Re: [Finale] OT: John Cage's first national TV appearance (1960)

[Mark D Lew]

On Jun 1, 2007, at 11:39 PM, Darcy James Argue wrote:

By "without a trace of irony or self-consciousness," I don't mean  
he didn't use the phrase deliberately. Of course he did. But he  
betrayed no awareness of the fact that "don't be a girlie-man" was  
originally a catch-phrase intended to make fun of him.


Ah, OK.  I misunderstood your original post.  I thought you were  
saying he didn't realize he was parodying himself.


mdl
___
Finale mailing list
Finale@shsu.edu
http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale

Re: [Finale] OT: John Cage's first national TV appearance (1960)

[dhbailey]

Darcy James Argue wrote:

Mark,

Please. There's a rather important difference between Schwarzenegger 
quoting one-liners from his own films, and quoting a line he never 
actually said in any of his films -- one which in fact comes from a 
Saturday Night Live parody of his outsized public persona.


What Schwarzenegger said would be like Dick Cheney unironically 
punctuating a sentence with "waugh!", or Bill O'Reilly unironically 
adding a fake fireplace to his set, and hanging a portrait of himself 
holding a portrait of himself above it.


By "without a trace of irony or self-consciousness," I don't mean he 
didn't use the phrase deliberately. Of course he did. But he betrayed no 
awareness of the fact that "don't be a girlie-man" was originally a 
catch-phrase intended to make fun of him.




It's funny you should say that, because when I saw the video clip of him 
saying that phrase, I was definitely under the impression that he was 
very aware (and betrayed that awareness) that the original phrase poked 
fun at him.


I saw it before the days/weeks/months of spin/counterspin, and had never 
seen the original, but from the expression in his face, it definitely 
looked like he knew all the implications behind that remark.


--
David H. Bailey
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
___
Finale mailing list
Finale@shsu.edu
http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale

Re: [Finale] OT: John Cage's first national TV appearance (1960)

[Darcy James Argue]

Mark,

Please. There's a rather important difference between Schwarzenegger  
quoting one-liners from his own films, and quoting a line he never  
actually said in any of his films -- one which in fact comes from a  
Saturday Night Live parody of his outsized public persona.


What Schwarzenegger said would be like Dick Cheney unironically  
punctuating a sentence with "waugh!", or Bill O'Reilly unironically  
adding a fake fireplace to his set, and hanging a portrait of himself  
holding a portrait of himself above it.


By "without a trace of irony or self-consciousness," I don't mean he  
didn't use the phrase deliberately. Of course he did. But he betrayed  
no awareness of the fact that "don't be a girlie-man" was originally  
a catch-phrase intended to make fun of him.


Cheers,

- Darcy
-
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Brooklyn, NY



On 02 Jun 2007, at 12:57 AM, Mark D Lew wrote:


On May 29, 2007, at 10:38 PM, Darcy James Argue wrote:

Schwarzenegger picked it up from the Hans & Franz skit on SNL. So  
yes, they were satirizing Schwarzenegger by throwing around the  
term "girly-man," and then Schwarzenegger appropriated it and  
started actually using the term himself, apparently without a  
trace of irony or self-consciousness.


Oh no, it was entirely self-conscious.  From your characterization  
of the comment, which rings very false, I can only guess that you  
heard about this second-hand after all the spinning and  
counterspinning.


It was summer of 2004 and the Governor was trying to pass his  
budget which was stalled in the state legislature.  In a high- 
profile speech he called the legislators "girlie-men" for not  
getting the job done.  In the same speech he called upon the voters  
to be "the Terminators" in November. Both phrases were used  
pointedly (and somewhat unnaturally), and it was clearly a  
deliberate and premeditated attempt to draw media attention to the  
speech.


mdl
___
Finale mailing list
Finale@shsu.edu
http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale


___
Finale mailing list
Finale@shsu.edu
http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale

Re: [Finale] OT: John Cage's first national TV appearance (1960)

[Mark D Lew]

On May 29, 2007, at 10:38 PM, Darcy James Argue wrote:

Schwarzenegger picked it up from the Hans & Franz skit on SNL. So  
yes, they were satirizing Schwarzenegger by throwing around the  
term "girly-man," and then Schwarzenegger appropriated it and  
started actually using the term himself, apparently without a trace  
of irony or self-consciousness.


Oh no, it was entirely self-conscious.  From your characterization of  
the comment, which rings very false, I can only guess that you heard  
about this second-hand after all the spinning and counterspinning.


It was summer of 2004 and the Governor was trying to pass his budget  
which was stalled in the state legislature.  In a high-profile speech  
he called the legislators "girlie-men" for not getting the job done.   
In the same speech he called upon the voters to be "the Terminators"  
in November. Both phrases were used pointedly (and somewhat  
unnaturally), and it was clearly a deliberate and premeditated  
attempt to draw media attention to the speech.


mdl
___
Finale mailing list
Finale@shsu.edu
http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale

Re: [Finale] OT: John Cage's first national TV appearance (1960)

[Christopher Smith]

On May 31, 2007, at 10:08 AM, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:



Later on when we'd grown up we used one lad as a dartboard, another we
tortured over a heating radiator and with lighted matches and the  
real highlight
of my school career was hanging a lad from the classroom girders  
(yes, really
hanging with a rope round his neck - we got into trouble for that  
one!)



It was a good school though.



Wow.

By what criteria was it a good school?

Unless I missed a smiley somewhere?

Christopher


___
Finale mailing list
Finale@shsu.edu
http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale

Re: [Finale] OT: John Cage's first national TV appearance (1960)

[YATESLAWRENCE]

 
 
In a message dated 31/05/2007 14:57:18 GMT Daylight Time, [EMAIL PROTECTED]  
writes:

"Your  class would have been put in the principal's office  ;-)"


But we were only kids then!!!
 
Later on when we'd grown up we used one lad as a dartboard, another we  
tortured over a heating radiator and with lighted matches and the real 
highlight  
of my school career was hanging a lad from the classroom girders (yes, really  
hanging with a rope round his neck - we got into trouble for that one!) 
 
When I say "we" I mean my mates - I wasn't actually in their class (thank  
god!!) but I did make the mistake of wandering into their classroom during the  
hanging.
 
It was a good school though.
 
Cheers,
 
Lawrence
 
lawrenceyates.co.uk



   
___
Finale mailing list
Finale@shsu.edu
http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale

Re: [Finale] OT: John Cage's first national TV appearance (1960)

[Phil Daley]

At 5/30/2007 06:50 PM, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:

>In a message dated 30/05/2007 23:46:36 GMT Daylight 
Time,  [EMAIL PROTECTED]

>writes:
>
>"When I  was a high jumper in high school, the world record holder in
>the high jump  was Walt Davis, who took ballet classes during the off
>season to keep his  muscles in good shape.  Nothing sissy there!!!"
>
>nah, but the kid in our class WAS a sissy!  - it wasn't just the  ballet
>dancing :-)

But, today, there are huge bullying issues in the US. At least, they are 
trying to tackle them now.


Your class would have been put in the principal's office ;-)

Phil Daley  < AutoDesk >
http://www.conknet.com/~p_daley



___
Finale mailing list
Finale@shsu.edu
http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale

Re: [Finale] OT: John Cage's first national TV appearance (1960)

[YATESLAWRENCE]

 
 
In a message dated 30/05/2007 23:46:36 GMT Daylight Time,  [EMAIL PROTECTED] 
writes:

"When I  was a high jumper in high school, the world record holder in 
the high jump  was Walt Davis, who took ballet classes during the off 
season to keep his  muscles in good shape.  Nothing sissy there!!!"


nah, but the kid in our class WAS a sissy!  - it wasn't just the  ballet 
dancing :-)
 
Cheers,
 
Lawrence
 
lawrenceyates.co.uk



   
___
Finale mailing list
Finale@shsu.edu
http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale

Re: [Finale] OT: John Cage's first national TV appearance (1960)

[John Howell]

At 4:00 AM -0400 5/30/07, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:

As a child here in Lancashire UK (and elsewhere I'm sure), the term  "Sissy"
was the standard word for someone, especially a child or young  person, who
was soft, or effeminate or who pursued "un-manly"  activities.  The lad in our
class at school who went for ballet lessons was  the archetypal sissy and
suffered greatly for his art!


When I was a high jumper in high school, the world record holder in 
the high jump was Walt Davis, who took ballet classes during the off 
season to keep his muscles in good shape.  Nothing sissy there!!!


But the claim that a boy playing clarinet was considered a sissy? 
That comes from a different universe than the one I live in!


John


--
John & Susie Howell
Virginia Tech Department of Music
Blacksburg, Virginia, U.S.A 24061-0240
Vox (540) 231-8411  Fax (540) 231-5034
(mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED])
http://www.music.vt.edu/faculty/howell/howell.html
___
Finale mailing list
Finale@shsu.edu
http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale

Re: [Finale] OT: John Cage's first national TV appearance (1960)

[Harold Owen]

...And I heard "bloody little twit" used in the same way whilst we 
were in the UK.


Hal


As a child here in Lancashire UK (and elsewhere I'm sure), the term  "Sissy"
was the standard word for someone, especially a child or young  person, who
was soft, or effeminate or who pursued "un-manly"  activities.  The lad in our
class at school who went for ballet lessons was  the archetypal sissy and
suffered greatly for his art!

Cheers,

Lawrence

lawrenceyates.co.uk



  
___

Finale mailing list
Finale@shsu.edu
http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale



--
Harold Owen
1375 Olive Street #402, Eugene, OR 97401
mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Visit my web site at:
http://uoregon.edu/~hjowen/
FAX: (509) 461-3608
___
Finale mailing list
Finale@shsu.edu
http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale

Re: [Finale] OT: John Cage's first national TV appearance (1960)

[YATESLAWRENCE]

As a child here in Lancashire UK (and elsewhere I'm sure), the term  "Sissy" 
was the standard word for someone, especially a child or young  person, who 
was soft, or effeminate or who pursued "un-manly"  activities.  The lad in our 
class at school who went for ballet lessons was  the archetypal sissy and 
suffered greatly for his art!
 
Cheers,
 
Lawrence
 
lawrenceyates.co.uk



   
___
Finale mailing list
Finale@shsu.edu
http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale

Re: [Finale] OT: John Cage's first national TV appearance (1960)

[Darcy James Argue]

Schwarzenegger picked it up from the Hans & Franz skit on SNL. So  
yes, they were satirizing Schwarzenegger by throwing around the term  
"girly-man," and then Schwarzenegger appropriated it and started  
actually using the term himself, apparently without a trace of irony  
or self-consciousness.


Cheers,

- Darcy
-
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Brooklyn, NY



On 29 May 2007, at 10:16 PM, Mariposa Symphony Orchestra wrote:

Probably the most widely-attributed use of the latter was to Arnold  
Schwarzenegger about two years ago.


Whether the term predated the Governator or he created it: I  
dunno.   And that's as far as I'll go rather than spilling my  
political guts any further.


Best,

Les

Les Marsden
Founding Music Director and Conductor,
The Mariposa Symphony Orchestra
Music and Mariposa?  Ah, Paradise!!!

http://arts-mariposa.org/symphony.html
http://www.geocities.com/~jbenz/lesbio.html


  - Original Message -
  From: John Howell
  To: finale@shsu.edu
  Sent: Tuesday, May 29, 2007 2:47 PM
  Subject: Re: [Finale] OT: John Cage's first national TV  
appearance (1960)



  At 7:24 AM -0400 5/29/07, Phil Daley wrote:


The sports nut wife called the other kids "sissys" and "girly men".
I wonder where that term came from? ;-)


  Either Laugh-In or Saturday Night Live.  I forget which.   
Although it

  may have been a more limited slang term before its TV exposure.

  John


  --
  John & Susie Howell
  Virginia Tech Department of Music
  Blacksburg, Virginia, U.S.A 24061-0240
  Vox (540) 231-8411  Fax (540) 231-5034
  (mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED])
  http://www.music.vt.edu/faculty/howell/howell.html
  ___
  Finale mailing list
  Finale@shsu.edu
  http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
___
Finale mailing list
Finale@shsu.edu
http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale


___
Finale mailing list
Finale@shsu.edu
http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale

Re: [Finale] OT: John Cage's first national TV appearance (1960)

[Mariposa Symphony Orchestra]

Probably the most widely-attributed use of the latter was to Arnold 
Schwarzenegger about two years ago.   

Whether the term predated the Governator or he created it: I dunno.   And 
that's as far as I'll go rather than spilling my political guts any further.

Best,

Les

Les Marsden
Founding Music Director and Conductor, 
The Mariposa Symphony Orchestra
Music and Mariposa?  Ah, Paradise!!!
 
http://arts-mariposa.org/symphony.html
http://www.geocities.com/~jbenz/lesbio.html 


  - Original Message - 
  From: John Howell 
  To: finale@shsu.edu 
  Sent: Tuesday, May 29, 2007 2:47 PM
  Subject: Re: [Finale] OT: John Cage's first national TV appearance (1960)


  At 7:24 AM -0400 5/29/07, Phil Daley wrote:
  >
  >The sports nut wife called the other kids "sissys" and "girly men". 
  >I wonder where that term came from? ;-)

  Either Laugh-In or Saturday Night Live.  I forget which.  Although it 
  may have been a more limited slang term before its TV exposure.

  John


  -- 
  John & Susie Howell
  Virginia Tech Department of Music
  Blacksburg, Virginia, U.S.A 24061-0240
  Vox (540) 231-8411  Fax (540) 231-5034
  (mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED])
  http://www.music.vt.edu/faculty/howell/howell.html
  ___
  Finale mailing list
  Finale@shsu.edu
  http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
___
Finale mailing list
Finale@shsu.edu
http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale

Re: [Finale] OT: John Cage's first national TV appearance (1960)

[John Howell]

At 7:24 AM -0400 5/29/07, Phil Daley wrote:


The sports nut wife called the other kids "sissys" and "girly men". 
I wonder where that term came from? ;-)


Either Laugh-In or Saturday Night Live.  I forget which.  Although it 
may have been a more limited slang term before its TV exposure.


