musical discoveries
Jan. 26th, 2010 10:52 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
calimacIn my current listening, I've just discovered a passage by Schubert - Schubert! - that sounds uncannily like Philip Glass. I couldn't be more astonished if I tried. The instrumentation is right too: strings and organ, with soft creepy voices. I think it's from Satyagraha or Koyaanisqatsi. Franz, you didn't tell me you were a minimalist.
Current musical reading is Music Downtown, a collection of Kyle Gann's Village Voice columns that came from the UC Press booksale. I don't like all the composers Gann praises (assuming I know their work at all, which I often don't) nor dislike all the ones he dismisses - I was sorry to see him lump Michael Torke as one of a list of composers writing for "little old ladies" (a rather Ivesian turn of phrase, no?) - but much of the time he is right on. I'm still burning enough at a lot of old serialist propaganda that I cheer robust three-point shots like this:
Current musical reading is Music Downtown, a collection of Kyle Gann's Village Voice columns that came from the UC Press booksale. I don't like all the composers Gann praises (assuming I know their work at all, which I often don't) nor dislike all the ones he dismisses - I was sorry to see him lump Michael Torke as one of a list of composers writing for "little old ladies" (a rather Ivesian turn of phrase, no?) - but much of the time he is right on. I'm still burning enough at a lot of old serialist propaganda that I cheer robust three-point shots like this:
But while bad 17th-century music is merely dull and bad 19th-century music is tediously grandiose, the late 20th century's bad music was pervasively ugly, pretentious, and meaningless, yet backed up by a technical apparatus that justified it and even earned it prestigious awards. Twelve-tone technique - the South Sea Bubble of music history, to which hundreds and perhaps thousands of well-intended composers sacrificed their careers like lemmings, and all for nothing - brought music to the lowest point in the history of mankind. Twelve-tone music is now dead, everyone grudgingly admits, yet its pitch-set-manipulating habits survive in far-flung corners of our musical technique like residual viruses.
