The main things that interfere with my trying to get some work done, i.e. composing, are things like barking dogs or a passing ice cream truck with an annoying bell. In Australia, however, they have different kinds of problems:
https://althouse.blogspot.com/2020/09/trying-to-get-some-work-done.html
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Lemme see, what can we culturally appropriate today? Pachelbel's infamous Canon on thumb piano/mbira/kalimba? Sure, why not.
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Here is a rather depressing clip: Why Your Favorite Musician Is Broke.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Ad1sNtqQ5Y
On a personal note, when I was a performer, the biggest check I ever got was a settlement from my record company when they violated my copyright after our contract expired.
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I'm not sure if this is related to the previous item or not:
Maybe being broke makes you left-leaning? I don't think artists typically sit down and read a lot of Austrian-school economists to find out why socialism usually ends up badly, nor do they necessarily read a lot of history.
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We started the week off with a section from my Third Quartet in 7/8, let's have some more music in seven! This is Don Ellis' band with that lyrical tune "Pussy Wiggle Stomp" in 7/4:
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I'm not sure whether to categorize this as silly or tragic, but I'm going to go with silly as I can just see a Babylon Bee headline: Western Civilization, troubled over its racist and sexist pass, decides to dissolve itself in favor of Maoism. The actual headline reads: Columbia marching band, ‘founded on the basis of racism,' votes to ‘dissolve’ itself.
The Columbia University Marching Band will disband “unanimously and enthusiastically” due to “racism, cultural oppression, misogyny, and sexual harassment.”
An announcement posted to the group’s Facebook page, begins with a “TW,” or “trigger warning,” and explains that more than 20 band members met on Sept. 12 to discuss anonymous social media postings that accused individual marching band members of “sexual misconduct, assault, theft, racism, and injury to individuals and the Columbia community as a whole.”
The band then unanimously decided that it would “dissolve” itself and would “no longer serve as a Columbia spirit group.”
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For this particularly wacky Friday Miscellanea, let's have some unusual music. I like John Cage's early stuff like these Three Dances for Two Prepared Pianos from 1945:
Thanks for introducing me to Ayishat Akanbi & Coleman Hughes... I wrote this over at the YouTube page:
ReplyDeleteArt is subversive precisely because it is not political. Art is a way of seeing. It values things for their own sake or for what the artist can make of them. It chases beauty and then redefines beauty. That is a whole other wheelhouse from politics. My mom is an artist and I remember driving with her when we were kids and coming up behind an open junk hauling truck. As we stopped behind the truck she said, "Look at all those beautiful shapes." Politics would never ever say anything like that; the rightist would say, "Just dump it all in the landfill." The leftist would say, "We need to raise taxes so that each piece of junk can have its very own landfill," the environmentalist would say, "We need to stop making junk and learn from cows how to live on grasses, etc ..." The very best art pisses everybody off ... the perennial problem of the artist is not money or lack of it; it is how to get their art done in the teeth of tyrants, popes, princes, and closer to our own day, politically correct morons who do not understand art but think they do ...
I would add here that the left spends so much time screaming that they represent the underdog ... artists -- mistakenly -- tend to absorb that screaming and join it to their intuitive sense of the subversive nature of art ... yet any real artist knows that there can be no political-sided art ....
Many interesting Friday posts ... Let's imagine the performers of Cage and the performers of Mongolian music switching clothes; the audiences would respond the same ....
Very brilliant comment!
ReplyDeleteArt is, or should be anti-ideology. Ideology always demands that we see the world in terms of its categories. Artists have to just see.
Good point about the costumes. Somewhere here I came out with the brilliant observation that psychedelic music, like symphonic music, also had a dress code.