Kyle Gann on music after the fact
Jan Herman sent me this link, and I absolutely laughed my ass off. It would be churlish not to share such effective medicine with the world. (If the link doesn’t still take you to Ten Worst Album Covers, try this: http://salamitsunami.com/archives/91.)
Now that I’ve got more than 7500 mp3s on each of two external hard drives, one for home and one for school, my attention has turned to PDF scores. I’m collecting a lot of Beethoven from the Sheet Music Archive, and I recently wrote an article about Melissa Hui entirely from PDFs she sent me. Now I’ve found out, through a post at Sequenza 21, that Leo Ornstein’s son is inputting Ornstein’s music and offering it to the public through Other Minds, so in a few minutes yesterday I went from years of wishing I had scores of Ornstein’s early piano music to carrying around more than I could possibly need of it on my computer. And from a comment on the tuning groups, I chanced to learn that the manuscript scores of Tui St. George Tucker – a quarter-tone pioneer who, it turns out, died in 2004 without my being informed – are available at her web site. Of course, a dozen or so of my scores have long been available as PDFs, although if I’ve received a single performance from the fact, no one’s ever apprised me. I love having hard copy, which is indispensible for certain purposes. But I also waste a tremendous amount of student time, and mine, looking for scores that I know are in my library somewhere, that somehow never manage to get placed back where I think they live. With my PDF scores, it’s a problem I’ll never have. (Though I’ve also run into the difficulty that my own PDF scores don’t seem to print out correctly on certain computers. I’ll be glad when all this gets standardized.)
Had my G4 Mac laptop in my lap. Smelled smoke. Felt hot place on my knee. Sparks flew. Screen went blank. Please expect communications to be on special schedule for a few days.
Art Jarvinen weighs in on the relation between totalism and dance:
I just watched Blow Up again. Had not seen it in a long time. There is a slightly interesting moment around 50 minutes in, where the bored photographer guy and the scrawny uninteresting woman are smoking and listening to groovy music. She’s trying to move to it, and she’s really lame. He gets her to move slooowly, "against the beat." She starts to get it, and it’s a totally Totalist moment….
I always wondered why I couldn’t dance. I couldn’t dance to The Twist, or "I Wanna Make It With You." But I could not NOT dance to Captain Beefheart. "Lick My Decals Off Baby" is my disco record. I have to move when I hear it, both knees going in different rhythms, one arm not knowing what the other one is doing – until it all comes around after…a while – or not.
We understand difference tones. You talk about ratios all the time. Totalist rhythmic structures usually add up to something – a big honkin’ downbeat that is so satisfying, and that you feel coming for a long time before it hits.
Composer Paul Epstein told me the other day that the only thing wrong with my Disklavier disc was that he couldn’t exercise to it – the different tempos kept throwing him off. I had had the same experience. When working out on a treadmill I often listen to Postclassic Radio. One day Michael Gordon’s Trance was on. I almost fell off. I could not keep moving in tempo to the jerking around of all those dotted quarters and triplets fighting with each other. Wherever we totalists make our money, it’s not going to be through the sale of totalist exercise videos.