A Quote Just Before February 2011

Xenakis and Messiaen: Because I couldn't find a picture of Messiaen and Varèse (it was always going to be a long shot). Taken from a 'Q & A' with James Dillon on The Arts Desk.

Varèse, whom I heard him [Messiaen] describe as 'my brother, who does for the urban landscape what I try to do with nature'.

Alexander Goehr: Finding The Key ('The Messiaen Class').

Also do check out this Varèse documentary extract on YouTube. Best thing I've seen on him so far but I can't find out where to get the full length film. Don't think it's the new Frank Schaeffer film Varese: The One All Alone (which I haven't seen, yet). Looks too dated but it's hard to tell with all the stock footage and YouTube compression etc.

Christmas Quote 2010

Ligeti: 'What did I come in here for?'**

"Ligeti doesn't ever try your patience. Few composers are so attuned to their audience's concentration threshold."

The Independent, December 1996

Quote taken from the Ligeti Facebook group. 'Like' it.

**Think I've used that pic and gag before but, what the hell.

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.)

Quote For Late March

Igor Stravinsky, at work, from LIFE Magazine's photo archive.

The creator’s function is to sift the elements he receives from [the imagination], for human activity must impose limits upon itself. The more art is controlled, limited, worked over, the more it is free . . . My freedom consists in my moving about within the narrow frame that I have assigned myself for each one of my undertakings.

I shall go even further: my freedom will be so much the greater and more meaningful the more narrowly I limit my field of action and the more I surround myself with obstacles. Whatever diminishes constraint, diminishes strength. The more constraints one imposes, the more one frees one’s self of the chains that shackle the spirit.

Stravinsky, Poetics of Music in the Form of Six Lessons, trans. Arthur Knodel and Ingolf Dahl (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,1947), 63–5.

Available from the USA shop here, and UK here (and excellent value might I add.)

Quote For The Middle of March

Brian Ferneyhough: perhaps just after reading a funny computer printout.

One of the 'complex' things about 'complex' music is its quality of of refusing to present a straightforward object (as for instance in much minimal sculpture): it is always perceived in the act of underlining it's own ongoing and provisional nature. It doesn't present the illusion of not being an illusion - in large measure because of the continual problematization of the performance/interpretaton context.

Brian Ferneyhough; Responses To A Questionnaire on 'complexity' (1990), from Collected Writings (you can get the relevant pdf extract plus another one in this previous 'free stuff' post.)

My note, this concept of a piece being ongoing and provisional reminds me of Derrida's idea about meaning always being deferred, perhaps one could speculate that music like Ferneyhough's is a product of the same post-structuralist/post-modern milieux (if you like, or perhaps it would be better just to drink beer and crush the empty cans on our heads, it's probably post-something)

Text Quote For The Fifth of March

An all interval row, from Berg's Lyric Suite, courtesy of this page from Northern Arizona University.

I have been researching into the matter of twelve-tone chords, I have categorised them - I came to the conclusion that the fewer the number of constructive intervals is the more characterisitc the resultant chord sounds.

Sometimes I use chords constructed with three or four intervals, though; but the building material of my chords never amounts to Schoenberg's Allintervallreihe ('row consisting of all twelve intervals'), because such 'omni-intervallic' chords cannot but turn out colourless, insipid, flat and tame (although in some - execeptional - cases chords constructed in this fashion can be useful, too.)

Conversations With Witold Lutoslawski: Irina Nikolska (pg 121)

The grammatical error in the first paragraph is due, I think, to the translation from Polish to English, a few lightly amusing malapropisms also result, such as, 'from the angel of pitch organisation', and, 'Debussy himself was an empiricist of the first water' (both from p76.)

Visual Quote For The Fifth of March

'Lutoslawski's sketches of texture'. Click for larger image. (example 16c Pg181) from Conversations with Witold Lutoslawski; Irina Nikolska.

Yet Another Quote For The Beginning of March

Milton Babbitt (centre) amuses the panel with yet more discussion about hexachordal combinatoriality. (photo via this Julliard article)

'The problem of analysis, of course, is that of significance, not of identification.'

Reply to George Perle; Collected Essays of Milton Babbitt: Milton Babbitt.

Another Quote For The Beginning of March

Ligeti: 'now, what did I come in here for?'

Although complex polyrhythms have existed in Ligeti’s music ever since he came to the West—practically every score abounds in simultaneous layers of quintuplets, septuplets, etc.—the difference between the earlier pieces and the recent music lies in this new conception of pulse.