John


--
John & Susie Howell
Virginia Tech Department of Music
Blacksburg, Virginia, U.S.A 24061-0240
Vox (540) 231-8411  Fax (540) 231-5034
(mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED])
http://www.music.vt.edu/faculty/howell/howell.html
___
Finale mailing list
Finale@shsu.edu
http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale

Re: [Finale] OT: John Cage's first national TV appearance (1960)

[Phil Daley]

At 5/28/2007 02:46 PM, dhbailey wrote:

>> it.* It is still possible, of course, for an American to express disdain
>> of classical music--but there's no pat expression to do it with anymore.
>
>For many people, simply calling it "classical music" is enough.  No need
>for a separate pejorative term.

I am sure you guys didn't watch "Wife Swap" last night, but it was a riot.

A family with musical kids swapped wives with a family of sports nuts.

The sports nut wife called the other kids "sissys" and "girly men".  I 
wonder where that term came from? ;-)


Phil Daley  < AutoDesk >
http://www.conknet.com/~p_daley



___
Finale mailing list
Finale@shsu.edu
http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale

Re: [Finale] OT: John Cage's first national TV appearance (1960)

[Dean M. Estabrook]

Have mercy!  Just think of the possibilities.

Dean

On May 28, 2007, at 2:05 PM, Mariposa Symphony Orchestra wrote:


Dean Estabrook wrote:
begging the issue, I know.>


And Les replies: Well, sure he did.Which makes sense in light  
of the (alleged) exchange in which Lenny said to Ned Rorem: "The  
trouble with you and me, Ned, is that we want everyone in the world  
to personally love us, and of course that's impossible: you just  
don't meet everyone in the world"


Best,

Les

Les Marsden
Founding Music Director and Conductor,
The Mariposa Symphony Orchestra
Music and Mariposa?  Ah, Paradise!!!

http://arts-mariposa.org/symphony.html
http://www.geocities.com/~jbenz/lesbio.html


  - Original Message -
  From: Dean M. Estabrook
  To: finale@shsu.edu
  Sent: Monday, May 28, 2007 12:58 PM
  Subject: Re: [Finale] OT: John Cage's first national TV  
appearance (1960)




  On May 28, 2007, at 10:00 AM, Andrew Stiller wrote:



On May 26, 2007, at 6:10 PM, Phil Daley wrote:

Snip
Whoa! Don't go off the deep end. First of all, notice the dates: I
was talking about those active in roughly the first half of the
20th c., and not all of them. The best estimate I have seen as to
how many of those composers were gay is about 50%. Certainly one
does not have to strain to find examples: Copland, Thomson, Partch,
Cage, Cowell, Bernstein,


  Dean




Cage, Harrison, Rorem...


 I cannot, for example, imagine any
American boy nowadays being denounced as a "fairy" because he  
played

the clarinet.


But when did this change?

I got that very comment in 1957.


Several other people on this list insist I was wrong about this, so
maybe I am. But what I had in mind was a *gradual* shift, starting
in the 1960s and culminating in, say, 1985.

 I'm sure all the older Americans on this list will remember when
classical music used to be called "longhair music"--because of the
hairstyles of Liszt et al. This was a semi-pejorative, like
"egghead," that went away when pop musicians began wearing their
hair "shoulder length or longer"--but the important point is that
*nothing replaced it.* It is still possible, of course, for an
American to express disdain of classical music--but there's no pat
expression to do it with anymore.

Andrew Stiller
Kallisti Music Press
http://www.kallistimusic.com/

___
Finale mailing list
Finale@shsu.edu
http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale


  Dean M. Estabrook
  http://deanestabrook.googlepages.com/home


Of all hoaxes, the one which is my most vexing bête noire on a
quotidian basis, is the cereal box top which informs  simply,
"Lift Tab to Open."  Then, "To Close, Insert Tab Here ." Yeah,
right! In attempting to accomplish the first direction, not only
the tab but also the slit intended to accept the aforementioned
protuberance  have both been irreparably  disfigured and rendered
dysfunctional.  This debacle is then amplified by the misbehavior
of the recalcitrant inner bag, which can not be unsealed sans
mangling it, and hence, will not disperse its contents without
exiting the box itself. All I wanted was a bowl of cereal.







  ___
  Finale mailing list
  Finale@shsu.edu
  http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
___
Finale mailing list
Finale@shsu.edu
http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale


Dean M. Estabrook
http://deanestabrook.googlepages.com/home

Of all hoaxes, the one which is my most vexing bête noire on a  
quotidian basis, is the cereal box top which informs  simply,   
"Lift Tab to Open."  Then, "To Close, Insert Tab Here ." Yeah,  
right! In attempting to accomplish the first direction, not only  
the tab but also the slit intended to accept the aforementioned  
protuberance  have both been irreparably  disfigured and rendered  
dysfunctional.  This debacle is then amplified by the misbehavior  
of the recalcitrant inner bag, which can not be unsealed sans  
mangling it, and hence, will not disperse its contents without  
exiting the box itself. All I wanted was a bowl of cereal.







___
Finale mailing list
Finale@shsu.edu
http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale

Re: [Finale] OT: John Cage's first national TV appearance (1960)

[Mariposa Symphony Orchestra]

Dean Estabrook wrote: 


And Les replies: Well, sure he did.Which makes sense in light of the 
(alleged) exchange in which Lenny said to Ned Rorem: "The trouble with you and 
me, Ned, is that we want everyone in the world to personally love us, and of 
course that's impossible: you just don't meet everyone in the world"

Best,

Les

Les Marsden
Founding Music Director and Conductor, 
The Mariposa Symphony Orchestra
Music and Mariposa?  Ah, Paradise!!!
 
http://arts-mariposa.org/symphony.html
http://www.geocities.com/~jbenz/lesbio.html 


  - Original Message - 
  From: Dean M. Estabrook 
  To: finale@shsu.edu 
  Sent: Monday, May 28, 2007 12:58 PM
  Subject: Re: [Finale] OT: John Cage's first national TV appearance (1960)



  On May 28, 2007, at 10:00 AM, Andrew Stiller wrote:

  >
  > On May 26, 2007, at 6:10 PM, Phil Daley wrote:
  >
  > Snip
  > Whoa! Don't go off the deep end. First of all, notice the dates: I  
  > was talking about those active in roughly the first half of the  
  > 20th c., and not all of them. The best estimate I have seen as to  
  > how many of those composers were gay is about 50%. Certainly one  
  > does not have to strain to find examples: Copland, Thomson, Partch,  
  > Cage, Cowell, Bernstein,

  Dean



  > Cage, Harrison, Rorem...
  >
  >>  I cannot, for example, imagine any
  >> >American boy nowadays being denounced as a "fairy" because he played
  >> >the clarinet.
  >>
  >> But when did this change?
  >>
  >> I got that very comment in 1957.
  >
  > Several other people on this list insist I was wrong about this, so  
  > maybe I am. But what I had in mind was a *gradual* shift, starting  
  > in the 1960s and culminating in, say, 1985.
  >
  >  I'm sure all the older Americans on this list will remember when  
  > classical music used to be called "longhair music"--because of the  
  > hairstyles of Liszt et al. This was a semi-pejorative, like  
  > "egghead," that went away when pop musicians began wearing their  
  > hair "shoulder length or longer"--but the important point is that  
  > *nothing replaced it.* It is still possible, of course, for an  
  > American to express disdain of classical music--but there's no pat  
  > expression to do it with anymore.
  >
  > Andrew Stiller
  > Kallisti Music Press
  > http://www.kallistimusic.com/
  >
  > ___
  > Finale mailing list
  > Finale@shsu.edu
  > http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale

  Dean M. Estabrook
  http://deanestabrook.googlepages.com/home

  >> Of all hoaxes, the one which is my most vexing bête noire on a  
  >> quotidian basis, is the cereal box top which informs  simply,   
  >> "Lift Tab to Open."  Then, "To Close, Insert Tab Here ." Yeah,  
  >> right! In attempting to accomplish the first direction, not only  
  >> the tab but also the slit intended to accept the aforementioned  
  >> protuberance  have both been irreparably  disfigured and rendered  
  >> dysfunctional.  This debacle is then amplified by the misbehavior  
  >> of the recalcitrant inner bag, which can not be unsealed sans  
  >> mangling it, and hence, will not disperse its contents without  
  >> exiting the box itself. All I wanted was a bowl of cereal.






  ___
  Finale mailing list
  Finale@shsu.edu
  http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
___
Finale mailing list
Finale@shsu.edu
http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale

Re: [Finale] OT: John Cage's first national TV appearance (1960)

[Dean M. Estabrook]

On May 28, 2007, at 10:00 AM, Andrew Stiller wrote:



On May 26, 2007, at 6:10 PM, Phil Daley wrote:

Snip
Whoa! Don't go off the deep end. First of all, notice the dates: I  
was talking about those active in roughly the first half of the  
20th c., and not all of them. The best estimate I have seen as to  
how many of those composers were gay is about 50%. Certainly one  
does not have to strain to find examples: Copland, Thomson, Partch,  
Cage, Cowell, Bernstein,


Actually, I believe Lenny swung both ways.  But that's just begging  
the issue, I know.



Dean




Cage, Harrison, Rorem...


 I cannot, for example, imagine any
>American boy nowadays being denounced as a "fairy" because he played
>the clarinet.

But when did this change?

I got that very comment in 1957.


Several other people on this list insist I was wrong about this, so  
maybe I am. But what I had in mind was a *gradual* shift, starting  
in the 1960s and culminating in, say, 1985.


 I'm sure all the older Americans on this list will remember when  
classical music used to be called "longhair music"--because of the  
hairstyles of Liszt et al. This was a semi-pejorative, like  
"egghead," that went away when pop musicians began wearing their  
hair "shoulder length or longer"--but the important point is that  
*nothing replaced it.* It is still possible, of course, for an  
American to express disdain of classical music--but there's no pat  
expression to do it with anymore.


Andrew Stiller
Kallisti Music Press
http://www.kallistimusic.com/

___
Finale mailing list
Finale@shsu.edu
http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale


Dean M. Estabrook
http://deanestabrook.googlepages.com/home

Of all hoaxes, the one which is my most vexing bête noire on a  
quotidian basis, is the cereal box top which informs  simply,   
"Lift Tab to Open."  Then, "To Close, Insert Tab Here ." Yeah,  
right! In attempting to accomplish the first direction, not only  
the tab but also the slit intended to accept the aforementioned  
protuberance  have both been irreparably  disfigured and rendered  
dysfunctional.  This debacle is then amplified by the misbehavior  
of the recalcitrant inner bag, which can not be unsealed sans  
mangling it, and hence, will not disperse its contents without  
exiting the box itself. All I wanted was a bowl of cereal.







___
Finale mailing list
Finale@shsu.edu
http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale

Re: [Finale] OT: John Cage's first national TV appearance (1960)

[dhbailey]

Andrew Stiller wrote:
[snip]

it.* It is still possible, of course, for an American to express disdain 
of classical music--but there's no pat expression to do it with anymore.



For many people, simply calling it "classical music" is enough.  No need 
for a separate pejorative term.


--
David H. Bailey
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
___
Finale mailing list
Finale@shsu.edu
http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale

Re: [Finale] OT: John Cage's first national TV appearance (1960)

[Andrew Stiller]

On May 26, 2007, at 6:10 PM, Phil Daley wrote:


At 12:41 PM 5/26/2007, Andrew Stiller wrote:

>IMO the cultural shift has been in the opposite direction. The
>fundamental antipathy among ordinary Americans toward classical music
>has its origins in the country's founding. In the 18th c., almost all
>classical music was commissioned by royalty or by the established
>church--both of which are outlawed in the US constitution. The 
American

>people, therefore, came to view this music as inherently elitist. By
>extension, its practitioners came to be regarded as effeminate, which
>is why Ives was so defensive about the matter, and also is one reason
>why such a high percentage of American composers 1890-1970 have been
>gay.

 I was unaware that American composers are gay.


Whoa! Don't go off the deep end. First of all, notice the dates: I was 
talking about those active in roughly the first half of the 20th c., 
and not all of them. The best estimate I have seen as to how many of 
those composers were gay is about 50%. Certainly one does not have to 
strain to find examples: Copland, Thomson, Partch, Cage, Cowell, 
Bernstein, Cage, Harrison, Rorem...



 I cannot, for example, imagine any
>American boy nowadays being denounced as a "fairy" because he played
>the clarinet.

But when did this change?

I got that very comment in 1957.


Several other people on this list insist I was wrong about this, so 
maybe I am. But what I had in mind was a *gradual* shift, starting in 
the 1960s and culminating in, say, 1985.


 I'm sure all the older Americans on this list will remember when 
classical music used to be called "longhair music"--because of the 
hairstyles of Liszt et al. This was a semi-pejorative, like "egghead," 
that went away when pop musicians began wearing their hair "shoulder 
length or longer"--but the important point is that *nothing replaced 
it.* It is still possible, of course, for an American to express 
disdain of classical music--but there's no pat expression to do it with 
anymore.


Andrew Stiller
Kallisti Music Press
http://www.kallistimusic.com/

___
Finale mailing list
Finale@shsu.edu
http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale

Re: [Finale] OT: John Cage's first national TV appearance (1960)

[Phil Daley]

At 11:49 PM 5/26/2007, Christopher Smith wrote:

>
>On May 26, 2007, at 5:53 PM, Phil Daley wrote:
>
>> Rock music is non-tonal?  That's news to me.  Doesn't it do 1-4-5-1?
>
>Not too much of it these days. I guess you don't put on a radio very
>often (not that I blame you for that) but I have a thirteen year old,
>so I hear things that I might not otherwise...

