intellectual terms.
Avey Tare, one of the members of the hipster-icon band Animal Collective, released an album a few years back with his wife -- a former member of Mum -- that was recorded and produced linearly: that is, "left to right," or, otherwise, normal. In post-production, the entire album -- each track (well, each soundfile) -- was reversed. The album was released like this. It sold horribly. Even the hipster completists buried or sold or dismissed themselves from this endeavor, and when the hipster crowd thinks something pretentious, WATCH OUT CHICAGO! The entire album in reverse. Again we have a paradox: pretentious as hell (what are they trying to say? that we're approaching music all wrong?), or is it just cheap? Reversing a sound file is probably the easiest digital audio manipulation one can make. Hell, a person doesn't even need a computer to do that: push the record backward or play-rewind a tape (remember those?). It's not novel. It's not smart. It's simple. Simply simple. And that's all there is to it.
John Cage has a piece going on in Germany. No surprise, even if he's been dead almost 20 years. But this piece is set to last hundreds of years. It takes place in an isolated cathedral in rural Deutschland, and it's for organ; it took almost ten years to fill the bellows, and the piece is on its second pitch out of dozens; it's been sounding for over four years. What the hell was Cage thinking, you may wonder? First of all, let me state that I hate invoking Cage: he's become the posterboy and the de facto excuse for a lot of what gets the third degree in the world of art music, but I have to do so here as it's quite relevant. Cage was a Zen Buddhist who was taken with the idea of reveling, for the fun of reveling, in the world of sound per se. Everything we do is music, he once quipped. This reification and devout love of absolute slowness and meditativeness guided practically all of his catalog. Cage may or may not argue for Langsammer-Bieber's status as a true piece of art; my feeling is that he wouldn't -- despite the concepts of chance and chaos playing into his compositions, it's difficult to imagine he would support naming something "art" using pre-existing material and pushing one solid button and only one to make it different. Even Brian Eno did more than that after he quit Roxy Music.
Hell, even naming Lento-Justin-Canto "ambient" is a slap in the face to the electronic music tradition. Ambient music -- Eno hated having it called that as it became a catch-all for all drone music played late at night on college radio stations -- still has craft, still has direction, still has workmanship and design, still has musicality that results from a number of techniques and approaches, not just one. Setting a variable and pressing "Go" erases all of that. So: in a similar vein, I'm Xeroxing Mona Lisa. I'm not even painting a fake, stroke by stroke, or taking a really good digital image and rasterizing it and retouching it and printing it on fine, aged linen. I'm taking her by her absent eyebrows, plopping her on the duplicator, pressing "Go", getting the blurry, black-and-white afterimage, and putting it up for all to see as a profound reworking.
Just to prove this point, here's a song or two that I've slowed down using pvoc in two of my free editing programs. I loaded the files and pushed a button. I didn't change the trajectory of the work. I didn't make anything new. I'm not adding commentary to it. I'm not saying "the only way to listen to these, heh heh, is to listen to it super slow like you're super baked! I'm not trying to make people marvel at technology -- which, if people marvel at this, as democratized as we are in terms of access to and understanding of digital media and how it's made, they may as well marvel when they turn on a light switch. All I did was slow them down. Can you figure out what they are? Does it matter? Does it provide any new commentary or knowledge about the pieces? Does this create a new narrative? Have I simply injured a boatload of electrons and wasted electrical current making these files? Only one way to know for sure!
first sample
second sample
As a final word, no, I am not angry I didn't think of this first. I didn't want to think of this first. I want to think of important things first. And as far as pvoc goes, I've been using the algorithm in my pieces since before J-Biebz was born. Yep.
*****
[DATELINE] The World, 17 January 2011
I have, in the past 24 hours, learned that there is a SEQUEL to this brainless, formless juggernaut:
The Jurassic Park theme, slowed down 1000 times.
Really? Is this all it takes to captivate listeners, the public, and stoners? It's bloody annoying to learn - again! - that such insipid and bland things are being touted as "awesome" or even a "sonic experience."
