Contemporary Music at the Proms, on S21

Just uploaded a list of more or less 'contemporary' music on at this year's Proms at Sequenza 21, I'll archive it here in a week or so.

EDIT: The list now includes a Google calendar version of the list (and an ical file too.) Thanks to Jamie Bullock for putting it together.

A Quotation For Nearly The Middle of July

Berio: Cigar, mackintosh, strange heart shaped pendant (???)

'I get the impression that behind the far-from-desperate musical folly of a Morton Feldman who writes everything pianissimo, lies the fear of taking even a step out of the "avant-garde", lest he should end up in those regions which in old maps used to carry the inscription "hic sunt leones", where music opens out with all its volcanoes, its seas and its hills. Maybe he is afraid of being eaten alive.'

Luciano Berio, an interview with Rossana Dalmonte (1981), from Luciano Berio, Two Interviews, available in the UK here, US here.

TinyURL for this post...http://tinyurl.com/m7lfd3

Quotation For Early July

Ferneyhough, Cage, and Reynolds (image courtesy of The Library of Congress.)

'What I have against the term "serial" is certainly partially dictated by the cliche which the word has become. In a sense, it means all and nothing. Music is in every case a more or less ordered object; whether the methods employed call for some form of pre-ordering or emerge only in the course of actual composition by so-called intuitive processes is scarcely very interesting.'

Brian Ferneyhough, Interview with Andrew Clements, taken from Brian Ferneyhough: Collected Writings, edited by James Boros and Richard Toop. Available in the UK here, US here.

TinyURL link for this post.. http://tinyurl.com/kuks3s

Earle Brown Documentary, yes....Free Stuff!!!

Earle Brown: Is that a tan or has he just been up a chimney?.

This may not be news to some, but if you go to Earle Brown's site you can watch a 25 minute documentary about him (you have to hand over some email details first though.)

It features the great man himself explaining some of his ideas and the history behind them, plus a little conducting footage is thrown in for good measure.

Oh, and also you get to watch him feed some swans in slow motion and hose down his black Porsche 911 (which he drives later on, wearing a black baseball cap, black leather jacket, blue jeans and white hi-top sneakers, nice, it looks like late 90s early noughties too, even better.)

Here is the now routine tinyurl for this post for feeds/blogs/water cooler conversations and so on.. http://tinyurl.com/kuyuf6

Quotation For The End of June

Alan Walker: being 'generous' at McMaster University.

'The whole point of an inspired composition is that it diversifies a unity. On the other hand, the whole point about musical analysis is that it seeks to show the unity behind the diversity.'

Alan Walker, A Study in Musical Analysis (London, 1962).

Quoted in Repetition in Music by Adam Ockleford.

You can purchase the book in the UK here, or in the US here (probably better to buy it from the UK though, it's £10, compared to $100 in the US.)

Quotation For Mid-June 2009, and, Free Stuff!!.

Lerdahl and Jackendoff: not a brand name emblazoned on hi-end audio equipment, apparently.

..'What of the other well-known Chomskian argument, the argument from linguistic universals? Chomsky urges that the existence of certain principles common to all languages strengthens the case for innateness. Are there structural similarities between the musics of different cultures that would support a parallel argument for music?.

Not just any universal feature will suffice for such an argument to work: in order to justify an explanation in terms of innate cognitions, the universal features need to be of reasonable complexity and somewhat "unobvious". For example, suppose it were found that all cultures made chairs. It would clearly be absurd to attribute this universal to a specialised mental structure for chair construction, because the idea of a chair is just too obvious to need a special structure.

I think we can say the same of ideas such as regular pulse, pitch centricity, and scales. Consider the example given in the context of Lerdahl and Jackendoff's version of the universality argument:

The range of variation among rules in different idioms also constitutes grounds for hypotheses about innateness. For example (to consider an extreme case), though idioms differ in metrical and intervallic possibilities, we feel safe in conjecturing that there is no idiom that makes use of metrical regularities 31 beats apart, or for which the most stable melodic interval is the thirteenth.

The trouble with this is that such similarities are just too obvious to call for explanation in terms of an innate grammar or module. The preference for somewhat smaller, more readily singable, intervals and simpler divisions of musical time are just the most obvious musical structures, just as chairs are the obvious things to sit on.

This is really another version of Putnam's point: if a structural principle is simpler than the
alternatives, it does not need to be explained by innate cognition.'

John Croft; Musical Memory, Complexity, and Lerdahl's Cognitive Constraints. 11-12. (masters thesis from 1999 which you can download for free from Croft's site here.)

TinyURL for this post for blogs/feeds etc.... http://tinyurl.com/mw2crb

Birtwistle On Messiaen

Interesting video here from the Southbank Centre in London with Birtwistle talking to Gillian Moore about Messiaen (I found it on the London Sinfonietta's site.)

If that wasn't enough the Southbank Centre made a three part documentary on Messiaen in 2008 (as part of their Messiaen festival) that's also on the same YouTube 'channel' (Lightweight Media.) Links to parts 1, 2 and 3. (it says a four part documentary in the blurb but I can't find that one, also, who knew Jack Bruce was a Messiaen fan?.)

BTW if you want to download this or other YouTube videos I suggest using Any Video Converter, it's free (in basic form) and once you have downloaded the clip it will convert the file into a format of your choice (I have been dl'ing stuff off YouTube and putting them on my Walkman, the quality is surprisingly good.)

Probably best to use the HQ version of the clip you want to DL, to do this add some text to the end of the YouTube URL,... &fmt=18

As per usual these days, here is a tinyurl for this post for your blogs and twitterings and so on.. http://tinyurl.com/mkard6