ihatemusic

"decreasing gesture-count"... I've come to think the defining feature of EAI is not so much quietness or slowness but the way that using computer-based instruments removes the necessity for sounds to involve (physical) gestures like they do with acoustic instruments... which has then influenced play...

also noticed the mp3s are tagged as "lowercase" ... so this IS lowercase? that's a strange genre name. why not? (although Steve Roden may have a different view) p.s. is there any coded information in edition RZ cover art? I've always found their graphics, color schemes pleasing to the eye. It's the...

Throughout the compositional process I had to bend or break my own rules, my extra-musical conceptual underpinning, in order to end up with something that made musical sense, i.e. that sounded good to my ears. I see what you mean now - I thought you were referring to the kind of dogma which might d...

Apologies if this has been dealt with here before, but speaking of Eddie's writings in terms of "wading through nonsense" strikes me as a bit overweening, especially at the same time as admitting to not having read the books in full... I mean, I find myself disagreeing with much of what he says, and...

Dan, why do you think "extra-musical conceptual underpinning" is a form of "compositional dogma"? Or isn't that what you're saying? Going a bit further, where do you draw the line between "musical" and "extra-musical"? Which is maybe another way of stating James's original question. Personally I pre...

I remember from reading his biog that he joined a fascist resistance group in Greece initially, before later moving to communist resistance groups. It's true that when he entered the Greek resistance he initially aligned himself with the the incumbent administration in Greece, a right-wing governme...

Dan Bennett wrote: Xenakis was supposedly a pretty difficult chap too and, if I understand correctly, a fascist for a short while.

He was never a fascist. (Where did you get that from?) And personally he was a generous and gentle character who however had no patience with bullshit of any kind.

forgot. I think the rant sounds better in the present tense tho. It sounds bad and unnecessary in any tense really. I'm sure that for every example of "transparent bullshit" you could find in Stockhausen's writings I could find you an example of the same kind of insight and fascination that makes m...

vrfats wrote:I dont think stockhausen probably saw much humor in it...

I'm pretty sure he did.

It certainly has lost almost all the cultural cache it had in the 60's and 70's and pretty much no one who isn't actively engaged in it could give a shit at this point I think that depends a lot on your location and perspective. Stockhausen's Mittwoch sold out for four nights in Birmingham last mon...

Thanks from me too, I've always read PT with great pleasure "from cover to cover" and then started looking forward to the next one. I can see how writing so many reviews can lead to a sense of exhaustion of the available adjectives (although many supposedly professional journalists seem not to regar...

Of course there is use in the comparison. If I listen to a piece I've written, I will often relate it to similar work by other composers and then consider the relative success of each piece. But that would be "relative success" according to your own personal criteria, right? since there are no gene...

So you're saying context is important in some contexts but in other contexts it isn't, right? Moving on: what about this whole idea of comparing your own work to someone else's and finding your own lacking in some way, as Keith was saying about Haydn? All I was saying was that maybe the problem here...

faster wrote:

Richard Barrett wrote:What artform would that be though?

Music

But you yourself stressed the importance of context a few posts ago.

But it's not a historical exercise. If Haydn floors you now and you work in the same artform What artform would that be though? string quartets composed according to the parameters pertaining at a certain moment in the evolution of structure, texture, harmony etc.? In what way is that "the same art...

the cruel logic of this will be when I make my feeble improvisation I need to place it alongside a Haydn quartet for comparison That's not really logical at all though - next to the Haydn quartet you'd need to place an improvisation from the 18th century, if that were possible. Composers like Beeth...

But improvisation isn't a style, it's a way of working. (Which is also how I would answer Max's post.) If you use "composition" to denote the creation of music, in the most general sense, and "improvisation" as one of the ways that can be done (though it's arguable whether "pure spontaneity" can exi...

Thanks Jesse. I was just considering the idea of composition as "- to a point - just slow improvisation" as James puts it, and actually that isn't necessarily the case - thinking of La Monte Young's Composition 1960 #7 , for example, which could easily take a lot longer to perform than it might have...

Since Eddie Prévost has been mentioned maybe it's worth saying that "composition" and "improvisation" might mean different things from what they meant when his ideas were first taking shape. In the 1960s many performers were often called upon by composers to improvise extensively, only to find that ...

At the risk of overloading you with yet more verbiage: I hope this post doesn't come across as too plug-like, but these issues are a central concern of mine and if you were to go to http://richardbarrettmusic.com/writings.html and have a look particularly at the first two items on the list, and the ...