Go turn on a vacuum cleaner and let it run non-stop for 45 minutes. You'll get the same effect/headache.
who the hell cares if someone slowed down a Justin Bieber song 800, or 900, or 1327 per cent to turn it into an "ambient" piece of music?
The more important question, here, is:
why is this a fad? why has this, in the past few days, received more Internet-based attention than the BP Saga or the horrendous natural atrocity at work in the flooding of Pakistan?
The obvious first criticism from you, then, is: "well, you're giving it attention." That may be true, but I do so without hesitation and without any artistic credence. I have also not listened to this super-slow version simply because I not only know what it would sound like, but I know precisely the technique used to change the duration (without reading about it other than seeing it exists or listening to it).
My criticisms are fairly straightforward, and I blame you, the Internet-loving public, for making this a much bigger deal than it ever needed to be.
The technique (well, the primary technique) used to slow down (or speed up) a sound without altering pitch and without radically altering timbre is a little gem known as phase vocoding (pvoc, for short). I won't get into the heavy mathematical fundamentals of it, but pretend for a minute that a sound is a series of pictures. Let's say a one-second sample of my voice can be divided in 1,024 discrete windows, and each window records three things: the pitch spectrum (the amount of energy present at a series, in this case harmonic in design, of frequencies); the intensity (or volume, which is dependent upon the amount of energy in the pitch spectrum); and, the physical location of my voice: since my voice moves in a continuous wave, each of the 1,024 windows will capture whether my wave is in a positive or negative phase. What pvoc does is take measurements of the information in windows 0 through 1023. Depending on what I want the algorithm to do, pvoc takes the information in window n and compares it to window n+1 up to n+n and compares each window to each other. When I want to, let's say, slow my voice sample down but retain the pitch, pvoc looks at window 0 and then window 1, retains the frequency information as much as possible as well as the intensity information, and using the location of the wave's phase as a guide, inserts x windows in between old windows 0 and 1, overlapping the windows as to prevent discretion and render the new, lengthened section as continuously as possible to provide the illusion of continuity. If I want to slow down a sound and change its pitch, it's a lot easier: I just change the frequency information proportionally, phase values remain the same, and my voice an octave lower, therefore (unless I constrain it otherwise), becomes a sample twice as long.
Sounds complicated. It isn't. Not by a mile. It's one of the easiest things to do with any audio editing software, and one of the stand-by techniques for soundscape artists. As an electroacoustic composer, it's one of my top three processes when I'm sculpting sounds and out of ideas. The famous Mac audio processing software SoundHack -- so famous that it's been around since Mac 8.1 and has been free for over a decade -- is nothing but a pvoc processor with additional features. Sony's SoundForge suite has over 20 options of pvoc processing. Cross-platform, free audio editing software Audacity has a respectable pvoc processor built-in. Hordes of composers/programmers make objects for pvoc for MAX/MSP, pd, jMAX, and CSound just to tweak and alter the method behind the pvoc madness. Anyone with an Internet connection, Adobe Reader, and a few minutes of time to learn the mouse clicks and a few dozen more to wait for the file to render can do this. Computer music composers have been using the technique for 25 or more years, but we don't stop there.