You are correct.  I only listen to news radio.

I haven't listened to a rock song since 1980.

___
Finale mailing list
Finale@shsu.edu
http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale

Re: [Finale] OT: John Cage's first national TV appearance (1960)

[Christopher Smith]

On May 27, 2007, at 5:48 PM, dhbailey wrote:


Dean M. Estabrook wrote:
I perceive that there is a hang up on this thread, that we gotta  
have a leading tone present to qualify for tonality. Tonality can  
also be established by just plain harmonies or single chords. If  
you have a perfect fifth, or perfect fourth in a vertical  
aggregate,  you have, according to Schenker, a tonal center present.


Oh, there you go, bringing in a major theorist and trying to quell  
our own little "it's tonal when I say it's tonal" arguments!


Sure, ruin my Sunday, why don't you!  :-)


Bwah-ha-ha!

Very good!

C.



___
Finale mailing list
Finale@shsu.edu
http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale

Re: [Finale] OT: John Cage's first national TV appearance (1960)

[Christopher Smith]

On May 27, 2007, at 2:40 PM, Aaron Rabushka wrote:

Perhaps it may be a geeky pecadillo on my part, but "tonal"  
requires that

the tonal center (or the tonal center of the moment, as it may be)  be
established by it's own dominant and leading tone (thank you IU theory
department!). So modal (including the pentatonic modes with no 7th  
and the

hexatonic with a flatted 7th) doesn't qualify. And of course (and
fortunately) it is not necessary to agree with this (or even  
understand it)

to enjoy the music.


Depends on your definition of tonal, as I said before. I-IV-I  
establishes a key centre as effectively as a I-V-I and without a  
leading tone.


We just have to certain which "tonal" we are talking about.

It's like the difference between "classical" music and "Classical"  
music. At least we have the capital C to distinguish the period from  
the whole genre. Maybe we should start capitalising Tonal for when we  
are talking about common-practice era European concert music, and  
reserve the small-t tonal for anything with any key centre at all?


Christopher



___
Finale mailing list
Finale@shsu.edu
http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale

Re: [Finale] OT: John Cage's first national TV appearance (1960)

[Aaron Rabushka]

Yes, perhaps abritraray and capricious. As are all other attempts to resolve
this "tonal/non-tonal" dichotomy. Good thing that good/great music doesn't
have to pass any theory exams.

Aaron J. Rabushka
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
http://users.waymark.net/arabushk
- Original Message - 
From: "dhbailey" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: 
Sent: Sunday, May 27, 2007 5:47 PM
Subject: Re: [Finale] OT: John Cage's first national TV appearance (1960)


> Aaron Rabushka wrote:
> > Perhaps it may be a geeky pecadillo on my part, but "tonal" requires
that
> > the tonal center (or the tonal center of the moment, as it may be)  be
> > established by it's own dominant and leading tone (thank you IU theory
> > department!). So modal (including the pentatonic modes with no 7th and
the
> > hexatonic with a flatted 7th) doesn't qualify. And of course (and
> > fortunately) it is not necessary to agree with this (or even understand
it)
> > to enjoy the music.
>
> That seems to be a totally arbitrary distinction, since lots of songs
> which can be harmonized very easily with typical I and IV and V chords
> don't use the leading tone at all, not even a flatted 7th.
>
> Does that make them nontonal when they don't include a chordal
> instrument and tonal when they do?
>
> I would think that tonal music would be music where anybody could easily
> point to the tonic and say "That's the tonic."
>
> And non-tonal music would be where nobody could point to such a thing.
>
> -- 
> David H. Bailey
> [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> ___
> Finale mailing list
> Finale@shsu.edu
> http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
>

___
Finale mailing list
Finale@shsu.edu
http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale

Re: [Finale] OT: John Cage's first national TV appearance (1960)

[David W. Fenton]

On 27 May 2007 at 12:45, Dean M. Estabrook wrote:

> I perceive that there is a hang up on this thread, that we gotta have 
> a leading tone present to qualify for tonality. Tonality can also be 
> established by just plain harmonies or single chords. If you have a 
> perfect fifth, or perfect fourth in a vertical aggregate,  you have, 
> according to Schenker, a tonal center present.

Many words have more than one meaning, often a very specific one and 
a generalized one. When some people use "tonal" they mean functional 
tonality. Others mean merely music with a tonal center. Andrew quite 
clearly used it in the former sense, which I think should have been 
pretty clear to all given the music he was describing as non-tonal.

Neither is right.

Neither is wrong.

It depends on context.


-- 
David W. Fentonhttp://dfenton.com
David Fenton Associates   http://dfenton.com/DFA/

___
Finale mailing list
Finale@shsu.edu
http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale

Re: [Finale] OT: John Cage's first national TV appearance (1960)

[David W. Fenton]

On 27 May 2007 at 15:35, Dennis Bathory-Kitsz wrote:

> At 01:44 PM 5/27/2007 -0400, David W. Fenton wrote:
> >On 26 May 2007 at 22:51, Dennis Bathory-Kitsz wrote:
> >
> >> "Star Wars" with John Williams's retro-heist from "The
> >> Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex".
> >
> >I thought it was from King's Road?
> 
> Maybe both? I don't know the latter, but I have the soundtrack for
> E&E. I played it for a class of schoolkids when I was teaching, and
> they all cried out "Star Wars! Yay!"

The main theme for Kings Row (sorry about messing up the title) is 
very similar to the opening theme of Star Wars. It's a Korngold 
score. Despite having Ronald Reagan in a starring row, it's a pretty 
good movie. I saw it because it came up in a "Claude Rains" wishlist 
on my TiVo.

-- 
David W. Fentonhttp://dfenton.com
David Fenton Associates   http://dfenton.com/DFA/

___
Finale mailing list
Finale@shsu.edu
http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale

Re: [Finale] OT: John Cage's first national TV appearance (1960)

[Dean M. Estabrook]

Sorry ... grad school coming back to haunt me  er, us. At least I  
didn't follow it with a QED.


Dean



On May 27, 2007, at 2:48 PM, dhbailey wrote:


Dean M. Estabrook wrote:
I perceive that there is a hang up on this thread, that we gotta  
have a leading tone present to qualify for tonality. Tonality can  
also be established by just plain harmonies or single chords. If  
you have a perfect fifth, or perfect fourth in a vertical  
aggregate,  you have, according to Schenker, a tonal center present.


Oh, there you go, bringing in a major theorist and trying to quell  
our own little "it's tonal when I say it's tonal" arguments!


Sure, ruin my Sunday, why don't you!  :-)

--
David H. Bailey
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
___
Finale mailing list
Finale@shsu.edu
http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale


Dean M. Estabrook
http://deanestabrook.googlepages.com/home

Of all hoaxes, the one which is my most vexing bête noire on a  
quotidian basis, is the cereal box top which informs  simply,   
"Lift Tab to Open."  Then, "To Close, Insert Tab Here ." Yeah,  
right! In attempting to accomplish the first direction, not only  
the tab but also the slit intended to accept the aforementioned  
protuberance  have both been irreparably  disfigured and rendered  
dysfunctional.  This debacle is then amplified by the misbehavior  
of the recalcitrant inner bag, which can not be unsealed sans  
mangling it, and hence, will not disperse its contents without  
exiting the box itself. All I wanted was a bowl of cereal.







___
Finale mailing list
Finale@shsu.edu
http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale

Re: [Finale] OT: John Cage's first national TV appearance (1960)

[Phil Daley]

At 12:00 PM 5/26/2007, Dennis Bathory-Kitsz wrote:

>I don't have any answers, but there is a cultural shift that isn't limited
>to the US. The post below appeared on the Two New Hours list a few days ago
>(Larry Lake is the host of Two New Hours, canceled in March after a quarter
>century on the air).
>
>Here is Russell Smith's column in today's Globe and Mail:

This is perfect.  Exactly what I am trying to say.

>-
>How pop has taken over the arts
>RUSSELL SMITH
>May 24, 2007
>
>The word "culture" in media now means what was once called mass or popular
>culture; the word "art" - when it is used at all - means what we once called
>entertainment. Examples of this are everywhere: Almost no North American
>newspaper has a section called "Arts" any more because it would be
>dishonest.

The Boston Globe does.

>The word "music" has suffered the same fate. Popular music no longer must be
>specified as such; it's just music. It's the other forms of music that need
>a qualifier. In other words, "music" tends not to include classical music,
>which is an obscure niche not unlike the "fetish" section of your adult
>video store.

Exactly what I have been saying.  THhs article is great.

>It's not included in most discussions of the form. (Actually, that's
>probably a bad example. Fetish porn is usually discussed or at least
>acknowledged in discussions of pornography, whereas classical music simply
>does not exist in most mediated discussions of "music." If you wanted to
>extend the pornographic metaphor a little, you could say that classical
>music is a bit like the old videos that the pornographers now label
>"natural" and classify as a fetish. They put the videos of un-enhanced women
>in the freaky section beside Latex Hotel and Plushy Party.)

Well, that is little beyond what I was saying.  Maybe this guy is a little 
overdone?


>Similarly, any "culture" section of a TV or radio news hour now means pop
>culture: It means discussion of hip hop and new trends in home decor. Again,
>I'm not denying that these things are culture, just pointing out that
>they're a particular kind of culture and not, I would say, representative of
>all culture.

Exactly.  I think the people on this list are very insular and don't have a 
conception of how classical music is viewed by the general public.


>What do I mean by this? I mean that every time I hear this usage, I feel
>excluded, and I feel I am meant to: I am meant to be reminded of my
>archaism, my "elitism," whatever that means, my essential difference from
>normal people. It's me who is out of place, me and all my unpleasant
>educated colleagues who insist on remaining all snotty about uncool and
>unlucrative things such as music without singing (and visual art and
>architecture and Web art and installation art and art theory and art
>criticism). Every time I hear an interview with an American sitcom actor
>referred to as culture - and culture it certainly is, although culture of a
>particular and narrow kind - I hear the low voice of normalcy murmuring in
>my ear: "Give up. It's all over. Just give up."

How many people here can relate to that statement?

___
Finale mailing list
Finale@shsu.edu
http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale

Re: [Finale] OT: John Cage's first national TV appearance (1960)

[dhbailey]

Dean M. Estabrook wrote:
I perceive that there is a hang up on this thread, that we gotta have a 
leading tone present to qualify for tonality. Tonality can also be 
established by just plain harmonies or single chords. If you have a 
perfect fifth, or perfect fourth in a vertical aggregate,  you have, 
according to Schenker, a tonal center present.




Oh, there you go, bringing in a major theorist and trying to quell our 
own little "it's tonal when I say it's tonal" arguments!


Sure, ruin my Sunday, why don't you!  :-)

--
David H. Bailey
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
___
Finale mailing list
Finale@shsu.edu
http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale

Re: [Finale] OT: John Cage's first national TV appearance (1960)

[Phil Daley]

At 12:41 PM 5/26/2007, Andrew Stiller wrote:

>IMO the cultural shift has been in the opposite direction. The
>fundamental antipathy among ordinary Americans toward classical music
>has its origins in the country's founding. In the 18th c., almost all
>classical music was commissioned by royalty or by the established
>church--both of which are outlawed in the US constitution. The American
>people, therefore, came to view this music as inherently elitist. By
>extension, its practitioners came to be regarded as effeminate, which
>is why Ives was so defensive about the matter, and also is one reason
>why such a high percentage of American composers 1890-1970 have been
>gay.

This is the most interesting opinion I have heard since the discussion started.

I think I agree with it a lot.

Also, I was unaware that American composers are gay.

>Prior to 1960, most Americans lived their entire lives without ever
>experiencing and opera, a ballet, or a symphony. TV has changed all
>that--and over the course of my lifetime I have definitely seen other
>forms of improvement that make the current situation, dismal as it is,
>much better than what it has been. I cannot, for example, imagine any
>American boy nowadays being denounced as a "fairy" because he played
>the clarinet.

But when did this change?

I got that very comment in 1957.

___
Finale mailing list
Finale@shsu.edu
http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale

Re: [Finale] OT: John Cage's first national TV appearance (1960)

[dhbailey]

Aaron Rabushka wrote:

Perhaps it may be a geeky pecadillo on my part, but "tonal" requires that
the tonal center (or the tonal center of the moment, as it may be)  be
established by it's own dominant and leading tone (thank you IU theory
department!). So modal (including the pentatonic modes with no 7th and the
hexatonic with a flatted 7th) doesn't qualify. And of course (and
fortunately) it is not necessary to agree with this (or even understand it)
to enjoy the music.


That seems to be a totally arbitrary distinction, since lots of songs 
which can be harmonized very easily with typical I and IV and V chords 
don't use the leading tone at all, not even a flatted 7th.


Does that make them nontonal when they don't include a chordal 
instrument and tonal when they do?


I would think that tonal music would be music where anybody could easily 
point to the tonic and say "That's the tonic."


And non-tonal music would be where nobody could point to such a thing.

--
David H. Bailey
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
___
Finale mailing list
Finale@shsu.edu
http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale

Re: [Finale] OT: John Cage's first national TV appearance (1960)

[dhbailey]

Dennis Bathory-Kitsz wrote:

At 01:44 PM 5/27/2007 -0400, David W. Fenton wrote:

On 26 May 2007 at 22:51, Dennis Bathory-Kitsz wrote:


"Star Wars" with John Williams's retro-heist from "The
Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex".

I thought it was from King's Road?


Maybe both? I don't know the latter, but I have the soundtrack for E&E. I
played it for a class of schoolkids when I was teaching, and they all cried
out "Star Wars! Yay!"



They do the same for Holst's Planets, too.

--
David H. Bailey
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
___
Finale mailing list
Finale@shsu.edu
http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale

Re: [Finale] OT: John Cage's first national TV appearance (1960)

[John Howell]

At 2:40 PM -0400 5/27/07, Aaron Rabushka wrote:

Perhaps it may be a geeky pecadillo on my part, but "tonal" requires that
the tonal center (or the tonal center of the moment, as it may be)  be
established by it's own dominant and leading tone (thank you IU theory
department!).


