Preface
"A score is a stimulus. to specific expressive events. to, that is, experientially realized creative activity.
There are primary and secondary creative activities. depending on the depth of expression elicited from you.
A stimulus to creative activity you value for its specificity. The greater its specificity as a stimulus the more potent its capacity to engender and participate in an episode of creative activity associated with it.
Stimulus specificity. which, liberates ideas in direct ratio to its distinctness. is easily confused with coercive specificity as to literal detail. If a stimulus has the effect in a given episode of creative activity of being coercive as to literal detail to some extent: to that extent, its stimulation is specific, but of something other than primary creative activity. at most of some form of secondary creative activity.
To the extent that a quest for 'correctness' ('compliance') replaces a quest for the maximum awareness of specificity of stimulus in the interest of specificity of response: primary creative activity is unavailable."
- Benjamin Boretz "(1/81)" from "Being About Music Textworks 1960-2003 J. K. Randall Benjamin Boretz Volume 2: 1978-2003"
Texts
October 28, 2020
Jazz: The Second Century - Night Two - Watch Party
Earshot Jazz
Cha - Carol J Levin, Heather Bentley, and Solvej Noa (Amelia Love Clearheart)
Ray Larsen
EarthtoneSkytone - Kelsey Mines, Carlos Snaider
Rae - Abbey Blackwell, Ronan Delisle, Evan Woodle
the river
is wide and level
smooth
up to the brush
that crowds the banks
the ancient bed
is unknowable
its depth unspecifiable
bright sky
bright water
equidistant
Recorded
October 25, 2020
Variation, Fvb 7 - Ferdinando Richardson - Claudio Columbo [from The Fitzwilliam Virginal Book]
the running notes
float weightless
among
the pillars of homophony
I want
to refocus
my attention
to the pillars
one could think of Chopin's C Major Etude as being similarly configured - running notes and slower melodic/contrapuntal spine - but not as gracefully accomplished
Bransle de la Torche - Michael Praetorius - New London Consort, Philip Pickett [from Dances from Terpsichore]
these old courtly dances
I presume they are courtly
else why would they have been kept at all
are derived
from even older courtly dances
(we presume or I do)
the act of writing down
or transcribing
music
from the demotic
to the aristocratic
becomes composing
it throws cultural grit into the machinery of demotic, unwrit, tradition
Suite in E minor, BuxWV 237 - Dietrich Buxtehude - Simone Stella
moves in all directions at once
all the time
a devious cabinetry
Huitième ordre (si mineur) - François Couperin - Rafael Puyana
voices playing peekaboo games among the keys
hiding in the tetrachords
spider silk macramé
a flattering portraiture
each of his subjects is dressed
in all the fancy gewgaws
and latest doodads
those are some ferocious chords down there Frank!
keep to the straight way
of manly virtue
and rejoicing shall be yours
a lovely duet
the prelude is
ingenious
sequences of
multiply chromatic
approaches to the structurally penultimate
threshold
Sonata in F Major - Georg Philipp Telemann - Michala Petri, Elisabeth Selin
is this about scales
I think so
then tonguing
Sonata in A Major, Wq. 48/6 - Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach - Miklós Spányi
tiny monkey hands
taking music apart from the inside
no dramatic necessity here
necessity here
is geometric
Adagio in F Major, Hob.XVII.9 - Franz Joseph Haydn - Christine Schornsheim
he flings flowers
in a down the wedding aisle flower flingy way
Sonata in D Major, K. 381 - Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart - Keith Eisenbrey, Chris Vincent [recorded during service at University Temple United Methodist Church, Seattle, September 30, 2018]
Mozart is alive here
to the theater
of the mechanism
that two people making this happen
make happen
Sonata in C Major, Op. 20 - Muzio Clementi - Howard Shelley
charming and full of tricks
fully engaged entertainment
he's showing all this to us
now see what you can do
Sonata in G minor, Op. 49#1 - Ludwig van Beethoven - Artur Schnabel
a sonata for playing in tempo never veering
how many times has this been rescued from vinyl?
presumably some or all of:
from 78 rpm dubplate to 78 rpm master
from 78 rpm master to 78 rpm production
from 78 rpm production to 33 1/3 rpm master
from 33 1/3 rpm master to 33 1/3 rpm production
from 33 1/3 rpm to indexed memory locations
and more intermediate steps than that no doubt
October 26, 2020
Symphony in B minor "Unfinished" - Franz Schubert - The Met Orchestra, James Levine
a quicker tempo than to which I am accustomed
it misses something important
vastness
sounds great
but the moments don't sink in
now appropriate for the small screen
Il Commendatore
October 27, 2020
there is a quartzy hardness about this music
it wants to sing
but is only capable
of etching the surface
on rare moments
when it glances
at just the right angle
so that the light
might just catch it
at it
String Quartet in A minor, Op. 41#3 - Robert Schumann - Quatuor Via Nova
melodies spill off the ends of melodies into the framework
the opening section
exposition to those who insist on music appreciation lingo
has no stable metrical locations
anywhere
advantage counterpoint
statements are answered by forked tongue questions
poly-chambered in that
the walls hold them in space
they don't always agree
where they are
all at the same time
Elijah, Part I (beginning) - Felix Mendelssohn - Atlanta Symphony Orchestra & Chorus, Robert Shaw, Thomas Hampson, Barbara Bonney, Henriette Schellenberg, Florence Quivar, Marietta Simpson, Jerry Hadley, Richard Clement, Thomas Paul, Reid Barteleme
what stands for piety?
oratorical structures developed for the stages and orchestras and choirs of a previous century
in bloated Romantic modernization
Elijah champion of the old order
reasonable expressions
appropriate for the occasion
gussied up Enlightenment fan fiction
October 29, 2020
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Ein Faust-Symphonie - Franz Liszt - Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, Beecham Choral Society, Thomas Beecham, Alexander Young
relay
baton pass
progression
traces the logic
brick upon brick
tissue upon tissue
Faust opening and Gretchen opening
have similarities in procedure
as in
how the batons pass
motives are sequences of ordered pitch intervals
slotted into segments of metrical and key function locations
all parts and slottings are malleable
linear melodic thinking
the melody is making this music as it goes
as a listener we are right in there with it in 3rd person audiential
Postscripts
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