Author: Markus Wenninger
Date: 2004-10-21 15:01
Hank,
You don´t remember the said composition´s title and composer any more, by any chance? (You know how to get my mouth watering, really...). And, as with feet stomping along, I´d be very irritated if someone went home after one of our concerts whistling those jagged, jumping melodies...Bolschoji might see it as people having several severe seizures, but New and avantgarde Music can be danced to, honestly. Working together with dancers, I often ask myself how they do it, but it works for dancers apparently. Well no, I don´t think You "have to learn much here", Hank, since Your open-minded attitude and ease make Your knitted forehead perfectly o.k., That´s just fine, in all honesty, if someone listens, appreciates, e.g., the technique, or the manieristic complexity, or just the fact watching strange younger and middleaged people perform equally strange music. Yours is just completely opposite to an imperialistic retro-conservativism which abnegates everything that´s not according to 19th century´s book.
Sue,
Your post reminds me a the famous Cage-anecdote, where a senior citizen, frantically beating his chair with his walkingstick after a performance of Cage´s compositions and yelling "See, I´m a musician too!", was answered by the (smiling benevolently, and internally snickering, for certain) great Cage:"You don´t have to call it music, if the term shocks You." Methinks, times are over where as music qualified only if the thing was staged, in front of an audience, with discernible beginning and ending etc (I love to think of a stageless concert, where I was adressed by an acquaintance, casually, and he went on talking to me although I went on playing what I had on my musicstand, until his wife say "Shut up, they´re playing already!"...wonderful.).
Allen,
That exactly is the point, posstonality is a (in the lgocal-hermeneutical sense of the word) totalitarian affair, of course the rhetoric as well is massively affected. This is not a Wittgensteinian language-game any more. I am sorry if my writing irritate You or cause You to see funny colours, I won´t change it just for the sake of smoothness and so-called 'better understanding', which most often is just another term for simplification.
This "Stop it, I can´t find anything here, what is this supposed to mean?!" -phenomenon I found in pupils often, the more violent the more they were suffering the locked-in-syndrome by tonality and all that goes along with it - but I tried to make them hop onto this 'inner continuous stream' that You object so much, literally to try to surf it, control it, just go along with it for the beginning, and in the end nearly all of them would do nothing else, on and on and on, they came up with own fingerings for multiphonics, or wanted to play everything in an instabile-pitched, very breathy and noise-enriched way Lachenmann-style etc. All this is about embracing tradition and propelling it up to a plateau where it itself is unable to go.
Markus
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