In the earlier works, the pulse is something to be divided into two, three and so on; even thirteenth-tuplets occasionally appear. The effect of these different subdivisions, especially when they occur simultaneously, is to blur the aural landscape, creating the micropolyphonic effect of Ligeti’s music from the sixties. The smallest common denominator of all these subdivisions is a microscopic fraction of a beat; no one can hear it, much less count it.

On the other hand, the recent music (and a few earlier pieces such as Continuum, 1966) conceives of the pulse as a musical atom, a common denominator, a basic unit which cannot be divided any further. Different rhythms appear through multiplications of the basic pulse, rather than divisions: this is the principle of African music seized on by Ligeti.

It also appears in the music of Philip Glass, Steve Reich and others; and significantly it shares much in common with the additive rhythms of Balkan folk music, the music of Ligeti’s youth. In effect, the blurred rhythmic patterns are now seen through a microscope; instead of a dense web, the shape’s contours become clearer, though fantastically complex, like an image of a fractal coastline.

“In a piece such as Continuum where I (consciously) tried to create an illusionary rhythm, I came (unconsciously) close to the rhythmic conception evident in the music of sub-
Saharan Africa” (Ligeti 1988b:6).

Ligeti, Africa and Polyrhythm:// Stephen Andrew Taylor

Quote For About Two Thirds Of The Way Through February

Mauricio Kagel

Anagrama was a spectacular success when first performed at the ISCM Festival in Cologne on 11 June 1960, but since then passed into near-oblivion. To have it performed at all, Kagel had to lobby for a change in the ISCM's rules as pieces had to be proposed by the national organisations, and Kagel was considered 'stateless'. (In ensuring that individual composers could propose pieces, Kagel also made possible the inclusion of of Ligeti's Apparitions at the same festival; Toop 1999: 72; Steinitz 2003: 98.)

Anagrama was performed at the same concert as Stockhausen's Kontakte, and led to tensions between the two composers that according to Ligeti, disunited the whole European avant-garde. What happened was that at a post-concert reception at the home of the owner of the DuMont publishing house, Ernst Brücher, everybody was only talking about Anagrama, and nobody about Kontakte, which the touchy Stockhausen appears to have taken personally - even though Kagel was one of the few who did talk to him about his piece (Kurtz 1992: 203f.; Toop 1999: 72). The reversal of fortunes, whereby Kontakte is now almost universally hailed as one of the foremost masterpieces of the time, whereas Anagrama is all but forgotten, remains to be explained.

The Music of Mauricio Kagel; Björn Heile (pg21)

UPDATE: You can get a free recording of Anagrama plus other Kagel pieces from the Avant Garde Project archive, volumes 40 and 41. (Anagrama is in AGP40).

Quote for Mid February

Wolff, Brown, Cage, Feldman....More info here from the University at Buffalo

Earle Brown: But is there not enough of what you might call reasonable music in the world that might be changing the insights of people? In other words, I always used to agree with Varese, Varese would never join polemical sides you know, ...

Morton Feldman: Not in public.

Brown: ... he said, if you've got a different idea then write the music, and that music will have its effect and it will change things. Don't stand around and holler I have been offended, help! The best thing that you can do is to not put yourself in a polemical position verbally, but just write a better piece of music, if you have got a better idea. Because it is the examples of things, that are better that change people, not forcing them to change.

From a Feldman, Brown and Metzger discussion in 1972, featured here.

Quote of The Month/Year/Day/Whatever

Thirty spokes are made one by holes in a hub,

By vacancies joining them for a wheel's use;
The use of clay in molding pitchers
Comes from the hollow of its absence;
Doors, windows, in a house,
Are used for their emptiness;
Thus we are helped by what is not,
To use what is.

Laotzi: quoted in The Medium is the Massage by Mcluhan and Fiore.

Musically, emptiness could be horizontal space (silence) or vertical space (space in terms of register/frequency, and perhaps other things).

Quote Of The Month (2) (12/2008)

Gino Robair

'There was everything: graphic scores, scores with noteheads but no rhythms, scores with complex dense rhythmic stuff. Every day something different: a new piece every day. 9am. It would kick your ass. He'd [Braxton] come in with these scores, there'd be like three saxophones, a woman on steel pan and me on snare drum, and he'd say, Gino you play the flute part. So I played the flute part on snare drum. That's how you play his scores. At first you think it's insane, but then you realise that for him it's not about purity of orchestration, it's about density and movement. If he gives a piccolo part to a bass player it's because he doesn't want those pitches, he wants something in that time frame that's rhythmically similar, with the same kinds of shapes. The whole thing about layering, the collage aspect turned me on.'