This easily segues into the next realm of contention: could it be a little more obvious? Justin Bieber is an insipid, cheap target, and using as unsophisticated a formula as slowing the song down to lampoon Bieber-Lieder is equally obvious and cheap as a means to transform the song into something else. The end result may be something trippy or not necessarily identifiable as Bieber-songs, but it is fundamentally the same. Congratulations, Internet-fame-seeker! You've taken a six-inch-long fruit rollup and made it 18 inches long! (And we say fame isn't phallic. Ha!) On a deeper level, if such can be said, "Bieber's" "music" (look, even I'm a satirist! Hah!) represents the epitome of the mechanized, the zenith of a cultural industry: an androgynous boy, barely pubescent, singing songs from someone else's brain and pen about love and loss and whatever it is 12-year-olds get gaga over these days. He is a product to be consumed, a marketable commodity to be bought and sold, a totem of profit, an icon of the emptiness of a popularized culture where the target demographic doesn't fully grasp the nature of the messages of the songs yet has lucre endowed by liberal-guilt, allowance-granting parents who don't care about the message so long as it quietly remains within the confines of good taste, moral and political authority, and renounces hazardous independent inquiry, fomented and fostered by a central doctrinal authority (the record company) to capitalize as quickly and as profoundly as possible. Cultural daguerreotypes like Bieber -- those icons that will fade over time and be forgotten -- are easy targets for the antipathy-filled section of the dichotomized audience; note the recent "vote" to send Biebz to North Korea to tour. So, it bothers me on an intellectual level that the perpetrator of SLOW BIEBER did not attempt to, I don't know, rework Breitbart interviews or selectively edit a Lady Gaga song -- or something less in the crosshairs. But then, the obviousness is the capitalizing point: the only reason to satirize Biebz in this way is to gain notoriety from notoriety. Which in itself is lazy as it manifests a desire to be heard, a desire to paradoxically rise above the fray of commonality simply by engaging the most common, the most prevalent, the easiest target. Furthermore, if something truly novel or radical was supposed to be the end result of this experiment, then surely the purveyor of snail-justin-music could have taken more artistic liberties and chopped up the piece and processed it and made something out of a cultural nothing. That would have more cultural resonance and much more lasting power in intellectual terms.
Avey Tare, one of the members of the hipster-icon band Animal Collective, released an album a few years back with his wife -- a former member of Mum -- that was recorded and produced linearly: that is, "left to right," or, otherwise, normal. In post-production, the entire album -- each track (well, each soundfile) -- was reversed. The album was released like this. It sold horribly. Even the hipster completists buried or sold or dismissed themselves from this endeavor, and when the hipster crowd thinks something pretentious, WATCH OUT CHICAGO! The entire album in reverse. Again we have a paradox: pretentious as hell (what are they trying to say? that we're approaching music all wrong?), or is it just cheap? Reversing a sound file is probably the easiest digital audio manipulation one can make. Hell, a person doesn't even need a computer to do that: push the record backward or play-rewind a tape (remember those?). It's not novel. It's not smart. It's simple. Simply simple. And that's all there is to it.
John Cage has a piece going on in Germany. No surprise, even if he's been dead almost 20 years. But this piece is set to last hundreds of years. It takes place in an isolated cathedral in rural Deutschland, and it's for organ; it took almost ten years to fill the bellows, and the piece is on its second pitch out of dozens; it's been sounding for over four years. What the hell was Cage thinking, you may wonder? First of all, let me state that I hate invoking Cage: he's become the posterboy and the de facto excuse for a lot of what gets the third degree in the world of art music, but I have to do so here as it's quite relevant. Cage was a Zen Buddhist who was taken with the idea of reveling, for the fun of reveling, in the world of sound per se. Everything we do is music, he once quipped. This reification and devout love of absolute slowness and meditativeness guided practically all of his catalog. Cage may or may not argue for Langsammer-Bieber's status as a true piece of art; my feeling is that he wouldn't -- despite the concepts of chance and chaos playing into his compositions, it's difficult to imagine he would support naming something "art" using pre-existing material and pushing one solid button and only one to make it different. Even Brian Eno did more than that after he quit Roxy Music.
Hell, even naming Lento-Justin-Canto "ambient" is a slap in the face to the electronic music tradition. Ambient music -- Eno hated having it called that as it became a catch-all for all drone music played late at night on college radio stations -- still has craft, still has direction, still has workmanship and design, still has musicality that results from a number of techniques and approaches, not just one. Setting a variable and pressing "Go" erases all of that. So: in a similar vein, I'm Xeroxing Mona Lisa. I'm not even painting a fake, stroke by stroke, or taking a really good digital image and rasterizing it and retouching it and printing it on fine, aged linen. I'm taking her by her absent eyebrows, plopping her on the duplicator, pressing "Go", getting the blurry, black-and-white afterimage, and putting it up for all to see as a profound reworking.