Well, unfortunately they were also, for the most part, ignorant of 
(or perhaps just dismissive of) the medieval and renaissance 
theorists who had no such definition, since it didn't exist until the 
common-practice period.  But if that's the definition that works for 
you, no problem.  Just don't try analyzing medieval or renaissance 
music using IU theory!


John


--
John & Susie Howell
Virginia Tech Department of Music
Blacksburg, Virginia, U.S.A 24061-0240
Vox (540) 231-8411  Fax (540) 231-5034
(mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED])
http://www.music.vt.edu/faculty/howell/howell.html
___
Finale mailing list
Finale@shsu.edu
http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale

Re: [Finale] OT: John Cage's first national TV appearance (1960)

[John Howell]

At 12:12 PM -0400 5/27/07, Andrew Stiller wrote:

On May 26, 2007, at 9:09 PM, John Howell wrote:


Andrew wrote:


And another thing: non-tonal and atonal are not synonyms.


I often agree with Andrew and respect his depth of knowledge, which 
goes well beyond my own, and with this I can definitely agree.  But 
again, I read in his comments that he's referring to the use of 
common-practice functional harmony and NOT simply to the presence 
of absence of a tonal center.




That is correct. The reason I do so is that atonality is a highly 
restricted idiom both culturally and chronologically. It is so small 
a portion of the total body of human music, that to make the 
dichotomy tonal/atonal on the basis you prefer is as fundamentally 
silly as to divide all music into impressionist vs. 
non-impressionist. Beyond that, if tonal and atonal are considered 
as co-equal terms, that ironically gives to atonal music a 
prominence and importance far beyond what it deserves. Finally, if 
"tonal" means any music with a tonal center, than what are we to 
call the harmonic idiom of 1660-1900--for which, I might add, the 
adjective "tonal" was originally employed?


At least it's clear that we're using the word in very different ways, 
which is useful to understand.  For the common-practice period I find 
that the music is overwhelmingly tonal (having tonal centers) of 
course, with the harmonic idiom being that of functional harmony. 
But to me that's two definitions looking at two aspects, tonal 
centeredness and harmonic usage.  Tonality does not require 
functional harmony, and is not restricted to either major-minor 
tonality nor to common-practice harmonic usage.  Your mileage clearly 
does differ.


I agree of course, that atonality is highly restricted culturally and 
chronologically, but also feel that by far the majority of all music 
of all times and all places (of which we can be aware) is tonal.


John


--
John & Susie Howell
Virginia Tech Department of Music
Blacksburg, Virginia, U.S.A 24061-0240
Vox (540) 231-8411  Fax (540) 231-5034
(mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED])
http://www.music.vt.edu/faculty/howell/howell.html
___
Finale mailing list
Finale@shsu.edu
http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale

Re: [Finale] OT: John Cage's first national TV appearance (1960)

[Dean M. Estabrook]

H,  your point is well taken ... I too do not know the answer for  
sure. Either way,  it sounds to me as if  you had one hell of a  
program in place for those young people, for which  you are to be  
commended.


Dean

On May 26, 2007, at 8:13 PM, Dennis Bathory-Kitsz wrote:


At 12:02 PM 5/26/2007 -0700, Dean M. Estabrook wrote:

I would think, if anything, that their views would widen when exposed
to tonal music, IF they had the previous training you gave them.


Just to clarify, though I taught music, I didn't give them training  
in the
traditional sense. I gave them opportunities to put hand-to-music,  
as it

were, and to engage a wide variety of sonic experiences -- including
listening into how their favorite pop songs worked. It was a  
process of
ongoing discovery. Everyone learned to play an instrument and to  
read music
as well as to write music; even the third-graders had to suggest  
and even
to some degree defend their choices of notation, for example. I  
avoided as

much as possible an implication of judgment while providing tools of
discernment. (Yeah, my whole approach crazified the lesson-plan-bound
administration.)

Sorry for the long preface, but here's an analogy: Even with an  
intense

early training in a language, even where it was the first language of
children in a household, a language can be forgotten when  
overwhelmed by

the dominant language of the culture.

My father grew up speaking Hungarian and going to a German-speaking  
school
(in rural New Jersey, not Europe), and only started to learn  
English after

he was ten years old (when the family moved to New York in 1928). His
German was long gone by the 1950s, and after his father died, the  
Hungarian

started to disappear as well.

It doesn't even take that long. I have some friends in the  
Netherlands, one
of whom has been working in England for the past five years. When  
we were
all visiting in Utrecht a few weeks ago, his brother-in-law  
complained that

his Dutch had really gone to the dogs -- no longer properly idiomatic.

One would hope early experiences provide a basis for a wider view,  
but I'm

not optimistic about how much pressure a dominant culture can exert.

Dennis



Please participate in my 2007 project:
http://maltedmedia.com/waam/
My "We Are All Mozart" blog:
http://maltedmedia.com/bathory/waam-blog.html


___
Finale mailing list
Finale@shsu.edu
http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale


Dean M. Estabrook
http://deanestabrook.googlepages.com/home

Of all hoaxes, the one which is my most vexing bête noire on a  
quotidian basis, is the cereal box top which informs  simply,   
"Lift Tab to Open."  Then, "To Close, Insert Tab Here ." Yeah,  
right! In attempting to accomplish the first direction, not only  
the tab but also the slit intended to accept the aforementioned  
protuberance  have both been irreparably  disfigured and rendered  
dysfunctional.  This debacle is then amplified by the misbehavior  
of the recalcitrant inner bag, which can not be unsealed sans  
mangling it, and hence, will not disperse its contents without  
exiting the box itself. All I wanted was a bowl of cereal.







___
Finale mailing list
Finale@shsu.edu
http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale

Re: [Finale] OT: John Cage's first national TV appearance (1960)

[Dean M. Estabrook]

I perceive that there is a hang up on this thread, that we gotta have  
a leading tone present to qualify for tonality. Tonality can also be  
established by just plain harmonies or single chords. If you have a  
perfect fifth, or perfect fourth in a vertical aggregate,  you have,  
according to Schenker, a tonal center present.


Dean

On May 26, 2007, at 7:03 PM, Andrew Stiller wrote:



On May 26, 2007, at 5:53 PM, Phil Daley wrote:



Rock music is non-tonal?  That's news to me.  Doesn't it do 1-4-5-1?



No it doesn't. The vast majority of rock music is cast  in the  
dorian or mixolydian modes, neither of which possesses a leading  
tone. Furthermore, it is derived from the 12-bar blues, which is  
itself  decidedly non-tonal (3 parallel, four-note chords,  
including what in tonal music would be a [forbidden] retrogression).


It's non-tonal nature allows rock music to be unusually flexible in  
its chordal sequences, and a strong final cadence can be formed  
from any chord directly to the home chord. The one exception to  
this is the  authentic cadence, which is for the most part found  
only in parodies of classical style (e.g. in "Bohemian Rhapsody").


Because the music is not tonal, some chords that are routine--even  
banal--in tonal music have a strikingly different effect when used  
in a rock song. My favorite example of this is the song "She's Not  
There": the chorus rocks gently between D minor and A  minor (the  
home key is A dorian),  until the words "Don't bother trying to  
find her, she's not there," where the progression is Dminor, C, E.  
Now, E major is the ordinary dominant chord in A minor and is  
utterly routine for music in that key; but in this song it strikes  
the ear as a completely unexpected altered chord, whose uncanniness  
perfectly illustrates the text.

It is not tonal.

Andrew Stiller
Kallisti Music Press
http://www.kallistimusic.com/

___
Finale mailing list
Finale@shsu.edu
http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale


Dean M. Estabrook
http://deanestabrook.googlepages.com/home

Of all hoaxes, the one which is my most vexing bête noire on a  
quotidian basis, is the cereal box top which informs  simply,   
"Lift Tab to Open."  Then, "To Close, Insert Tab Here ." Yeah,  
right! In attempting to accomplish the first direction, not only  
the tab but also the slit intended to accept the aforementioned  
protuberance  have both been irreparably  disfigured and rendered  
dysfunctional.  This debacle is then amplified by the misbehavior  
of the recalcitrant inner bag, which can not be unsealed sans  
mangling it, and hence, will not disperse its contents without  
exiting the box itself. All I wanted was a bowl of cereal.







___
Finale mailing list
Finale@shsu.edu
http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale

Re: [Finale] OT: John Cage's first national TV appearance (1960)

[Dennis Bathory-Kitsz]

At 01:44 PM 5/27/2007 -0400, David W. Fenton wrote:
>On 26 May 2007 at 22:51, Dennis Bathory-Kitsz wrote:
>
>> "Star Wars" with John Williams's retro-heist from "The
>> Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex".
>
>I thought it was from King's Road?

Maybe both? I don't know the latter, but I have the soundtrack for E&E. I
played it for a class of schoolkids when I was teaching, and they all cried
out "Star Wars! Yay!"

Dennis



___
Finale mailing list
Finale@shsu.edu
http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale

Re: [Finale] OT: John Cage's first national TV appearance (1960)

[Aaron Rabushka]

Perhaps it may be a geeky pecadillo on my part, but "tonal" requires that
the tonal center (or the tonal center of the moment, as it may be)  be
established by it's own dominant and leading tone (thank you IU theory
department!). So modal (including the pentatonic modes with no 7th and the
hexatonic with a flatted 7th) doesn't qualify. And of course (and
fortunately) it is not necessary to agree with this (or even understand it)
to enjoy the music.

And speaking of "atonality," who here has NOT had the experience of hearing
an amateur children's choir's performance where no parent complained a bit
about the atonality being produced?

Aaron J. Rabushka
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
http://users.waymark.net/arabushk
- Original Message - 
From: "John Howell" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: 
Sent: Sunday, May 27, 2007 12:55 PM
Subject: Re: [Finale] OT: John Cage's first national TV appearance (1960)


> At 10:48 PM -0400 5/26/07, Aaron Rabushka wrote:
> >Hmm--I never heard of Charles Whittenberg, but if he sounds like me he
must
> >have something on the ball! And yes, there was chromaticism before Wagner
> >(late Gesualdo madrigals, anyone?). Or Lasso's Sybillene Prophecy music?
> >(remember those, John H?)
>
> Oh yes!!  And not only them, but De Rore, Marenzio, Luzzeschi, and
> that young whippersnapper, Monteverdi, each in his own way.  It was
> in the air.  (Or maybe the water!)  Only Claudio went more for
> unexpected dissonance than for temporarily shifting or temporarily
> unclear tonal centers.  But Lasso sure showed that he could do it, if
> he felt like it!  (Mostly he didn't feel like it.)  The challenge in
> performing the late Italian madrigalists is not just the
> chromaticism, but figuring out how to adjust the intervals to keep
> them pure in the midst of meandering tonal centers.  Equal
> temperament need not apply!!!
>
> John
>
>
> -- 
> John & Susie Howell
> Virginia Tech Department of Music
> Blacksburg, Virginia, U.S.A 24061-0240
> Vox (540) 231-8411  Fax (540) 231-5034
> (mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED])
> http://www.music.vt.edu/faculty/howell/howell.html
> ___
> Finale mailing list
> Finale@shsu.edu
> http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
>

___
Finale mailing list
Finale@shsu.edu
http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale

Re: [Finale] OT: John Cage's first national TV appearance (1960)

[David W. Fenton]

On 26 May 2007 at 22:51, Dennis Bathory-Kitsz wrote:

> "Star Wars" with John Williams's retro-heist from "The
> Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex".

I thought it was from King's Road?

-- 
David W. Fentonhttp://dfenton.com
David Fenton Associates   http://dfenton.com/DFA/

___
Finale mailing list
Finale@shsu.edu
http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale

Re: [Finale] OT: John Cage's first national TV appearance (1960)

[John Howell]

At 10:48 PM -0400 5/26/07, Aaron Rabushka wrote:

Hmm--I never heard of Charles Whittenberg, but if he sounds like me he must
have something on the ball! And yes, there was chromaticism before Wagner
(late Gesualdo madrigals, anyone?). Or Lasso's Sybillene Prophecy music?
(remember those, John H?)


Oh yes!!  And not only them, but De Rore, Marenzio, Luzzeschi, and 
that young whippersnapper, Monteverdi, each in his own way.  It was 
in the air.  (Or maybe the water!)  Only Claudio went more for 
unexpected dissonance than for temporarily shifting or temporarily 
unclear tonal centers.  But Lasso sure showed that he could do it, if 
he felt like it!  (Mostly he didn't feel like it.)  The challenge in 
performing the late Italian madrigalists is not just the 
chromaticism, but figuring out how to adjust the intervals to keep 
them pure in the midst of meandering tonal centers.  Equal 
temperament need not apply!!!


John


--
John & Susie Howell
Virginia Tech Department of Music
Blacksburg, Virginia, U.S.A 24061-0240
Vox (540) 231-8411  Fax (540) 231-5034
(mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED])
http://www.music.vt.edu/faculty/howell/howell.html
___
Finale mailing list
Finale@shsu.edu
http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale

Re: [Finale] OT: John Cage's first national TV appearance (1960)

[John Howell]

At 10:43 PM -0400 5/26/07, Aaron Rabushka wrote:

So does "non-Western" include Appalachian fiddle tunes (often not tonal)


OH?  Not what I've heard.  Very tonal, unless of course you discount 
modality.  And very much tied to the open strings for tonal centers.


John


--
John & Susie Howell
Virginia Tech Department of Music
Blacksburg, Virginia, U.S.A 24061-0240
Vox (540) 231-8411  Fax (540) 231-5034
(mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED])
http://www.music.vt.edu/faculty/howell/howell.html
___
Finale mailing list
Finale@shsu.edu
http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale

Re: [Finale] OT: John Cage's first national TV appearance (1960)

[Andrew Stiller]

On May 26, 2007, at 9:09 PM, John Howell wrote:


Andrew wrote:


And another thing: non-tonal and atonal are not synonyms.


