Jottings
We see comprehension and we see incomprehension. We love the former and are impatient with the latter. However, give incomprehension the time and space to ripen into something interesting.
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Death: Mastering the trope trumps the fear thereof, for a time.....
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The Chinese landscape poets put the birth of tragedy into negative relief.
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Fads are rendered moot when we adopt a diachronic stance.
When we adopt a diachronic stance, *anything goes*. People do adopt the diachronic stance, for example, when a composer says she'll "wait fashion out".
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There's nothing more real than fashion, *and that says little for fashion.....*
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When soldiers start swaggering, kick them out; but then you have to assume their roles, and when *you* start swaggering, you'll be kicked out.....
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I'd pay anything for a whiff of ambergris. The complex volatiles in that rare fermented hazel nut or pistachio is a truly amazing thing. Through our physical senses, especially our sense of smell, we commune with our ancestors, mammalian back to reptilian and beyond. We morph into a wave.
So perhaps needing good music or better music has nothing to do with the primal musical experience. The whales enjoy their songs, and their songs evolve; **but did the first whale enjoy her song more than the last**?
This is the attitude of Artistic Directors who are not musicians. They think of music as something people love, not as something to be cultivated and improved. They think that's just partisan silliness.
This also gets to the heart of Stephen Jay Gould's observation in his book Full House, about Mozarts and 4.0 batting averages.
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Trills in the penultimate bar = a bit of turbulence & cognitive dissonance from Zeno's paradox.
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There is no meaning, except in fashion; fashion is real; sadly, the transitive equation breaks down there.
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William Anderson
I compose, play plucked instruments, run ensembles, produce concerts, and advocate for new music, I soaked up contemporary American music for 30 years, working directly with composers from all over the map. In the last 20 years I began composing works that draw on that experience, with a particular concern for finding a coherent way to make reconciling musics that were sealed off from one another. How to make embarrassingly simple and charming music work with the most complex musical modalities? Tipping in this direction has made me aware of the dangers of grasping too firmly onto any one notion.
I've come to Macherey's vision that our shadow (what we're *not*) is radiantly present in our work. So it's perfectly reasonable to *love everything*. We're imbricated. --
**The true necessity of the text manifests itself in the fact that not a word of it can be changed and nothing can be added, even though it appears at each moment as though a new topic could be chosen, an alternative narrative selected. But it is precisely this ceaseless shadowy presence of other possible phrases which could be pronounced, this ineradicable sense that things could have been other than they are, which enforces the constraining necessity of the text we actually have before us.**--Macherey