Two post tie for the honor this month. First, my detailed dismantling of the deceptive dialogues of Ted Gioia: The Harmony of Ted. A sample:
Ok, let's take a run at his latest effort: Is There Such a Thing as Western Harmony? That really captures the Ted Method which seems very similar to the approach of many YouTubers. Make a flat, challenging, controversial statement that is only controversial to people who are unacquainted with the topic. Here are some similar titles from YouTube: "How The Beatles wrote their most ambitious song," "The greatest 30 seconds of Classical Music," "Top 10 metal moments in classical music," "HOW TO READ MUSIC IN 15 MINUTES," "The string Quartet explained in less than 5 minutes," and so on and on.
Mr. Gioia operates on a higher level, of course, he does not purport to explain harmony in three minutes or less. Instead of promising something impossible in a jiffy, he takes a well-established historical fact and shows how roguishly cool he is by calling it into question. And he does it by an age-old technique named after those clever Greeks: sophistry: "A plausible but misleading or fallacious argument."
My commentators weighed in in general agreement.
The other post was one about my String Quartet No. 2 with a clip of the performance. Again, my commentators were kind and we got into some interesting discussions of musical form. A sample:
Moment form brings up some interesting philosophical issues: what you have in front of you is not a score, for example. It is a set of instructions for creating a performance which you could record and then transcribe into a score. But that defeats the whole purpose, of course. It does depend a great deal on what the performers can bring to the table. In my conception of moment form it always has a certain Eastern quality: lots of silence, wisps of sound, etc. But even with a quartet that are 3/4 Asian, they are actually strictly trained in the Western European concepts of form and performance. So they don't necessarily take to the basic concept.
Most performers are going to simply play the moments as if they were a score. What you want to do is be hyper-attuned to the atmosphere and take each moment as contributing to that atmosphere. That is the performance practice. I have never really thought about these things until recently because I have always been directly involved in the performance and therefore helping to create the right atmosphere.
As an envoi, here is my piece for violin and guitar, Dark Dream:
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