I often agree with Andrew and respect his depth of knowledge, which 
goes well beyond my own, and with this I can definitely agree.  But 
again, I read in his comments that he's referring to the use of 
common-practice functional harmony and NOT simply to the presence of 
absence of a tonal center.




That is correct. The reason I do so is that atonality is a highly 
restricted idiom both culturally and chronologically. It is so small a 
portion of the total body of human music, that to make the dichotomy 
tonal/atonal on the basis you prefer is as fundamentally silly as to 
divide all music into impressionist vs. non-impressionist. Beyond that, 
if tonal and atonal are considered as co-equal terms, that ironically 
gives to atonal music a prominence and importance far beyond what it 
deserves. Finally, if "tonal" means any music with a tonal center, than 
what are we to call the harmonic idiom of 1660-1900--for which, I might 
add, the adjective "tonal" was originally employed?



Andrew Stiller
Kallisti Music Press
http://www.kallistimusic.com/

___
Finale mailing list
Finale@shsu.edu
http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale

Re: [Finale] OT: John Cage's first national TV appearance (1960)

[dhbailey]

Aaron Rabushka wrote:

Not to mention the Bach chorale the Berg literally quotes in the second
movement. I've always been fascinated how his violin concerto can seduce and
convine people who think they don't like 20th-century music.



They're the same people who love movie music but hate concert music, right?

People who won't stand for certain sounds in the concert hall, enjoy 
experiencing them in movie theaters.


--
David H. Bailey
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
___
Finale mailing list
Finale@shsu.edu
http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale

Re: [Finale] OT: John Cage's first national TV appearance (1960)

[dhbailey]

Christopher Smith wrote:


On May 26, 2007, at 5:53 PM, Phil Daley wrote:



Rock music is non-tonal?  That's news to me.  Doesn't it do 1-4-5-1?


Not too much of it these days. I guess you don't put on a radio very 
often (not that I blame you for that) but I have a thirteen year old, so 
I hear things that I might not otherwise...




And we do have to remember that there is no single musical culture 
represented by the term "rock music."



--
David H. Bailey
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
___
Finale mailing list
Finale@shsu.edu
http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale

Re: [Finale] OT: John Cage's first national TV appearance (1960)

[dhbailey]

Phil Daley wrote:

At 01:04 PM 5/26/2007, David W. Fenton wrote:

 >On 26 May 2007 at 12:41, Andrew Stiller wrote:
 >
 >> I cannot, for example, imagine any
 >> American boy nowadays being denounced as a "fairy" because he played
 >> the clarinet.
 >
 >You must live in an entirely different world than *I* live in!

Please clarify.

They are still gay?  Or you never heard that comment?



While I can't verify or discount the claim about sexual preferences, in 
practically every town around me except two, being in band is certainly 
not looked on as something which one should be proud of.


And that viewpoint in some of the elementary schools comes from the 
teachers!



--
David H. Bailey
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
___
Finale mailing list
Finale@shsu.edu
http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale

Re: [Finale] OT: John Cage's first national TV appearance (1960)

[Christopher Smith]

On May 26, 2007, at 6:09 PM, Dean M. Estabrook wrote:

I appreciate these words  thank you. From the sense I make of  
it, "atonal" and "no-tonal" come to mean pretty much the same  
thing, i.e., lack of a tonal center due to the avoidance of leading  
tone progressions and harmonies built of fourths and fifths, which  
tend to announce a tonal center given their relation to the  
harmonic series.


Well, closer to the point is what definition of "tonal" are you going  
to use, then?


Tonal vs. Modal

Tonal vs. Atonal

Tonal vs. Music I don't like (I had to throw that one in, as it WAS  
the one my grandma used!)


I don't really like any of those terms, except in conjunction with  
the historical context that created them. Even a relatively neutral  
term (without the charge that comes with the "atonal" word) like  
"modal" can start arguments, like the one Andrew Stiller and I had a  
year or so ago on this list, when I realised that I was using a jazz  
musician's definition of "modal" while Andrew was using a mideval/ 
renaissance definition. I think we both realised that we were talking  
about different things that used the same word, and settled before  
fisticuffs broke out...


On a similar subject, I attended an ear-opening master class with  
pianist Ritchie Beirach and saxophonist Dave Liebman. They mentioned  
that they hated the term "free jazz" because it didn't mean anything  
to them, and it just tended to turn off listeners that had bad  
associations with the term (like some have with the term "atonal"!)  
Over the twenty-odd years they they had played together they had  
developed a whole vocabulary to put into words the various concepts  
they attached to what they were playing (like that old chestnut about  
Inuit having many different words for "snow").


They talked about all the things that jazz could be without that were  
tied to traditional playing, like keep the phrases, but get rid of  
the chord progression (like So What). Then get rid of the chord  
altogether, but keep the bass note (pedal). Then get rid of phrases,  
but keep bars (to keep a metre.) Then keep the pulse, but get rid of  
bars (so no metre.) Then maybe have different pulses between  
different musicians, but with a clear relationship. Then NOT a clear  
relationship. And that was only how they talked about the time!  
Harmony, melody, etc., got even more intense. I learned a new term  
for a kind of a medium ballad tempo feel, that they called a  
"Slowlope", that was somewhat uncommon in modern jazz playing, except  
for them. Anyway, all this was to illustrate that nobody else needed  
to know or agree with the words they used for these things, as long  
as THEY understood them. I think "tonal" and "atonal" are a couple  
more of those words, that have taken on more and different meanings  
than they originally had, and so are less useful now because of it.



Christopher


___
Finale mailing list
Finale@shsu.edu
http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale

Re: [Finale] OT: John Cage's first national TV appearance (1960)

[Christopher Smith]

On May 26, 2007, at 5:53 PM, Phil Daley wrote:



Rock music is non-tonal?  That's news to me.  Doesn't it do 1-4-5-1?


Not too much of it these days. I guess you don't put on a radio very  
often (not that I blame you for that) but I have a thirteen year old,  
so I hear things that I might not otherwise...


Christopher


___
Finale mailing list
Finale@shsu.edu
http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale

Re: [Finale] OT: John Cage's first national TV appearance (1960)

[Dennis Bathory-Kitsz]

At 12:02 PM 5/26/2007 -0700, Dean M. Estabrook wrote:
>I would think, if anything, that their views would widen when exposed  
>to tonal music, IF they had the previous training you gave them.

Just to clarify, though I taught music, I didn't give them training in the
traditional sense. I gave them opportunities to put hand-to-music, as it
were, and to engage a wide variety of sonic experiences -- including
listening into how their favorite pop songs worked. It was a process of
ongoing discovery. Everyone learned to play an instrument and to read music
as well as to write music; even the third-graders had to suggest and even
to some degree defend their choices of notation, for example. I avoided as
much as possible an implication of judgment while providing tools of
discernment. (Yeah, my whole approach crazified the lesson-plan-bound
administration.)

Sorry for the long preface, but here's an analogy: Even with an intense
early training in a language, even where it was the first language of
children in a household, a language can be forgotten when overwhelmed by
the dominant language of the culture.

My father grew up speaking Hungarian and going to a German-speaking school
(in rural New Jersey, not Europe), and only started to learn English after
he was ten years old (when the family moved to New York in 1928). His
German was long gone by the 1950s, and after his father died, the Hungarian
started to disappear as well.

It doesn't even take that long. I have some friends in the Netherlands, one
of whom has been working in England for the past five years. When we were
all visiting in Utrecht a few weeks ago, his brother-in-law complained that
his Dutch had really gone to the dogs -- no longer properly idiomatic.

One would hope early experiences provide a basis for a wider view, but I'm
not optimistic about how much pressure a dominant culture can exert.

Dennis



Please participate in my 2007 project:
http://maltedmedia.com/waam/
My "We Are All Mozart" blog:
http://maltedmedia.com/bathory/waam-blog.html


___
Finale mailing list
Finale@shsu.edu
http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale

Re: [Finale] OT: John Cage's first national TV appearance (1960)

[Aaron Rabushka]

Hmm--I never heard of Charles Whittenberg, but if he sounds like me he must
have something on the ball! And yes, there was chromaticism before Wagner
(late Gesualdo madrigals, anyone?). Or Lasso's Sybillene Prophecy music?
(remember those, John H?)

Aaron J. Rabushka
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
http://users.waymark.net/arabushk
- Original Message - 
From: "Phil Daley" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: 
Sent: Saturday, May 26, 2007 6:24 PM
Subject: Re: [Finale] OT: John Cage's first national TV appearance (1960)


> At 01:09 PM 5/26/2007, Aaron Rabushka wrote:
>
>  >Wait a minute--how can anyone be wrong about what they like? Like any
great
>  >composer Bach offers more than just a single attribute, and I think that
all
>  >three comments here are very perceptive. When people make blanket
statements
>  >to the effect that "all atonal music is crap" I remind them that they
>  >disqualify the 40th symphony of Mozart (the bit right ofter the double
bar
>  >in the finale)
>
> You are sounding like my 20th Century music graduate class professor
> (Charles Whittenberg) who said about some Baroque music composer who used
a
> "chromatic passing tone", "see, they used chromaticism back in 1600."
>
> I stopped listening to what he said after that.
>
> We also had to write a composition (for the instruments students in that
> class played) for that class.  I would call my style "neo-baroque".
>
> Whittenberg had no clue that I was writing in the pattern of Bach.  I am
> not sure he even knew what Baroque was.
>
> Several students came up to me, after the performance, and said how much
> they liked playing "classical" music.
>
> ___
> Finale mailing list
> Finale@shsu.edu
> http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
>

___
Finale mailing list
Finale@shsu.edu
http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale

Re: [Finale] OT: John Cage's first national TV appearance (1960)

[Aaron Rabushka]

So does "non-Western" include Appalachian fiddle tunes (often not tonal) and
Carter family songs (whose guitars tonalized entire tradtions)? (Sorry, but
as a new Carolinian I couldn't resist.)

Aaron J. Rabushka
who has always been thankful for the liberating influence of Indian
classical
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
http://users.waymark.net/arabushk

- Original Message - 
From: "Phil Daley" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: 
Sent: Saturday, May 26, 2007 5:53 PM
Subject: Re: [Finale] OT: John Cage's first national TV appearance (1960)


> At 10:46 PM 5/25/2007, Andrew Stiller wrote:
>
>  >And another thing: non-tonal and atonal are not synonyms. Most music,
>  >in fact, is non-tonal: Medieval and Renaissance music,  non-Western
>  >music (all of it), rock music...
>
> Rock music is non-tonal?  That's news to me.  Doesn't it do 1-4-5-1?
>
>  >Being charitable, I assume your
>  >blanket condemnation does not extend to any of these musics.
>
> All non-Western music is on my list of "unlistenable".
>
> ___
> Finale mailing list
> Finale@shsu.edu
> http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
>

___
Finale mailing list
Finale@shsu.edu
http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale

Re: [Finale] OT: John Cage's first national TV appearance (1960)

[Dennis Bathory-Kitsz]

At 12:41 PM 5/26/2007 -0400, Andrew Stiller wrote:
>IMO the cultural shift has been in the opposite direction. The 
>fundamental antipathy among ordinary Americans toward classical music 
>has its origins in the country's founding. In the 18th c
[...]
>Prior to 1960, most Americans lived their entire lives without ever 
>experiencing and opera, a ballet, or a symphony.
[...]

Let me explain how I perceive the cultural shift.

America had home-grown composers as well as imported music, showing a
dramatic change following the 19th century European invasion (which
included American composers studying in Europe), after which the sweep of
American symphony orchestra foundings could occur. [What might have grown
from the original American composers 'stock' would never be known.]

(As for your 1960 date, that seems peculiar to me as the child of a
lower-class family. If you chose your word 'experiencing' to mean
'attending', I'd have to say you were correct; but the legacy of recordings
and radio broadcasts says something very different.)

But my 'cultural shift' is not focused on the distant history, and I
believe it has no influence today. America doesn't have much of a
collective cultural memory, so it wouldn't matter if the American
orchestras had appeared suddenly in 1930 from the planet Zombartumian. Yes,
the U.S. does have a long legacy of individuals who, whether self-made or
heirs, self-educated or university, had open minds toward the arts and
culture. Endowments from them built the opera houses and the libraries, and
created collections that became their own museums or were given to museums.
They wrote about and spoke about culture as significant. (I knew some of
the last of that generation when I was the young 'token' artist on the
board of the New Jersey State Museum in the mid-1970s: Barbara and Glenway
Wescott, Douglas Dillon, Malcolm Forbes, Marjorie Graff, etc. They believed
in cultural significance and collected and commissioned art they found
compelling and challenging.)

This cultural thinking grew -- and what might be called a 'cultural
awareness' reached a moment of collective enthusiasm with, among thousands
of other examples, the founding of the National Endowment for the Arts, the
consolidation of of educational broadcasting into National Public Radio and
the Public Broadcasting System, the building of Lincoln Center and the
Kennedy Center, and the peak of adventure and experiment in America's
musical forms (jazz and minimalism) ... all within about ten years (1963-73).

But the democratizing and public funding of the arts (the latter a
mucked-up intrusion without the cultural experience of, say, Europe) and
especially music (an intimate artform we bring into our lives in real time)
also carried with it the tacit assumption that political and marketplace
forces held a key to 'unlock' culture for Americans. It did and it didn't.
Whether or not Pollock or Warhol or Oldenburg or Paik or Rauschenberg
caught on in the general populace was irrelevant, because those artists
could be given time and space to influence the generation of designers who
can now create silhouette iPod ads -- without it being in the least
visually confounding. Nor would we have "Studio 60" or "ER" without the
products of handheld-camera experimental filmmakers a generation earlier
and the vocal rhythms of Burroughs and Ginsberg. 

