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Summer Reading - The rest is noise
StoreTags: summer, balls, fundamental, reading
Author: Roshi on July 02 2008 Viewed 3132 times. 25 people liked this blog. You can rate it below if you haven't already.
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Hooray for summer! And hooray for reading what you want to read, instead of biochem textbooks!
Right now I'm reading "The Rest is Noise" by Alex Ross. It's a well written survey of a large swath of 20th century composers, including Bartok, Shoenberg, Duke Ellington, Richard Strauss, Debussy, Xenakis, Partch, Schnittke, and mentions of Velvet Underground, Radiohead, IRCAM, and much much more.
For people like me who have large gaps in their knowledge of 20th century composers, it's invaluable, and a great read - Ross manages to give you the historical background, biography, and impact of each composer in a way that's snappy, dishy and eminently readable. At the same time, his descriptive writing about the musical pieces is vivid and illuminating about the theoretical idiosyncrasies of each piece. His writing on the gestation and impact of Stravinsky's 'Rite of Spring' alone makes it worth reading. I highly recommend it.
Also, right now I'm working on Bartok's 44 duos with my teacher, which is a set of 44 duets based on folksongs that seem simple on the page, but which are harmonically really strange and wacky. For example, one of the duets I'm playing in G major (1 sharp) and he is playing in Eb major (2 flats). They were written for beginning violinists, but they get rapidly stranger and stranger and harder and harder as they go on.
I'm finding them really inspiring, composition-wise, and it makes me want to write ensemble pieces of beginning musicians, who don't really have a lot of interesting pieces to play. | |
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07/03/08
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Fredo
yo Roshi, thanks for the recommendation. Im going to go buy this today...
If you need any 20th century tracks, btw, I have a ton of Schnittke, Shost, Strav, Bartok, Britten and Webern... 
07/03/08
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Analog
I recently read "Howard Goodall's Big Bangs".
He's a british composer writing about some of the things that he thinks changed classical music.
IE: the inventions of notation, opera, the piano, equal temperament, etc.
It's written from a slightly defensive standoint, and gets a bit colonialist in parts in its championing of western classical music over the primitive rhythms and tones of the stupid savages of the rest of the world, but if you can see past that bullshit there's quite a lot of interesting stuff there.
Like, using equal temperament as all (most) western music does, every note is actually slightly out of tune. That is, compared to the natural notes that occur, er, naturally. That's a pretty fucking deal if you ask me. Ancient China worked out the capabilities of equal temperament hundreds of years before the west, but chose to stick with the natural tones. To Howard Goodall, that makes them a bit stupid, like they should be kicking themselves. To me it's the opposite. Fuck equal temperament, bring back the 13th note. Or maybe it just lets me not worry about notions of harmony and discord, and lets me be a lot more expressive when i'm imporvisng.
I know there's people on here who know a lot more about equal/just tuning than me, so i might have the wrong end of the stick, but either way it made me think pretty deeply about how i make music. no i think, "if it sounds right, it is right, fuck what key it's in or if it's in tune or not" But then, having only heard western music really my whole life, what sounds right to me is probably more like ET than not...
Anyway, i also learned that some people think that you can't meditate with music written in equal temperament as the notes are all wrong. I think there's a lot more to this than people like to make out.
rant over.... it's worth a read.
07/03/08
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Roshi
Fredo said: "yo Roshi, thanks for the recommendation. Im going to go buy this today...
If you need any 20th century tracks, btw, I have a ton of Schnittke, Shost, Strav, Bartok, Britten and Webern... "
Hope you like it Fredo...I'd definitely be down with more of the above.
07/03/08
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Roshi
Also, thanks for the recs, ygh, monty, jogn, and analog - they all sound like interesting reads!
The days are not long enough
07/03/08
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j_chot
wow I really appreciate the calm and considerate rational responses to my emotional outburst...seriously
I feel people are being deconstructavists...if that makes any sense.
07/03/08
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Roshi
are you worried that in taking music apart you're going to not be able to making
07/03/08
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Roshi
stupid edit: I meant:
are you worried that in taking music apart you're going to not be able to make it?
07/03/08
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Roshi
Also, without equal temperament, would we even have keyboard instruments?
If an augmented 4th is not the same note as a diminished 5th (which it is in equal temperament), wouldn't that make keyboards that much more complicated?
Should we just abolish keyboard instruments?
07/03/08
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j_chot
roshi: To me, when ever music is deconstructed, it's just about like taking apart your favorite toy, it's no longer fun when it's in pieces. It just seems to contribute to people being jaded about music when they're listening to something and thinking "that chord structure is too simple, it sounds just like blahblahblah" or questioning any technical facet of a song rather than listening to the song it's self.
07/03/08
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Roshi
I used to be the same way...but I think it's inspiring to analyse stuff that mystifies me, and forces me to think about music in a different way. The bartok duos, for instance, are mysterious and any insight into what bartok was thinking might send me in a different direction.
I am rarely jaded about chord progressions...as long as it fits the music, I'm happy.
07/03/08
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Roshi
I think the people you are thinking about tend to be berklee school of music grads and unhappy with their lives anyway ("no one appreciates my genius or slap bass playing!") They grow to be music critics.
It's good to take things apart - just be sure to put them back together.
07/03/08
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delete
everyone has their own balance of analyzing and synthesizing
lots of interesting titles here, some of them will eventually make it to my book queue, after Döblin's "Berlin Alexanderplatz", Steiner's "Ten (possible) Reasons for the Sadness of Though", Debord's "Society of the Spectacle"... shit, the list has grown a lot since the last time i mentally brought it up :S
07/03/08
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oxymoron
Has anyone trotted out the "writing about music is like dancing about architecture" line yet? Academic writing has its own lingo and assumptions (and prerequisites) so that it only makes sense to those in the loop (who have digested the previous writings on a topic). I've only read Alex Ross in the New Yorker and his blog (therestisnoise.com , but he's great because his writing works for the non-specialist. Not head-up-ass, but not condescending or stupid either. Will have to check out his book and some of the others her (always wanted to check out Toop's books).
Maybe I'm just speaking about me, but I'd wager that most of us here as composers and performers of every level and ability do listen to music analytically:
- What sounds and timbres are chosen?
- How they are they sequenced and layered and juxtaposed?
- Jeez, is that the "Apache break" slowed down, filtered, and compressed?
- Is the song a fresh spin on a retro sound? Mentally classifying something as "sounds like Soft Cell circa 1982" is in the same ballpark as identifying the neoclassical elements of Stravinsky and Webern's work, no?
I wish I could listen like a layperson again. You know, just let the whole thing wash over me.
Has anybody been able to reclaim that? Any tips?
07/03/08
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Roshi
oxymoron said: "Has anybody been able to reclaim that? Any tips?"
Robotussin
Doob
drank
Or, just play with legos awhile and reclaim your sense of child like wonder
07/03/08
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jogn
you know, branford marsalis was from berklee .... but so were the click five.
just some trivia
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