Just to prove this point, here's a song or two that I've slowed down using pvoc in two of my free editing programs. I loaded the files and pushed a button. I didn't change the trajectory of the work. I didn't make anything new. I'm not adding commentary to it. I'm not saying "the only way to listen to these, heh heh, is to listen to it super slow like you're super baked! I'm not trying to make people marvel at technology -- which, if people marvel at this, as democratized as we are in terms of access to and understanding of digital media and how it's made, they may as well marvel when they turn on a light switch. All I did was slow them down. Can you figure out what they are? Does it matter? Does it provide any new commentary or knowledge about the pieces? Does this create a new narrative? Have I simply injured a boatload of electrons and wasted electrical current making these files? Only one way to know for sure!
first sample
second sample
As a final word, no, I am not angry I didn't think of this first. I didn't want to think of this first. I want to think of important things first. And as far as pvoc goes, I've been using the algorithm in my pieces since before J-Biebz was born. Yep.
*****
[DATELINE] The World, 17 January 2011
I have, in the past 24 hours, learned that there is a SEQUEL to this brainless, formless juggernaut:
The Jurassic Park theme, slowed down 1000 times.
Really? Is this all it takes to captivate listeners, the public, and stoners? It's bloody annoying to learn - again! - that such insipid and bland things are being touted as "awesome" or even a "sonic experience."
Go turn on a vacuum cleaner and let it run non-stop for 45 minutes. You'll get the same effect/headache.
25.5.10
Oh, hello. I didn't see you sitting over there, poor neglected blogorino.
My mind has been connecting some academic dots for a while, and while I'm not at the point yet to fully elucidate some of my most recent internal discourse, I figured I could at least be less neglectful and give a general idea of some topics I have been mulling over. They're exciting and enticing, for certain. Understand that these are rough sketches that make perfect sense to me. I am, as they say, all about some feedback.
Semiotica-Erotica
Largely, an exploration into the past thirty to forty years of postmodern discourse and field of ideas unveils a bit of heavy-handedness when it comes to transcendental characteristics of closed or open sign-signified systems vis-a-vis Lacan and Derrida, with so much as inspecting the readings done on them by Lyotard and Baudrillard revealing a kind of fetish characteristic over one aspect of this discourse: while not specifically gendered, the deconstructionist (and post-deconstructionist) reading of linguistic symbologies in a sense sexualizes its own content. Disrobing the closed systems and denuding open systems, there has been a slow rise in the approach to deconstructionist philosophy of ritual and sustained academic pleasure in it. So much so that at this stage that Fukuyama (for one) can be completely discredited: neither are we at the end of history, nor are we at the end of semiotics. While I disagree with any eschatological reading of philosophy/history, a pretense of sophistry on the part of structuralist/early-poststructuralist hangers-on can be observed as little more than a repeated act to derive some sort of pleasure.
Liquid Fragmentation
In a less (perhaps) disturbing realm, I turn to the concept of technologically/societally-created/aided social fragmentation. Any volume by Zygmunt Bauman, and select writings of Baudrillard, Kristeva, and Habermas, will speak about, poke and prod at, and engage the concept of modernity being a breaking device, a clever tail-eating serpent that both created and was created by a weakening of the social fabric of humanity and the demise of community. This, of course, has been popularized in such works as Bowling Alone and others, and still more less-technical philosophising has been done in the popular sphere to invoke some sort of awareness and action from its readership in order to restore humanity to a world of connection and unification, less homogeneous heterogeneity and happy-unhappy individual isolationism. While Bauman et al briefly touch on these points, I have only seen any extensive theorizing on the subject in one place (Liquid Modernity) and at that only subdued: the subject I speak of here is a concept of Liquid Fragmentation. Perhaps the moniker Fluid Fragmentation would be more fitting: while sociologically this is not a radical concept, in terms of ontological readings of religious ideologies it has the potential to be galvanizing. The central framework is that societies, groups, clusters, and even individuals suffer from yet perpetually celebrate the notion of fluidity and liquidity, that an identity is a continual, breathing, near-sentient thing: while not pernicious inherently, its application has some room giving us pause: identity creation, symbol creation, and crystallization of the unified are typically things we come to celebrate once those are in place and - barring for the minute any Bagdikian or Adorno reading on mass media being the message rather than the mediums - if we legitimize and non-problematize the notion of morphological identity we allow ourselves a permanent yet constantly shifting form of fragmentation. Marriage name conventions, street addresses, jobs, hair colors, tattoos: these are all small things that point to a permanent flux rather than a permanent break and do indeed become signs for ourselves; yet, each shift becomes a form of fragmentation distancing oneself and (if I can sneak in Adorno) pseudo-individualizing us through marked isolational activities.
