How To Listen

Intuitive Music

Brad Mehldau on improvisation:

The improvisation was often not in our comfort zone — that is to say, usually, when a jazz musician improvises, he is working intuitively, allowing his intellect to be suspended for a while.

While defending my dissertation I argued with a committee member about the elements of surrealism in jazz. I, of course, lost the arguement and removed the chapter from the document.

Well now I have a doctorate AND I am vindicated by my most favorite jazz musician.

/gloat

Scelsi: Eternal

I love these last lines from Alex Ross’s 2005 article about Scelsi:

Scientific researchers have recently observed a musical event that employs a curiously familiar style: a black hole in the Perseus cluster of galaxies is emitting a B-flat fifty-seven octaves below middle C.

I want to believe.

Awkward Classical Music Photos

Exactly what it says on the tin.

Make it good

Along the lines of the previous post from a few days ago comes this great gem from Slate’s Jan Sawfford:

The archetypal avant-garde sensibility was captured in the dictum “Make it good or make it bad, but make it new.” I suggest that it’s time to take that attitude out behind the barn and shoot it. Standing in the middle of the sometimes interesting chaos and anarchy that is the scene in all the arts, I suggest in its place: Make it old or make it new, but for chrissake make it good.

I’m done with new. Leave it for the kids who think that matters.

I’m really into good right now.

New is not better than good.

I love this line from Sam Bergman:

By refusing to judge the quality of the works we commission and simply insisting that all new music is important, we implicitly tell our audience that we care more about new than we do about good.

Bergman doesn’t have all of the solutions to fix the problem of orchestras avoiding new music, but he’s got some great insight into the problem. I particularly agree with his idea about evaluating new music and repeating it a lot.

Say what you mean

David MacDonald lifts his hiatus from blogging to deliver this little gem:

To me, especially in art, “abstract” means the opposite of “concrete” or “representational.” In this sense, isn’t most music abstract? Surely, Bach was not writing the Goldberg variations to represent sounds heard in nature, right?

As usual, David nails it.

We need to talk and write about music a lot better than we do. Cut the buzzwords and the dog whistles — just say what you mean.

A Sapphire Stylus

Robert Irwin writes in Satan Wants Me:

You’ve got a sapphire sylus, haven’t you? Since it’s mineral, it will be inhabited by tiny gnomes. The dead sylphs, undines and other elementals on the record are liberated by the gnomes. If only you could see them, you would behold them come floating out of the speaker and circulating in the air before trying to find your ears.

(h/t to An Overgrown Path for the quote.)

Brief and to the Point

Norman Lebrecht wrote wrote on Slipped Disc:

“If it’s sound, it’s music.”

That’s the entire text of the shortest letter in the Guardian today.

It was written by Howard Burrell, emeritus professor at the University of Hertfordshire.

Mahler said much the same. So did John Cage.

But it’s good to be reminded.

A.C. Douglas of Sound & Fury quoted Lebrecht and then wrote:

To which our response is: Mahler said no such thing, and John Cage, Howard Burrell, and Norman Lebrecht are idiots.¹

Could we have said it more succinctly?

Lord preserve us all!

One person is a close-minded luddite here; of that I am certain. Can you spot which one?

Bespoke Accordians

Elisabetta Povoledo writes in the New York Times:

Now, years after the electric guitar became the instrument of choice in popular music — people here still point to Elvis Presley and the Beatles as their economic nemeses and the production of basic models largely moved to Asia, Castelfidardo has continued to shift its focus to quality from quantity. That has allowed the town to sustain a key industry, though in a much diminished form.