However, it also set in motion an aggressive making up for lost time among
less fleet-of-foot organizations such as the major orchestras, which were
being wrenched from the Toscanini-style domination (a few generations
during which they did play new nonpop) into a swamp of licensing
requirements and union rules and expensive buildings and recording
contracts and political expediency and pseudo-participatory decision-making
and accountancy management, leaving them unable to pursue artistic
invention without being squashed deeply into the corner of a perpetual
marketplace crisis. So while Marat-Sade was being premiered, across the
fountain the New York Philharmonic was resurrecting Mahler -- and even that
to controversy.

Contemporary nonpop had a few minor film successes (such as Ligeti in
"2001", Hermann in "Fahrenheit 451" and even Mancini in "Charade") during
that ten-year flourishing of musical arts, only to be subsumed by
shoot-em-ups like "Star Wars" with John Williams's retro-heist from "The
Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex".

Conservative politics and free-marketism snapped back before the path of
new nonpop (which, one has to keep in mind, takes place in real time rather
than in "considered time") could deeply influence the later musical
'designers' who would guide public tastes by example. Simultaneously, a
rush into considerations of relevance -- understood and not -- had ruptured
higher education's teacher training programs. Conservative by nature,
musical education programs all but abandoned the creation of nonpop -- the
creation of any music, for that matter.

In twenty years,

Re: [Finale] OT: John Cage's first national TV appearance (1960)

[Aaron Rabushka]

Not to mention the Bach chorale the Berg literally quotes in the second
movement. I've always been fascinated how his violin concerto can seduce and
convine people who think they don't like 20th-century music.

Aaron J. Rabushka
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
http://users.waymark.net/arabushk
- Original Message - 
From: "Christopher Smith" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: 
Sent: Saturday, May 26, 2007 3:42 PM
Subject: Re: [Finale] OT: John Cage's first national TV appearance (1960)


>
> On May 26, 2007, at 2:44 PM, Dean M. Estabrook wrote:
>
> > Please define "Non -Tonal."
>
> There are several definitions in current use of "tonal" and "atonal",
> none very strict nor all-encompassing. Depending on which one for
> "tonal" you are using, "non-tonal" would just be everything else that
> you decided didn't fall under the "tonal" umbrella.
>
> I think Andrew was meaning for tonal; any music defined by a leading
> tone cadence, which has been the current European definition since
> late Renaissance up to 1910 or so, where things started to get harder
> to define. NOT tonal, by that definition, includes early modal and
> anything that you might like to include after 1910 or so that doesn't
> have its key centre defined by a leading-tone cadence, and a whole
> cartload of non-European music as well.
>
> Atonal is just a very bad expression, and I wish we could come up
> with something more descriptive. Originally it was meant to include
> new music (at the start of the 1900's, that is) that didn't have a
> clear key centre, or else actively avoided leaning even slightly
> toward one, including most twelve-tone music. But the word has been
> co-opted to mean "music I don't like" by just about everyone who
> doesn't have a better definition than the above one to offer.
> Culprits in this category include our local classical music critic,
> who uses it as a dismissal whenever he doesn't understand a work, and
> my grandmother.
>
> Incidentally, someone mentioned Berg's Violin Concerto as an example
> of atonal music. While it was undoubtedly composed using serial
> twelve-tone techniques (though not exclusively) I find it to be
> notable in that it DOES sort of bend toward a key, and in a fairly
> conservative way too, in that the series includes two sets of two
> stacked triads a fifth apart which sort of suggest a i-V harmonic
> movement. I am somewhat ashamed to admit that perhaps one of the
> reasons I find this work to be so beautiful is the suggestion of
> traditional tonality, however fleeting. But then I console myself by
> admiring his melodic sense and astonishing orchestrational colours
> (it really is a gorgeous work!)
>
> Christopher
>
>
> ___
> Finale mailing list
> Finale@shsu.edu
> http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
>

___
Finale mailing list
Finale@shsu.edu
http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale

Re: [Finale] OT: John Cage's first national TV appearance (1960)

[Andrew Stiller]

On May 26, 2007, at 5:53 PM, Phil Daley wrote:



Rock music is non-tonal?  That's news to me.  Doesn't it do 1-4-5-1?



No it doesn't. The vast majority of rock music is cast  in the dorian 
or mixolydian modes, neither of which possesses a leading tone. 
Furthermore, it is derived from the 12-bar blues, which is itself  
decidedly non-tonal (3 parallel, four-note chords, including what in 
tonal music would be a [forbidden] retrogression).


It's non-tonal nature allows rock music to be unusually flexible in its 
chordal sequences, and a strong final cadence can be formed from any 
chord directly to the home chord. The one exception to this is the  
authentic cadence, which is for the most part found only in parodies of 
classical style (e.g. in "Bohemian Rhapsody").


Because the music is not tonal, some chords that are routine--even 
banal--in tonal music have a strikingly different effect when used in a 
rock song. My favorite example of this is the song "She's Not There": 
the chorus rocks gently between D minor and A  minor (the home key is A 
dorian),  until the words "Don't bother trying to find her, she's not 
there," where the progression is Dminor, C, E. Now, E major is the 
ordinary dominant chord in A minor and is utterly routine for music in 
that key; but in this song it strikes the ear as a completely 
unexpected altered chord, whose uncanniness perfectly illustrates the 
text.

It is not tonal.

Andrew Stiller
Kallisti Music Press
http://www.kallistimusic.com/

___
Finale mailing list
Finale@shsu.edu
http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale

Fw: [Finale] OT: John Cage's first national TV appearance (1960)

[Mariposa Symphony Orchestra]

John Howell ended this particular post with:

"Yes, I have appeared to argue otherwise in the past.  So??  If you want 
consistency, go find a fundamentalist Republican!!"


And Les just had to say:

John - thank you for a wonderfully great, ROTFLMGO line!

Best,

Les

Les Marsden
Founding Music Director and Conductor,
The Mariposa Symphony Orchestra
Music and Mariposa?  Ah, Paradise!!!

http://arts-mariposa.org/symphony.html
http://www.geocities.com/~jbenz/lesbio.html

___
Finale mailing list
Finale@shsu.edu
http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale

Re: [Finale] OT: John Cage's first national TV appearance (1960)

[Andrew Stiller]

On May 26, 2007, at 1:33 PM, Mariposa Symphony Orchestra (Les Marsden) 
wrote:


   In the mid-to-late 1800s American symphony orchestras and opera 
companies were sprouting everywhere;


There *were* no American symphony orchestras in the mid-late 19th c. 
except for the NY Phil and Theodore Thomas's touring outfit.


every last small town had its Opera House which was routinely sold out 
when a Jenny Lind or Louis Moreau Gottschalk came through.


"Opera house" meant simply a theater equally adapted to drama and 
music. The most typical thing you'd hear there would be a minstrel 
show. As for Gottschalk, his diary of his experiences on tour will put 
paid immediately to any notion that audiences outside a handful of 
major cities were even remotely sophisticated.


Whether the cheering mining-camp reactions to touring 
Shakespeareans


drama, be it said, is not music.

or Tchaikovsky's (1891) writings which document his astonishment while 
touring the US East Coast at the fact that he was far-better known, 
comprehended and more widely celebrated in America than in his own 
land,


Things had improved somewhat by the 1890s--a part of the continuing, 
long-term improvement that I mentioned in my previous posting. Note, 
however the key phrase "East Coast" in the quote above. I suspect that 
even that would better read "Northeast Coast." Did Tchaikovsky go to 
Richmond, Charleston, Atlanta?


or the plethora of competing music critics in US cities major and 
minor,


This went hand in hand with a plethora of newspapers. The closest 
equivalent nowadays would be the blogosphere--where there are indeed 
numerous competing music critics, major and minor.


Dvorak was celebrated - and extremely well-known in this country when 
Jeanette Thurber managed the coup of bringing him here to head the 
National Conservatory of Music,


Again, this was at  the very end of the 19th c., just before the 
foundation of orchestras in Philadelphia, Cleveland, etc.


in 1851 Anthony Philip Heinrich, America's most important  composer 
before the civil war, took an extended vacation in the Catskills. He 
had thought of himself as a famous man, for every musically-educated 
person in Boston, New York, and Philadelphia knew his name and 
affectionately referred to him as "Father Heinrich." A decade  earlier 
he had chaired the founding meeting of the New York Philharmonic 
Society.  In the Catskill towns, however, he found he was totally 
unknown--which sent him into a deep depression lasting a month or more, 
after which he started styling himself "The Unknown Man."


Nearly every parlor in nearly every American home had a piano which 
served as training ground for yet another Fur Elise rendering;


But mostly to accompany popular songs. A home piano nowadays signifies 
some degree of musical sophistication, but that was certainly not true 
in the 19th c.



Caruso's 78s were the greatest-selling recordings by far


OK,  now we're  into the 20th c. And the statistic  you  give is  a 
slippery  one: thousands of musical acts were recorded, most of them 
utterly meritricious-- and Caruso could easily have outsold all the 
others without commanding more than a tiny percentage of the total. I 
don't know for a fact that this is the case, but I suspect it is.


the age of radio and later TV produced far more wide-flung, 
non-specific broadcast dissemination of classical music than we have 
today - think only of the Metropolitan Opera broadcasts,


--which still continue, uninterrupted--except that nowadays, at least 
where I live, you can now hear two different opera broadcasts each week 
instead of just one. As for the rest, it is simply untrue. Ballet only 
came to TV in the 1960s, and operas in that medium were rare "specials" 
before then.


Andrew Stiller
Kallisti Music Press
http://www.kallistimusic.com/

___
Finale mailing list
Finale@shsu.edu
http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale

Re: [Finale] OT: John Cage's first national TV appearance (1960)

[John Howell]

At 3:42 PM -0400 5/26/07, Christopher Smith wrote:

On May 26, 2007, at 2:44 PM, Dean M. Estabrook wrote:


Please define "Non -Tonal."


There are several definitions in current use of "tonal" and 
"atonal", none very strict nor all-encompassing. Depending on which 
one for "tonal" you are using, "non-tonal" would just be everything 
else that you decided didn't fall under the "tonal" umbrella.


I think Andrew was meaning for tonal; any music defined by a leading 
tone cadence, which has been the current European definition since 
late Renaissance


Well, silly old me, I like to keep things simple.  I take "tonal" to 
mean exactly what it says, music with a tonal center.  Period. 
Nothing about cadences, definitely nothing about common-practice 
functional harmony (which seems to be what some people insist on). 
Just an identifiable tonal center.  And incidentally, I've never read 
any late renaissance writer who used your definition, and don't much 
care what modern theorists try to impose on earlier music.


Hindemith took care of fleshing out this definition in the opening 
section of "The Craft of Musical Composition," which also gives the 
theoretical basis for Neo-Classisism and non-functional tonal harmony 
in general.  He did a very commendable job, even if I don't find his 
music terribly attractive.


So by that simplest definition (remember Ocam's razor?):

NOT tonal, by that definition, includes early modal and anything 
that you might like to include after 1910 or so that doesn't have 
its key centre defined by a leading-tone cadence, and a whole 
cartload of non-European music as well.


Nope.  Suggesting that medieval chant and polyphony and renaissance 
music in all its wide variety of styles isn't tonal is just plain 
silly.  It doesn't use functional harmony and the early theorists had 
their own definitions of what cadences were, but it has the one 
essential element:  identifiable tonal centers.


Atonal is just a very bad expression, and I wish we could come up 
with something more descriptive.


It seems perfectly descriptive.  It's music that deliberately avoids 
a tonal center.  As Hindemith pointed out, that's pretty difficult to 
do, but it can be done, and it doesn't require serial techniques or 
the 12-tone rulebook to make it work.  What IS confusing is the 
difference between atonality and pantonality, at least to me, since I 
really can't hear a difference between no tonal center and all tonal 
centers present.  But that's probably just me.


Originally it was meant to include new music (at the start of the 
1900's, that is) that didn't have a clear key centre, or else 
actively avoided leaning even slightly toward one, including most 
twelve-tone music.


So we're in agreement!!

But the word has been co-opted to mean "music I don't like" by just 
about everyone who doesn't have a better definition than the above 
one to offer.


I think my definition's better because it's simpler, and it clearly 
defines atonal at the same time without invoking cadences or anything 
else extraneous.


Andrew wrote:


And another thing: non-tonal and atonal are not synonyms.


I often agree with Andrew and respect his depth of knowledge, which 
goes well beyond my own, and with this I can definitely agree.  But 
again, I read in his comments that he's referring to the use of 
common-practice functional harmony and NOT simply to the presence of 
absence of a tonal center.



Most music, in fact, is non-tonal: Medieval and Renaissance music,


All tonal;


non-Western music (all of it),


Tonal, much or even most of it; there are certainly tonal centers in 
both hemitonic and anhemitonic pentatonic music, although I know 
little about Arabic or Indian scales and tonal centers, but the use 
of different scales and intervals does not obviate the presence of 
tonal centers.



rock music...


Certainly tonal, with or without functional harmony.  Plus ALL 20th 
century pop, traditional, musical theater, jazz, folk and neo-folk, 
and anything else you'd care to attempt to define.  Which is why I 
suggested to Dennis B-K that modern culture is permeated by tonal 
music and it can't be avoided.


Now please understand that I'm only speaking to the definitions of 
terms, and advocating the simplest possible.  If we can't agree on 
what the words we use mean, we really ARE blind men trying to 
describe an elephant!!  Tonal, non-tonal, atonal, polytonal, 
pantonal, none of these terms has anything to do with judging the 
quality of a piece of music.  The music works or it doesn't.  It 
communicates or it doesn't.  It makes us want to hear it again or it 
doesn't.  Seems simple enough to me!


Yes, I have appeared to argue otherwise in the past.  So??  If you 
want consistency, go find a fundamentalist Republican!!