Cyber Ecology
While this has probably been writ about before up to this point, I have honestly not read any academic writing about it; my ignorance of such a topic clearly, obviously, does not prevent it from existing. I've just not done any research on this. (NB - this tends to be my MO: I'll think on a subject for a while, and once I've clarified it to some extent, then I start researching to see how behind I am) In 1998, I started my first webpage and got my first (several) email addresses. Where are they now? What happened to them? Who claimed them? Of course, this is analogous to who we are as fluid-identity-permanent-fragmentation humans (see previous topic), but who is cleaning up the messes we made in the early days of the dot-com? What will happen to MySpace five years from now when only "Tom" (who has not apparently logged in for months!) will be remaining? What, if anything, does this say about our predilections as humans, and, perhaps, as Americans (in this instance)? Benign neglect speaks volumes - and for the first time, perhaps we will soon have some sort of permanent graveyard to see our wastes and wanton excess that is consistently viewable from our own homes and bears our identity; landfills, junkyards... these things bear the mark of anonymity: "that could be anyone's trash - not just mine." Paradoxically, what's missing here is an individual responsibility, an existence in isolation of our consumer sins as outlined in the catechism in each one of our guidebooks to planet Earth. (I think now of a website in particular that keeps old, dead pages permanently cached - I think they've collected something in the neighborhood of 2 billion pages up to this point, and counting) What impact will this have on us - if anything! - if we see all our creations and identities laid bare before us? Will it be another long bookshelf of old romance novels or VHS tapes from an elderly, deceased family member? Will we actually pay attention to it?
---
Don't worry, I still think / write plenty about music. But analyses of Shostakovich in technical terms and brainstorms about musicological matters seem less sexy...
EDIT: So, Cyber-Ecology exists ("they" added the hyphen, not me) but isn't quite what I had in mind. Casual glances have pointed me to DARPA (shudder), information storage that's "green" (certainly, an important aspect of this in a less sociological-societal realm), and a bunch of articles about art. If I call it something else and tease out some subtleties, this could be something. Or nothing.
My mind has been connecting some academic dots for a while, and while I'm not at the point yet to fully elucidate some of my most recent internal discourse, I figured I could at least be less neglectful and give a general idea of some topics I have been mulling over. They're exciting and enticing, for certain. Understand that these are rough sketches that make perfect sense to me. I am, as they say, all about some feedback.
Semiotica-Erotica
Largely, an exploration into the past thirty to forty years of postmodern discourse and field of ideas unveils a bit of heavy-handedness when it comes to transcendental characteristics of closed or open sign-signified systems vis-a-vis Lacan and Derrida, with so much as inspecting the readings done on them by Lyotard and Baudrillard revealing a kind of fetish characteristic over one aspect of this discourse: while not specifically gendered, the deconstructionist (and post-deconstructionist) reading of linguistic symbologies in a sense sexualizes its own content. Disrobing the closed systems and denuding open systems, there has been a slow rise in the approach to deconstructionist philosophy of ritual and sustained academic pleasure in it. So much so that at this stage that Fukuyama (for one) can be completely discredited: neither are we at the end of history, nor are we at the end of semiotics. While I disagree with any eschatological reading of philosophy/history, a pretense of sophistry on the part of structuralist/early-poststructuralist hangers-on can be observed as little more than a repeated act to derive some sort of pleasure.
