On Tue Jun 1, at TuesdayJun 1 7:58 AM, Dennis Bathory-Kitsz wrote:
On Mon, May 31, 2010 9:51 pm, Christopher Smith wrote:
I suppose what we are up in arms about is composers (we ALL know
them!) who write strange things either because they don't know any
better, or are looking for ways to make their music difficult to
understand as a substitute for actual musical depth.
You think? I suppose that can be true, but there's plenty of musical
shallowness in new compositions written in conventional notation. I
don't
think this is a substitution issue.
You are, of course, completely correct about shallowness in
conventional notation as well. That doesn't prevent shallowness in
new notation, though.
The thing that drives me nuts (well, about my students and young
composers who bring works in for reading, so maybe I get exposed to
it more) is when a perfectly conventional gesture is written in a way
that makes it incomprehensible. They haven't played enough music
themselves or had enough musical experience in general to "get" how a
performer's brain works. Perhaps they have "borrowed" a gesture from
another composer's work and completely misunderstood it and why it
was notated the way it was. Or maybe they got something that pleased
them in their sequencer program and used the rendering of the
sequencer's notation module to prepare a part for a live musician.
Maybe there was a floating kind of mismatched rhythm going on (rather
than an exact relationship like your Rain piece) and they didn't
understand it, so they notated it exactly with the same speeding up
and slowing down that their inexact rhythmic sense made them play,
and the computer rendered it as incomprehensible shifting tuplets of
some sort.
I guess I want all my students to have jef chippewa's brain, even in
their first year. Is that asking too much? 8-)
Christopher
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