John


--
John & Susie Howell
Virginia Tech Department of Music
Blacksburg, Virginia, U.S.A 24061-0240
Vox (540) 231-8411  Fax (540) 231-5034
(mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED])
http://www.music.v

Re: [Finale] OT: John Cage's first national TV appearance (1960)

[Phil Daley]

At 01:13 PM 5/26/2007, Aaron Rabushka wrote:

>I've always found it interesting that young children can often groove on
>music that their older siblings don't consider hip and their parents may not
>even consider music. Case in point:  my youngest brother who never griped
>about music I was listening to (e.g., Mahler, Webern, Nono) unless someone
>else was there telling him that he needed to. I also recall a premium cable
>statio production of Pinocchio (Lainie Kazan was the fairy) whose music, had
>I not seen the composer's name (and no, I don't remember it) I would've
>attributed to Stravinsky with some excusrions into Penderecki-like
>glissandi. Great for it's target audience and anyone open to music as
>expression period.

In the early 50's, we had the first record  (I presume of a set) of 
Tchaikovsky's Piano Concerto.


I absolutely wore the record out, so that it only played static. That was 
in the days of wooden needles that you had to have a sharpener for.


___
Finale mailing list
Finale@shsu.edu
http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale

Re: [Finale] OT: John Cage's first national TV appearance (1960)

[David W. Fenton]

On 26 May 2007 at 18:11, Phil Daley wrote:

> At 01:04 PM 5/26/2007, David W. Fenton wrote:
> 
>  >On 26 May 2007 at 12:41, Andrew Stiller wrote:
>  >
>  >> I cannot, for example, imagine any
>  >> American boy nowadays being denounced as a "fairy" because he
>  played >> the clarinet. > >You must live in an entirely different
>  world than *I* live in!
> 
> Please clarify.
> 
> They are still gay?  Or you never heard that comment?

>From what I know about it, the stereotypes are as strong or stronger 
than they ever were.

-- 
David W. Fentonhttp://dfenton.com
David Fenton Associates   http://dfenton.com/DFA/

___
Finale mailing list
Finale@shsu.edu
http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale

Re: [Finale] OT: John Cage's first national TV appearance (1960)

[Phil Daley]

At 01:04 PM 5/26/2007, David W. Fenton wrote:

>On 26 May 2007 at 12:41, Andrew Stiller wrote:
>
>> I cannot, for example, imagine any
>> American boy nowadays being denounced as a "fairy" because he played
>> the clarinet.
>
>You must live in an entirely different world than *I* live in!

Please clarify.

They are still gay?  Or you never heard that comment?

___
Finale mailing list
Finale@shsu.edu
http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale

Re: [Finale] OT: John Cage's first national TV appearance (1960)

[shirling & neueweise]

I did an aleatoric piece with my middle school band (no, I didn't 
like it, I thought it was important to expose them to other music 
ideas).


you should try some of your own teaching sometime (you know, that bit 
about exposure).


I don't think anyone in the audience (even the parents) liked it and 
I personally considered it "non music".


i think you should maybe stop doing what you refer to as thinking, 
and start asking some questions.


hm... a piece chosen by someone who hates modern music, performance 
of said work under the same person, performed by students who 
certainly couldn't have received any meaningful guidance from the 
instructor on the piece, about the composer or stylistic aspects of 
the work... i bet you i would have hated the performance as well.


who knows, maybe the piece really did suck, maybe there were hundreds 
of better and more relevant pieces the musical (sic) director could 
have chosen if he was the slightest bit informed which would have 
provoked an entirely different reaction from the audience.  maybe the 
piece was good and the performance sucked because the performers had 
no clue; maybe the piece was good and the performance would have been 
good if the director understood the piece better; maybe the piece 
sounded great in rehearsal and everyone -- director and musicians -- 
were totally involved but the piece unfortunately fell apart in 
concert...


so kids, what does this little fairy tale tell us -- from a broad 
general perspective of course -- about "modern music"?


nothing.

it does make us consider the impact that we all have as individuals 
on all people we come in contact with (notably in the case of 
teacher-student relations), and teaches us to have respect for this 
fragile power wherever and whenever we may be called upon or inclined 
to wield it, and to use it wisely.


phil, what would you have to say if i told you i am fed up with your 
inane blather and have decided to judge americans the same way you 
have judged new music and am from this point on using you as a 
reference for my (non-) appreciation of those south-of-the-border 
folk?


--

shirling & neueweise ... new music publishers
mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] :.../ http://newmusicnotation.com
___
Finale mailing list
Finale@shsu.edu
http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale

Re: [Finale] OT: John Cage's first national TV appearance (1960)

[shirling & neueweise]

I am just trying to point out what a majority of the people who 
actually listen to classical music think.


hey phil thanks for representing me buddy.

get your facts straight.

better yet, get some facts.

--

shirling & neueweise ... new music publishers
mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] :.../ http://newmusicnotation.com
___
Finale mailing list
Finale@shsu.edu
http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale

Re: [Finale] OT: John Cage's first national TV appearance (1960)

[Phil Daley]

At 01:29 PM 5/26/2007, John Howell wrote:

>So I think Dennis's point might best be interpreted in this way:
>Inundation with tonality is there and is unavoidable.  There's no
>"maybe later" about it!  But young minds and young ears ARE open to
>more than one kind of music, or more than one kind of ANYTHING!, and
>they CAN be attracted to anything that is skillfully and lovingly
>presented.  What it comes down to is not just learning, but good
>teaching, and good teaching means careful manipulation of peer
>pressure and not just accepting it ready-made.

This is a really good idea.  I think it might be a hard row to hoe.

I did an aleatoric piece with my middle school band (no, I didn't like it, 
I thought it was important to expose them to other music ideas).


It was a mind opening experience for them.  Originally, they hated 
it.  What do I play when it says "random trills"?  etc.


By the time we did it in concert, it was their favorite piece.  They loved 
being able to do different things on every run through.


I don't think anyone in the audience (even the parents) liked it and I 
personally considered it "non music".


___
Finale mailing list
Finale@shsu.edu
http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale

Re: [Finale] OT: John Cage's first national TV appearance (1960)

[David W. Fenton]

On 26 May 2007 at 11:47, Mariposa Symphony Orchestra wrote:
>   On 26 May 2007 at 10:33, Mariposa Symphony Orchestra wrote:
> 
>   > In the mid-to-late 1800s American symphony
>   > orchestras and opera companies were sprouting everywhere; every
>   last > small town had its Opera House which was routinely sold out
>   when a > Jenny Lind or Louis Moreau Gottschalk came through. 
> 
>   Both of these would correspond to today's POPULAR music. At the time
>   they were not thought of as "art" music at all.
>
> Perhaps, perhaps not.Liszt 

Early Liszt, in his virtuoso days, would be popular music. As would 
all of the velocity school pianists, for instance.

> himself described Gottschalk as the
> Alcibiades of the Piano and Gottschalk was also called - routinely -
> the American Chopin. 

Chopin was popular music.

>   The performing Gottschalk was known as a
> "concert pianist" - not as anything less; I think rather than
> describing him as a pop musician of his day, he was probably a little
> more accurately the 19th-century equivalent of a crossover musician.  
>  His music, while structurally  for the most part quite simple,
> certainly is as demanding as Schumann; the fact that he was swarmed
> and swooned over is really not his own fault. I think he was
> integral in popularizing an aspect of what truly must be thought of as
> 'classical' music; is he today thought of as a pop composer or a
> 'classical' one?While his music lacks the depth of - oh, say, any
> number of DWM composers, I feel the only real claim to his being
> described as a popular musician was simply in the fact that he
> popularIZED piano concerts.

A huge number of his works became popular chestnuts. There were 
actually two different kinds of pieces that he wrote, the virtuoso 
pieces, and the more popular ones. His concerts were a mix of these, 
but his popular pieces were very widely published and played.

That's popular music, to me.

Mozart wrote some popular music, too.

> Jenny Lind - oh, come on!Royal Swedish Opera for years, Agathe in
> Freischutz, Alice in Robert le Diable, so many other roles;
> association with Mendelssohn, her great love of Bach and performance
> of so many of his oratorios - the fact that PT Barnum wildly promoted
> her in her 93 (count 'em) American concerts doesn't mean she was a
> popular performer in our current sense of that adjective; she was
> popularizing classical music on her American tour! 

By singing a lot of popular music, not excerpts from the operas 
(though those were included).

>   Her rep on those
> concerts was eclectic (with German conductor/composer Julius Benedict
> and Italian baritone Giovanni Belletti as demanded by Lind), but
> contained (besides American popular songs,) 

You're making my point!

> opera arias and other
> 'classical' rep as selected by Lind - who was proud of her standing as
> a serious artist.   Does the fact that popular-entertainment maven
> Barnum produced her concerts make them pop concerts? 

No, but the fact that they were programmed like our modern "pops" 
concerts should tell you something. And that they were attended by 
the general public.

>   Nope.   Again:
> she was popularizing eclectic repertoire - with emphasis on her
> serious 'classical' training.A crossover artist, perhaps, but a
> popular entertainer - in the way we use that term today?No.A
> classically-trained, classical artist performing an eclectic rep to
> throngs - and introducing many 19th century Americans to classical
> music in the process.

It was popular entertainment. 

Keep in mind that in Italy, Rossini and Verdi were popular music 
within their own lifetimes.

-- 
David W. Fentonhttp://dfenton.com
David Fenton Associates   http://dfenton.com/DFA/

___
Finale mailing list
Finale@shsu.edu
http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale

Re: [Finale] OT: John Cage's first national TV appearance (1960)

[Dean M. Estabrook]

I appreciate these words  thank you. From the sense I make of it,  
"atonal" and "no-tonal" come to mean pretty much the same thing,  
i.e., lack of a tonal center due to the avoidance of leading tone  
progressions and harmonies built of fourths and fifths, which tend to  
announce a tonal center given their relation to the harmonic series.  
I have always been careful to not equate 12 tone music with atonal  
music, because via the construction of the row, you can achieve any  
amount of tonality or lack thereof.  I certainly agree on the  
Berg  a wonderful piece, so outstanding because of  his ability  
to use dodecaphonic techniques in such a sophisticated manner, and  
make them do exactly what he wanted with them. I.e., the row did not  
use him, he used it. If you have time, go to my web site (see below)  
and check out a bite of my MA thesis, "Orthochromatics."  It is  
strictly 12 tone, but also very tonal, as the row was constructed of  
4ths, 5th, and seconds.


Thanks,

Dean
On May 26, 2007, at 12:42 PM, Christopher Smith wrote:



On May 26, 2007, at 2:44 PM, Dean M. Estabrook wrote:


Please define "Non -Tonal."


There are several definitions in current use of "tonal" and  
"atonal", none very strict nor all-encompassing. Depending on which  
one for "tonal" you are using, "non-tonal" would just be everything  
else that you decided didn't fall under the "tonal" umbrella.


I think Andrew was meaning for tonal; any music defined by a  
leading tone cadence, which has been the current European  
definition since late Renaissance up to 1910 or so, where things  
started to get harder to define. NOT tonal, by that definition,  
includes early modal and anything that you might like to include  
after 1910 or so that doesn't have its key centre defined by a  
leading-tone cadence, and a whole cartload of non-European music as  
well.


Atonal is just a very bad expression, and I wish we could come up  
with something more descriptive. Originally it was meant to include  
new music (at the start of the 1900's, that is) that didn't have a  
clear key centre, or else actively avoided leaning even slightly  
toward one, including most twelve-tone music. But the word has been  
co-opted to mean "music I don't like" by just about everyone who  
doesn't have a better definition than the above one to offer.  
Culprits in this category include our local classical music critic,  
who uses it as a dismissal whenever he doesn't understand a work,  
and my grandmother.


Incidentally, someone mentioned Berg's Violin Concerto as an  
example of atonal music. While it was undoubtedly composed using  
serial twelve-tone techniques (though not exclusively) I find it to  
be notable in that it DOES sort of bend toward a key, and in a  
fairly conservative way too, in that the series includes two sets  
of two stacked triads a fifth apart which sort of suggest a i-V  
harmonic movement. I am somewhat ashamed to admit that perhaps one  
of the reasons I find this work to be so beautiful is the  
suggestion of traditional tonality, however fleeting. But then I  
console myself by admiring his melodic sense and astonishing  
orchestrational colours (it really is a gorgeous work!)


Christopher


___
Finale mailing list
Finale@shsu.edu
http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale


Dean M. Estabrook
http://deanestabrook.googlepages.com/home

Of all hoaxes, the one which is my most vexing bête noire on a  
quotidian basis, is the cereal box top which informs  simply,   
"Lift Tab to Open."  Then, "To Close, Insert Tab Here ." Yeah,  
right! In attempting to accomplish the first direction, not only  
the tab but also the slit intended to accept the aforementioned  
protuberance  have both been irreparably  disfigured and rendered  
dysfunctional.  This debacle is then amplified by the misbehavior  
of the recalcitrant inner bag, which can not be unsealed sans  
mangling it, and hence, will not disperse its contents without  
exiting the box itself. All I wanted was a bowl of cereal.







___
Finale mailing list
Finale@shsu.edu
http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale

Re: [Finale] OT: John Cage's first national TV appearance (1960)

[Phil Daley]

At 01:09 PM 5/26/2007, Aaron Rabushka wrote:

>Wait a minute--how can anyone be wrong about what they like? Like any great
>composer Bach offers more than just a single attribute, and I think that all
>three comments here are very perceptive. When people make blanket statements
>to the effect that "all atonal music is crap" I remind them that they
>disqualify the 40th symphony of Mozart (the bit right ofter the double bar
>in the finale)

You are sounding like my 20th Century music graduate class professor 
(Charles Whittenberg) who said about some Baroque music composer who used a 
"chromatic passing tone", "see, they used chromaticism back in 1600."


I stopped listening to what he said after that.

We also had to write a composition (for the instruments students in that 
class played) for that class.  I would call my style "neo-baroque".