Liquid Fragmentation
In a less (perhaps) disturbing realm, I turn to the concept of technologically/societally-created/aided social fragmentation. Any volume by Zygmunt Bauman, and select writings of Baudrillard, Kristeva, and Habermas, will speak about, poke and prod at, and engage the concept of modernity being a breaking device, a clever tail-eating serpent that both created and was created by a weakening of the social fabric of humanity and the demise of community. This, of course, has been popularized in such works as Bowling Alone and others, and still more less-technical philosophising has been done in the popular sphere to invoke some sort of awareness and action from its readership in order to restore humanity to a world of connection and unification, less homogeneous heterogeneity and happy-unhappy individual isolationism. While Bauman et al briefly touch on these points, I have only seen any extensive theorizing on the subject in one place (Liquid Modernity) and at that only subdued: the subject I speak of here is a concept of Liquid Fragmentation. Perhaps the moniker Fluid Fragmentation would be more fitting: while sociologically this is not a radical concept, in terms of ontological readings of religious ideologies it has the potential to be galvanizing. The central framework is that societies, groups, clusters, and even individuals suffer from yet perpetually celebrate the notion of fluidity and liquidity, that an identity is a continual, breathing, near-sentient thing: while not pernicious inherently, its application has some room giving us pause: identity creation, symbol creation, and crystallization of the unified are typically things we come to celebrate once those are in place and - barring for the minute any Bagdikian or Adorno reading on mass media being the message rather than the mediums - if we legitimize and non-problematize the notion of morphological identity we allow ourselves a permanent yet constantly shifting form of fragmentation. Marriage name conventions, street addresses, jobs, hair colors, tattoos: these are all small things that point to a permanent flux rather than a permanent break and do indeed become signs for ourselves; yet, each shift becomes a form of fragmentation distancing oneself and (if I can sneak in Adorno) pseudo-individualizing us through marked isolational activities.
Cyber Ecology
While this has probably been writ about before up to this point, I have honestly not read any academic writing about it; my ignorance of such a topic clearly, obviously, does not prevent it from existing. I've just not done any research on this. (NB - this tends to be my MO: I'll think on a subject for a while, and once I've clarified it to some extent, then I start researching to see how behind I am) In 1998, I started my first webpage and got my first (several) email addresses. Where are they now? What happened to them? Who claimed them? Of course, this is analogous to who we are as fluid-identity-permanent-fragmentation humans (see previous topic), but who is cleaning up the messes we made in the early days of the dot-com? What will happen to MySpace five years from now when only "Tom" (who has not apparently logged in for months!) will be remaining? What, if anything, does this say about our predilections as humans, and, perhaps, as Americans (in this instance)? Benign neglect speaks volumes - and for the first time, perhaps we will soon have some sort of permanent graveyard to see our wastes and wanton excess that is consistently viewable from our own homes and bears our identity; landfills, junkyards... these things bear the mark of anonymity: "that could be anyone's trash - not just mine." Paradoxically, what's missing here is an individual responsibility, an existence in isolation of our consumer sins as outlined in the catechism in each one of our guidebooks to planet Earth. (I think now of a website in particular that keeps old, dead pages permanently cached - I think they've collected something in the neighborhood of 2 billion pages up to this point, and counting) What impact will this have on us - if anything! - if we see all our creations and identities laid bare before us? Will it be another long bookshelf of old romance novels or VHS tapes from an elderly, deceased family member? Will we actually pay attention to it?
---
Don't worry, I still think / write plenty about music. But analyses of Shostakovich in technical terms and brainstorms about musicological matters seem less sexy...
EDIT: So, Cyber-Ecology exists ("they" added the hyphen, not me) but isn't quite what I had in mind. Casual glances have pointed me to DARPA (shudder), information storage that's "green" (certainly, an important aspect of this in a less sociological-societal realm), and a bunch of articles about art. If I call it something else and tease out some subtleties, this could be something. Or nothing.
Labels:
philosophy,
post-structuralist dodderings
22.4.10
a few small, important questions
Music criticism is a baffling thing. Having written reviews, the questions of objectivity and taste are always paramount. As it approaches lay audiences, what else can be said beyond an opinion? How can there be equal measures of education and elucidation about the music? At what point does criticism stop and theoretical analysis begin? Must criticism defend itself by means of observing musical works in a radically lucid analysis to justify whether a work is “good,” “bad,” or “neither?”
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