Stopgap

Friends,

Thank you for your patience. You may have noticed that What Music Is has been on an unceremonious and unofficial hiatus. Thanks to those new readers and listeners from all over the world who have stopped by, even in (especially in) the absence of new content. I hate to reinforce a certain stereotype about graduate school, but my final semester in the Butler School of Music’s ivory tower (that bleeds orange) has proven to be a formidable challenge to maintaining this site. All the same, I have been involved in new adventures as a Graduate Fellow with Texas Performing Arts, working to convene Austin’s Classical Music Task Force. You can follow our twitter feed here. I’ve also resurrected my own personal twitter feed here. The whatmusicis twitter feed has had to stay on hiatus as well (maintaining three twitter feeds is also challenging. How’s that for a First World problem?).

Thank you to the many who have called or emailed to ask when the next podcast is going to be posted. The good news is…..a new one has already been recorded! It has to be edited, but I hope to have it up over the weekend. It was actually done in partnership with Texas Performing Arts, and it takes the form of an archival interview with a very exciting young chamber group based in Austin. I’ll tell more later, but a hint is that this group will be performing at this year’s SXSW convention in Austin, as SXSW continues to branch out into classical music.

Thanks again, readers and listeners.

Lane

P.S. How about that Golijov story, huh? If i was doing the podcast regularly, it would LEAD every one. #wouldacouldashoulda

Elements of Music

This semester, I am privileged to be teaching music theory to sophomore music majors as well as to non-majors. The latter group is taking a course entitled Elements of Music. One of the components of the course is a series of assignments wherein students tweet (on Twitter, of course) about various topics, articles, videos, or pieces of music that I give to them. Their tweets include the hashtag #mus606 (the course number). Feel free to follow their discussions by searching for that hashtag. This week, they are commenting on two excerpts from Igor Stravinsky’s Dialogues and a Diary. Even though we all know that much of Stravinsky’s authorship is spurious (what was it about Robert Craft’s involvement with his work that was so creepy?), these excerpts have some compelling points.

From Dialogues and a Diary (“Thoughts of an Octogenarian”)

by

Igor Stravinsky

Igor Stravinsky and Robert Craft, Dialogues and a Diary (Garden City, NY, Doubleday & Co., Inc., 1963), pp. 23-36

What about the much-publicized “infinity of possibilities” in connection with the new art material of electronically produced sound? With few exceptions “infinite possibilities” has meant collages of organ burbling, rubber suction (indecent, this), machine-gunning, and other – this is curious – representational and associative noises more appropriate to Mr. Disney’s musical mimicries. Not the fact of possibilities, of course, but choice is the beginning of art. The sound lab is already a part of the musical supermarket, however. (Especially in the field of publicity. The structure of a new piece by Xenakis is advertised as having been “worked out on the IBM 7090 electronic computer” as though that were a guarantee of quality.) I know of a composer who wanted “something electronic, kind of middle range, bassoon-trombone like” – these were his only instructions to the sound engineer, who nevertheless flipped a toggle switch, made a few connections, and handed the composer an envelope containing a tape of the desired noise. The composition, I am told, sounds like “electronic Brahms.” …..

…..

An electronic machine cannot dehumanize (whatever that may be); indeed, it can only do what it has been directed to do. It may extend memory functions, for example, when a man has established its memory locations and devised the means to signal and connect them. But the most nearly perfect musical machine, a Stradivarius as well as an electronic synthesizer, is useless until joined to a man with musical skill and imagination. The stained-glass artists of Chartres had few colors, and the stained-glass artists of today have hundreds of colors but no Chartres. Organs, too, have more stops now than ever before, but no Bach. Not enlarged resources, then, but men and what they “believe.”