ars antiqua

"unison, fourth and fifth. all other intervals are shit!"

the beginning is a little slow, give it about 90 seconds.

thanks to david ocker at mixed meters

retrace our steps, act II

stockhausen served imperialism

in the spirit of cornelius cardew's 1974 polemic, stockhausen serves imperialism, on his former teacher, nemesis, and the newly dead (in the true spirit of the title of this blog) karlheinz stockhausen , 1928-2007, i put forward david ocker's more very personal mixed manifesto on "new music"

1. I lost my faith in new music years ago. Also my respect for certain "important" composers.
2. I did not lose my interest in new music although I expected to.
3. Living with this faithless interest has become the central issue of my middle-age creative musicianship.
4. I believe music can and should be challenging and involving and beautiful and provocative without being ponderous or academic.
5. There is a certain existential tension between these ideas and the way I earn my living: as a copyist of new pieces by "important" composers.
6. I no longer enjoy attending concerts. Exceptions do occur.
7. I prefer listening to recordings. iPod is good.
8. My time is limited. Life is short.
9. I feel fully qualified to predict from the music I already know whether I will enjoy music I haven't heard yet. You can't listen to everything. You have to have favorites. If you don't like something, say so.
10. The "important" centers of new music are in New York and Europe. California is the boonies and our new music scene is vastly underdeveloped for our size and economic clout.
11. What hapens in the centers of new music has become of only minor passing interest to me.
12. The New Music Pie is fixed in size. Maybe it's even shrinking. That would make new music a negative sum game
13. New music programming is more often based on the "importance" rather than the talent of the composers.
14. Recent programming by the Monday Evening Concerts and the Green Umbrella has disappointed me as overly Eurocentric.
15. Although I may not enjoy or attend new music concerts I support them and hope for their success. I once found them useful and others still do.
16. I enjoy "making up" music. I never refer to myself as a "composer" without adding the adjective "failed".
17. The choice between spending my time making up my own music and attending a concert of music by composers from traditions for which I have little tolerance or enthusiasm is easy.
18. I want my music to derive as much as possible from my immediate surroundings and culture at the current moment. Starbucks is the perfect metaphor for this.
19. Every piece of music should have elements immediately appreciable by any listener, from novice through professional.
20. I enjoy giving my pieces misleading titles.
21. Music is a fundamentally an abstract art and should avoid the overuse of lyrics.
22. I want my music to be unpredictable.
23. I have no interest in being part of an established musical movement or tradition, even as I am probably falling into the traps associated with certain California Maverick composers.
24. I have no reason, desire or ability to express the eternal verities through my music. Indeed, I doubt eternal verities are eternal, veritable or even expressible through music.
25. I've learned as much from negative examples and bad teaching as from positive and good.
26. I want to personally enjoy the acts of writing my music and listening to it later.
27. Writing about my music is difficult for me. I would like people who hear my music to enjoy it without having to read about it.
28. I can no longer say I've never written a manifesto.

because they are dead theme song
orlando, he dead
(just add karlheinz to the lyric's)
composed, doug hein
performed, cartesian reunion memorial orchestra

Orlando, Orlando, he dead, he dead, Orlando, he dead.

Josquin, Johann, Amadeus, Ludwig, they dead, they dead, all them guys they dead.

Buddy H., Brian J., Mama C. Karen C., they dead, they dead, all them guys, the dead.

La, la, la …

And when your dead your dead forever,

forever, forever, forever

You don’t go live no more,

no more, no more, no more.

You be dead more long than live

‘Cuz when your dead your dead forever,

Forever, forever, forever.

Some day me be dead,

Some day you be dead,

Some day me be dead,

Some day you be dead,

All us guys

We dead

La, la, la ….

"now " and "then"

last night was a great example of what i find frustrating in undergraduate comp forums. i know that composition is one of the "black arts" of teaching, so i am really not here to throw stones at students our students. all of the pieces were very well prepared and performed (except for one piece that was so bad i thought was performance art), but it always frustrates me hearing pieces from young composers that sound 100-200 years old. may i strongly suggest that they you spend more time listening the "now" instead of the "then". you can reject it all of it if you want, but you should have a good idea of a majority of the art music composed in the last 30 years.

when i was in kansas, my first teacher, walter mays, did me the biggest favor by forcing upon me long listening lists in place of any actually writing. by keeping my away from the pencil he did me the best teaching possible for a very young and naive student and i was quite happy when i found a group of living composers that excited me. he started me in the 1970's and pushed forward, and then we jumped back starting with pierrot lunaire and filled in the gaps through the 60's. overall it gave me a sense of place and i have had many years to think about how i fit in to it.

we can evaluate our compositions in many ways; is it idiomatic and well orchestrated? does it have a consistent logic or musical universe that it resides? even if all those things are in place i'm not sure how writing in the "ars antiqua" style is a useful artistic exercise unless it is somehow connected to the now. i think it is one thing to write music that sounds like chopin and quite another to distill what makes chopin's music interesting and apply that to your own art. the journey to figure out how we fit the "now" and "then" into our own personal narrative is just as important as any pen and paper "technique" we can acquire.

will the last one out please turn off the lights?

i have been enjoying the very interesting and civil musings on "non-death of classical music" at daniel wolf's renewable music blog. i wish i had more time to post about this but here is my 2 cents.

is it possible that the definition of "classical music" is more of a description of an musical social status?

i think the space between "art music" and "classical music" has never been wider,

what is classical music? (from the naxos website)

Any attempt to define what is meant literally by the term 'classical' music is fraught with difficulty. How does one encapsulate in just a few words a musical tradition which encompasses such infinite varieties of style and expression, from the monastic intonings of Gregorian chant to the laid-back jazz inflections of Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue, from the elegant poise of Mozart's Eine kleine Nachtmusik to the despairing, heightened emotionalism of Tchaikovsky's "Pathetique" Symphony? One is treading on very dangerous ground indeed if one pre-supposes that it is simply 'superior' to other musical types such as popular, jazz, rock and the like, let alone the music of other cultures.

In general 'popular' music may be as clear in expression as the longer examples of 'classical' music. One important difference, however, lies in the logical connection that exists in 'classical ' music between the beginning and end, with the latter a logical extension and development of the former. 'Popular' music, on the other hand, tends to present its material without development, the music ending when interest is exhausted.

Sadly, whilst 'classical' music is socially undivisive in itself, it has unfortunately become associated in most people's minds with the intellectual elite. Even now, and with certain honourable exceptions, the attending of a 'live' concert can be an intimidating (not to say costly) experience for the uninitiated, especially in that most jealously guarded of establishments, the opera house. The wonderful thing about the technological age in which we live, and particularly the advent of the compact disc, is that we can bypass all irrelevant social and intellectual pretence, and enjoy in the comfort of our own home (often at far less cost) some of the finest music ever composed.

i'm not sure that helped? the harvard dictionary doesn't help much either.

in popular music, art or "serious" music as opposed to popular music.

ok... they take the same tack saying what classical music isn't, and the best part is they don't define either art music or serious music.

so what does classical music mean to you?

i bet each of our definitions tells us more about differences than our similarities. over time i think its meaning has shifted to imply a musical social status. its easy to see many examples of classical music being used to anything "upmarket". i also see parents pushing their young children into piano and violin lessons in hopes of them achieving higher social status through music. it is also interesting to note that my former principal and headmaster's vision for the music program was to create an orchestra. they both strongly felt (in their own unique way) that the orchestra would bring a certain cachet to the school, even though the student interest was limited and the program would be mostly symbolic.

does the mean "classical music" is dead? maybe it has just lost its meaning as its institutions have become irrelevant?