- An early example looking at the element of originality in music: https://themusicsalon.blogspot.com/2011/06/originality-in-music.html
- A look at the problem of harmony for a composer: https://themusicsalon.blogspot.com/2011/07/problem-of-harmony.html
- Here is a look at different aspects of musical structure: https://themusicsalon.blogspot.com/2011/10/musical-genres-and-musical-forms.html
- A look at a way of categorizing music in terms of its reception: https://themusicsalon.blogspot.com/2012/07/private-vs-public.html
- Early on I also took a stab at musical historiography: https://themusicsalon.blogspot.com/2011/07/conservatism-vs-progressivism.html
- And another way of looking at music history: https://themusicsalon.blogspot.com/2012/10/music-history-in-two-dimensions.html
- I was just Facetiming with my ex-wife, who teaches in a private school in Germany and she commented that a very big problem with students now is that they seem to lack curiosity. We speculated that this was because everything is available--you don't have to dig around to find information. Contrast that with this post in which I talk about what it was like being a student at university in the 70s: https://themusicsalon.blogspot.com/2019/06/the-universe-of-music.html
That is a somewhat haphazard selection of a few serious posts. Stay tuned, because next time I am going to collect a bunch of my least serious posts. Yes, and Yma Sumac is likely to make an appearance.
Our envoi today will be another of the Frankfurt daily concerts. This is a really unusual one. Oliver Leicht is a solo clarinetist and saxophonist who works with electronics. Put up on April 15:
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"I was just Facetiming with my ex-wife, who teaches in a private school in Germany and she commented that a very big problem with students now is that they seem to lack curiosity."
That reminds me of telling someone that one of the things I noticed over my life is that no matter how much formal education a person gets in terms of credentials curiosity is one of the things a student (or any person, really) either has cultivated or not cultivated independent of any formal instruction. In some ways I would prefer to hang out with not-so-formally educated but endlessly curious people than to hang out with immensely educated people who have little to no curiosity.
That might be why, of all the various "high modernisms" that have evolved in the postwar era I'm most sympathetic to the microtonalists because questioning the necessity of equal temperament seems like the most useful direction musical curiosity can take in a century in which mass producing instruments that use equal temperament has so tacitly defined how we think about harmony and melody. That doesn't mean I'm always going to dig Partsch but that if I had to pick between Schoenberg and Partsch in terms of whose musical "revolution" opened up what are for me more interesting possibilities then I'll go with Partsch.
Yes, the highly credentialed but incurious tend to rather boring interlocutors. Probably because what matters most to them are their career goals.
Partch was a very interesting figure in US music history. I'm sure I mentioned somewhere that my seminar in American Experimental Music did a field trip to White Plains, NY where, at the time, the Partch instrument collection was housed. I actually got to play a few notes on the bass marimba.
I would put the cause of incuriosity which I have also noticed for at least 15 years as more the result of ideological polarization than widespread availability of info. My sense in talking to people young or middle-aged is that they look for info only from their personal "approved" sources and regard anything not in there as disinformation. I think the availability of information in the true sense is actually decreasing.
I also agree with the Hatchet that Schoenberg is not the revolutionary he's made out to be. He was clear eyed about the direction of tonal harmony but was acting more as a conservator of the tradition than a destroyer. People like Varese and the non serialist radicals of the 50s were much more serious revolutionaries. Microtonality of course was already inherent in Indian music though more as a melodic adjunct to the scale. It's harder to construct a microtonal harmonic system than melodic system except with electronic generation.
I think of curiosity as being a basic character trait linked to the "openness to experience" of the Big Five. It is a minority trait, I would guess. But there seems to be something in the social dynamic nowadays that tends to suppress it. Too much information too easily available? Perhaps. Ideological fixation? Perhaps. But there are a couple of other possible explanations. One is that curiosity tends to pay off when it is combined with the trait of logic and reason. We live in a world of a zillion sources of information and a zillion theories as to what it all means. Either you just go with your ideological propensities or you need a method of evaluating all this information for veracity and usefulness. If our critical judgement faculties are either untrained or suppressed, again for ideological reasons, then our ability to evaluate information will be poor. That pretty much explains why the mass media, politicians and public intellectuals are so bad. The populace is very bad at evaluating them. Another reason that curiosity is suppressed might be that there has been a fundamental shift in cultural values. Moving through life motivated by curiosity and the desire to explore will not necessarily result in personal wealth or even prosperity. So if your fundamental value is the acquisition of material goods, you will set aside curiosity as being largely a waste of time.
it is harder to construct a harmonic approach to microtonality but obviously it's been done, to varying degrees by Haba, particularly Wyschnegradsky, but also the late Ben Johnston to name just a few. Kyle Gann has this broad topic pretty well-covered in his books.
I'm not really a microtonalist myself in intent but I could see how someone could be an accidental microtonalist by committing to composing works that use only natural harmonics on the guitar. Sofia Gubaidulina reportedly mentioned that it seemed impractical to write sonorities using harmonics but that's not the case at all, there are plenty of block chords that are feasible on the instrument using harmonics alone but most guitarists have not spent, say, fifteen to twenty years looking for them.
appropos of nothing published a blog post on why knowing the basics of chord theory (root, 1st inversion, 2nd inversion) is necessary to mastering bottleneck technique. When all you have are different forms of a major triad because of open D tuning you need theory more rather than less trying to figure out how to do an arrangement of a song as a slide guitar solo
https://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2020/04/a-reason-why-chord-theory-matters-for.html
Threw in a slide guitar solo arrangement of Aberystwyte, just because it's a magnificent tune and plays comfortable in open D as a slide solo.
An excellent analysis Bryan. So perhaps it is a combination of ideological restriction (essentially the punishment of curiosity) and sensory overload of non ideological entertainment, the proverbial bread and circuses with the thought crime of questioning the "emperor".
Thanks, Maury!
Wenatchee, those are three composers I have never looked closely at!
I have a piece for solo guitar in which I made a lot of use of artificial harmonics in chords. I figured a way to arpeggiate whole chords in harmonics.
Bryan, congratulations on your fast approaching 3000 post milestone.
I came across this editorial on the ClassicsToday site. I often peruse CT for the reviews. This time, I wandered into the less populated "Editorials" page.
The perspective of the editorial was interesting to me. You may have seen it already. It might be a candidate for one of your Friday Miscellanae.
https://www.classicstoday.com/editorial-classical-musics-ten-dirtiest-secrets/
Best wishes for continued Blog success and fulfilment.
David
David, thanks so much for the supportive comment. You know, for some odd reason, I don't think I read Classics Today. I will bookmark it for future reference. Interesting editorial. Along the way there were some odd quirks along with some good common sense. Then it all came clear at the end when I saw the author. I think I incurred David Hurwitz' permanent antipathy by giving a bad review to his book on Shostakovich over at Amazon. Hurwitz is one of those music commentators who appears to be very knowledgeable, but falls a bit short. I think his list at the end reveals exactly where and how!
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