Gino Robair: Interview with Paristransatlantic.com

Quote Of The Month (1) (12/2008)

Kosuth: One and three chairs (1965)

'Perhaps only because it's been this way for me, it seems that the strongest artists have their "why" before they have their "how". It certainly was that way for Pollack, for Reinhardt, for Judd, for Flavin. It's about having one's "why" and realizing that everyone else's "how" won't do; and the continuing search for a personal "how" that directly answers and relates to his "why".

Joseph Kosuth Art After Philosophy and After: Collected Writings 1966-1990

Quote of the Month (?)

'On the day Mick Jagger stopped by for his first visit, one of the above-mentioned splinters crammed itself into the end of my big toe on my right foot, just as I was making my way to the door.I greeted Mr Jagger, hopping on one foot. He asked why I was behaving in this manner.

I told him about the splinter and hobbled over to a chair. He followed, got on the floor in front of me, located the little wooded tormentor and removed it. We spent about an hour after that discussing European history.'

Frank Zappa: Chapter 5 'The Real Frank Zappa book.'

Not quoted anything for a while (got off to a good start early on though), here is one to be going along with (nothing profound, just lightly amusing, perhaps).

Quote Of The Day (08/05/08)

'To my dear wife, Peggie, who loves music but does not entirely approve of the 12 tone scale, this book is affectionately dedicated.'

Howard Hanson: Harmonic Materials of Modern Music

Quote of The Day (28/04/08)

'All our sense organs function in response to the geometrical or proportional - not quantitative - differences inherent in the stimuli they receive. For example, when we smell a rose we are not responding to the chemical substances of its perfume, but instead the geometry of their molecular construction. That is to say, any chemical substance that is bonded together in the same geometry as that of the rose will smell as sweet. Similarly, we do not hear simple quantitative differences in sound wave frequencies, but rather the logorithmic, proportional differences in sound wave frequencies, logarithmic expansion being the basis of the geometry of spirals.'

Robert Lawlor: 'Sacred Geometry.'

Quote Of The Day (14/04/08)

'In a way, art is a theory about the way the world looks to human beings. It`s abundantly obvious that one doesn`t know the world around us in detail. What artists have accomplished is realizing that there`s only a small amount of stuff that`s important, and then seeing what it was. So they can do some of my research for me.

When you look at early stuff of Van Gogh there are zillions of details that are put into it, there`s always an immense amount of information in his paintings. It obviously occurred to him, what is the irreducible amount of this stuff that you have to put in. Or you can study the horizons in in Dutch ink drawings from around 1600, with tiny trees and cows that look very real. If you look closely, the trees have sort of leafy boundaries, but it doesn`t work if that`s all it is - there are also, sticking in it, little pieces of twiglike stuff. There`s a definite interplay between the softer textures and things with more definite lines. Somehow the combination gives the correct perception.

With Ruysdael and Turner, if you look at the way they construct complicated water, it is clearly done in an iterative way. There`s some level of stuff, and then stuff painted on top of that, and then corrections to that. Turbulent fluids for those painters is always something with a scale idea in it'

Mitchell Feigenbaum, quoted in 'Chaos' by James Gleick.


Mitchell Feigenbaum, courtesy Rockerfeller University.

Quote Of The Day (13/04/08)

'I`ve always respected the science in the music, though I haven`t respected some of the related value systems: for instance, the concept of notation - I don`t think notation is the problem, it`s the concepts that surround notation. Bach, Beethoven, Mozart, all of the master Europeans who solidified Western art music were instrumentalists and improvisers as well as composers. Notation wasn`t used then as a choking device to stop the blood, the dynamic, of the culture; it was later, when the technocrats made the process more important than the results, that we got the so-called crisis of Western art music, which is still with us. In fact, we can see the same mind-set entering the bebop continuum: now they`re making bebop so "correct", it will be bopbe or something - it won`t be the same music that Charlie Parker and John Coltrane played'.

Anthony Braxton: An interview with Graham Lock (from 'Contemporary Composers on Contemporary Music', originally from 'Forces in Motion' by Lock)

Quote Of The Day (11/04/08)

'You were asking about the rules. There`s a parable of Kafka`s about a man living in a country where he doesn`t know the rules. Nobody will tell him what they are. He knows neither right nor wrong, but he notes that the rulers do not share his anxiety. From this he deduces that the rules are for those who rule. What they do is the rule. That`s why all my knowledge doesn`t make me understand what Mozart did that I should also do in order to reach a state of artistic grace'

Morton Feldman; Conversations Without Stravinsky (from Give my Regards to Eighth Street)