Whittenberg had no clue that I was writing in the pattern of Bach.  I am 
not sure he even knew what Baroque was.


Several students came up to me, after the performance, and said how much 
they liked playing "classical" music.


___
Finale mailing list
Finale@shsu.edu
http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale

Re: [Finale] OT: John Cage's first national TV appearance (1960)

[David W. Fenton]

On 26 May 2007 at 19:49, João Miguel Pais wrote:

> > This old chestnut is not really true. Bach's keyboard music, for
> > instance, never quite disappeared. And in Leipzig, he was well-known
> > and his music was studied and played. The Allgemeine musikalische
> > Zeitung (published by Breitkopf) has mentions of Bach's music as
> > early as the first volume, in 1798. The Traeg music catalogs of 1799
> > from Vienna list Bach's keyboard music, and that doesn't mean Traeg
> > acquired Bach's music in 1799, as it was the first catalog he'd ever
> > published (having been in business since the late 1780s).
> >
> > What Mendelssohn rediscovered was the vocal music, but especially
> > the Passions. The cantatas as a body languished until the 20th
> > century, for the most part.
> 
> my bad, then. by the way, if you have them at hand's reach, could you 
> quote some references to the reception of this bach's music during and
>  after his life? 

What, the citation of primary sources that I gave was insufficient?

-- 
David W. Fentonhttp://dfenton.com
David Fenton Associates   http://dfenton.com/DFA/


___
Finale mailing list
Finale@shsu.edu
http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale

Re: [Finale] OT: John Cage's first national TV appearance (1960)

[Phil Daley]

At 10:46 PM 5/25/2007, Andrew Stiller wrote:

>And another thing: non-tonal and atonal are not synonyms. Most music,
>in fact, is non-tonal: Medieval and Renaissance music,  non-Western
>music (all of it), rock music...

Rock music is non-tonal?  That's news to me.  Doesn't it do 1-4-5-1?

>Being charitable, I assume your
>blanket condemnation does not extend to any of these musics.

All non-Western music is on my list of "unlistenable".

___
Finale mailing list
Finale@shsu.edu
http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale

Re: [Finale] OT: John Cage's first national TV appearance (1960)

[Phil Daley]

At 11:19 AM 5/26/2007, João Miguel Pais wrote:

>By the way, JS Bach's music wasn't played almost at all in his last years,
>and it pratically disappeared until Mendelsson picked it up later
>(Beethoven and Mozart only got to some scores late in their lives). His
>contemporaries found it too far-fetched and overfull with counterpoint (a
>kind of nowadays Ferneyhough), and they found him already back of his time
>(you know, just like a guy "who don't know what current public option is,
>[is] out in the dark."), preferring his son's CPE's works. His violin
>suites (which apparently he could play - anyone correct me) are obligatory
>repertoire in any violinist who wants to live from his bowing nowadays,
>were considered not suitable or natural for the instrument. Is that enough
>of a hint for you about relativity, need of understanding, and not to
>consider yourself as the center of the world?

I am just trying to point out what a majority of the people who actually 
listen to classical music think.


I don't know how many people today listen to classical music, maybe 10%?




___
Finale mailing list
Finale@shsu.edu
http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale

Re: [Finale] OT: John Cage's first national TV appearance (1960)

[Raymond Horton]

I got the humor, if it's any consolation, Randolph. 



RBH


Randolph Peters wrote:

 > Mariposa Symphony Orchestra wrote:

 Sure, I like Bach; I marvel especially at his contrapuntal
 creativity; I enjoy the sound of his music.

 Andrew Stiller wrote:
 Me, I like his grinding dissonances!

 dhbailey wrote:
 I like the percussiveness of so much of it...

 And I say:

 > You're all wrong!
 >
 > -Randolph Peters


Aaron Rabushka wrote:

Wait a minute--how can anyone be wrong about what they like?

[snip]

I'll resist the urge to treat that as a straight line, but I want you 
to know that it was a struggle.


You do know that I was trying to make a point using humour?

If only I had used the emoticon for irony...


-Randolph Peters


_


___
Finale mailing list
Finale@shsu.edu
http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale

Re: [Finale] OT: John Cage's first national TV appearance (1960)

[John Howell]

At 6:50 AM -0400 5/26/07, dhbailey wrote:

Dennis Bathory-Kitsz wrote:
[snip]>

Kids aren't fixed. Maybe later, when inundated with tonality, their aural
view will narrow. But it doesn't start out that way.


How true that is!  What's that line from South Pacific about kids 
having to be taught to learn hate before they're six or seven or 
eight?


"To hate all the people your relatives hate; you've got to be 
carefully taught."


And I understand that Rodgers & Hammerstein took a lot of flack 
because of that song, from people whom we would probably recognize 
today as highly racist.  But that was the temper of the time.


John


--
John & Susie Howell
Virginia Tech Department of Music
Blacksburg, Virginia, U.S.A 24061-0240
Vox (540) 231-8411  Fax (540) 231-5034
(mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED])
http://www.music.vt.edu/faculty/howell/howell.html
___
Finale mailing list
Finale@shsu.edu
http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale

Re: [Finale] OT: John Cage's first national TV appearance (1960)

[Christopher Smith]

On May 26, 2007, at 4:11 PM, Randolph Peters wrote:



If only I had used the emoticon for irony...



Could this be it?


  / ***
/*|
  /|
*



Christopher ;-)


___
Finale mailing list
Finale@shsu.edu
http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale

Re: [Finale] OT: John Cage's first national TV appearance (1960)

[Randolph Peters]

 > Mariposa Symphony Orchestra wrote:

 Sure, I like Bach; I marvel especially at his contrapuntal
 creativity; I enjoy the sound of his music.

 Andrew Stiller wrote:
 Me, I like his grinding dissonances!

 dhbailey wrote:
 I like the percussiveness of so much of it...

 And I say:

 > You're all wrong!
 >
 > -Randolph Peters


Aaron Rabushka wrote:

Wait a minute--how can anyone be wrong about what they like?

[snip]

I'll resist the urge to treat that as a straight line, but I want you 
to know that it was a struggle.


You do know that I was trying to make a point using humour?

If only I had used the emoticon for irony...


-Randolph Peters


___
Finale mailing list
Finale@shsu.edu
http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale

Re: [Finale] OT: John Cage's first national TV appearance (1960)

[Christopher Smith]

On May 26, 2007, at 2:44 PM, Dean M. Estabrook wrote:


Please define "Non -Tonal."


There are several definitions in current use of "tonal" and "atonal",  
none very strict nor all-encompassing. Depending on which one for  
"tonal" you are using, "non-tonal" would just be everything else that  
you decided didn't fall under the "tonal" umbrella.


I think Andrew was meaning for tonal; any music defined by a leading  
tone cadence, which has been the current European definition since  
late Renaissance up to 1910 or so, where things started to get harder  
to define. NOT tonal, by that definition, includes early modal and  
anything that you might like to include after 1910 or so that doesn't  
have its key centre defined by a leading-tone cadence, and a whole  
cartload of non-European music as well.


Atonal is just a very bad expression, and I wish we could come up  
with something more descriptive. Originally it was meant to include  
new music (at the start of the 1900's, that is) that didn't have a  
clear key centre, or else actively avoided leaning even slightly  
toward one, including most twelve-tone music. But the word has been  
co-opted to mean "music I don't like" by just about everyone who  
doesn't have a better definition than the above one to offer.  
Culprits in this category include our local classical music critic,  
who uses it as a dismissal whenever he doesn't understand a work, and  
my grandmother.


Incidentally, someone mentioned Berg's Violin Concerto as an example  
of atonal music. While it was undoubtedly composed using serial  
twelve-tone techniques (though not exclusively) I find it to be  
notable in that it DOES sort of bend toward a key, and in a fairly  
conservative way too, in that the series includes two sets of two  
stacked triads a fifth apart which sort of suggest a i-V harmonic  
movement. I am somewhat ashamed to admit that perhaps one of the  
reasons I find this work to be so beautiful is the suggestion of  
traditional tonality, however fleeting. But then I console myself by  
admiring his melodic sense and astonishing orchestrational colours  
(it really is a gorgeous work!)


Christopher


___
Finale mailing list
Finale@shsu.edu
http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale

Re: [Finale] OT: John Cage's first national TV appearance (1960)

[Dean M. Estabrook]

H  in the school at which I taught, playing the clarinet was  
minimally acceptable, singing in the choir was (if male)  
automatically classified as an all gay activity, and playing any  
sport was an instant ticket to the adulation of 90%of your peers.  
Unfortunately, I was the choral director.



Dean

On May 26, 2007, at 10:35 AM, Christopher Smith wrote:



On 26-May-07, at 1:04 PM, David W. Fenton wrote:


On 26 May 2007 at 12:41, Andrew Stiller wrote:


I cannot, for example, imagine any
American boy nowadays being denounced as a "fairy" because he played
the clarinet.


You must live in an entirely different world than *I* live in!


Not me!

In my high school, the best male musicians in the band were the  
cool ones with the cute girlfriends, while the guys on the  
perpetually-losing basketball team were the dummies with  
girlfriends who didn't look as if they washed often enough. Guess  
which one I chose to go to after school? 8-)


(not that it helped my girlfriend situation at all, but I had the  
ILLUSION that the band would help my success with the ladies, which  
was the point that Andrew was making, I think.)


Christopher



___
Finale mailing list
Finale@shsu.edu
http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale


Dean M. Estabrook
http://deanestabrook.googlepages.com/home

Of all hoaxes, the one which is my most vexing bête noire on a  
quotidian basis, is the cereal box top which informs  simply,   
"Lift Tab to Open."  Then, "To Close, Insert Tab Here ." Yeah,  
right! In attempting to accomplish the first direction, not only  
the tab but also the slit intended to accept the aforementioned  
protuberance  have both been irreparably  disfigured and rendered  
dysfunctional.  This debacle is then amplified by the misbehavior  
of the recalcitrant inner bag, which can not be unsealed sans  
mangling it, and hence, will not disperse its contents without  
exiting the box itself. All I wanted was a bowl of cereal.







___
Finale mailing list
Finale@shsu.edu
http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale

Re: [Finale] OT: John Cage's first national TV appearance (1960)

[Dean M. Estabrook]

Please define "Non -Tonal."

Dean
On May 25, 2007, at 7:46 PM, Andrew Stiller wrote:



On May 25, 2007, at 7:04 PM, Phil Daley wrote:



I agree.  But if it's non-tonal, it's not good.



Really? Berg's violin concerto is not good? Wozzeck and Lulu are  
not good? *All* of Varèse is not good? Three of  the four movements  
of Ives' fourth symphony are not good? Pierrot Lunaire and  
Erwartung are not good?


Are you *sure* you want to go there?

--The story is  told of a visitor to the Louvre who struck up a  
conversation w. the security guard, criticizing this painting and  
that, finding fault with all and satisfied with none. Finally the  
guard could take no more of this and said "Pardonnez moi, monsieur,  
but it is not  the *pictures* that are on trial here."


--A word to the wise.

And another thing: non-tonal and atonal are not synonyms. Most  
music, in fact, is non-tonal: Medieval and Renaissance music,  non- 
Western music (all of it), rock music... Being charitable, I assume  
your blanket condemnation does not extend to any of these musics,  
but is limited to that properly called atonal. Even that puts you  
*way* out on a limb.



Andrew Stiller
Kallisti Music Press
http://www.kallistimusic.com/


___
Finale mailing list
Finale@shsu.edu
http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale


Dean M. Estabrook
http://deanestabrook.googlepages.com/home

Of all hoaxes, the one which is my most vexing bête noire on a  
quotidian basis, is the cereal box top which informs  simply,   
"Lift Tab to Open."  Then, "To Close, Insert Tab Here ." Yeah,  
right! In attempting to accomplish the first direction, not only  
the tab but also the slit intended to accept the aforementioned  
protuberance  have both been irreparably  disfigured and rendered  
dysfunctional.  This debacle is then amplified by the misbehavior  
of the recalcitrant inner bag, which can not be unsealed sans  
mangling it, and hence, will not disperse its contents without  
exiting the box itself. All I wanted was a bowl of cereal.







___
Finale mailing list
Finale@shsu.edu
http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale

Re: [Finale] OT: John Cage's first national TV appearance (1960)

[Dean M. Estabrook]

I would think, if anything, that their views would widen when exposed  
to tonal music, IF they had the previous training you gave them.


Dean

On May 26, 2007, at 3:50 AM, dhbailey wrote:


Dennis Bathory-Kitsz wrote:
[snip]>
Kids aren't fixed. Maybe later, when inundated with tonality,  
their aural

view will narrow. But it doesn't start out that way.


--
David H. Bailey
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
___
Finale mailing list
Finale@shsu.edu
http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale


Dean M. Estabrook
http://deanestabrook.googlepages.com/home

Of all hoaxes, the one which is my most vexing bête noire on a  
quotidian basis, is the cereal box top which informs  simply,   
"Lift Tab to Open."  Then, "To Close, Insert Tab Here ." Yeah,  
right! In attempting to accomplish the first direction, not only  
the tab but also the slit intended to accept the aforementioned  
protuberance  have both been irreparably  disfigured and rendered  
dysfunctional.  This debacle is then amplified by the misbehavior  
of the recalcitrant inner bag, which can not be unsealed sans  
mangling it, and hence, will not disperse its contents without  
exiting the box itself. All I wanted was a bowl of cereal.







___
Finale mailing list
Finale@shsu.edu
http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale

Re: [Finale] OT: John Cage's first national TV appearance (1960)

[Mariposa Symphony Orchestra]

Perhaps, perhaps not.Liszt himself described Gottschalk as the Alcibiades 
of the Piano and Gottschalk was also called - routinely - the American Chopin.  
  The performing Gottschalk was known as a "concert pianist" - not as anything 
less; I think rather than describing him as a pop musician of his day, he was 
probably a little more accurately the 19th-century equivalent of a crossover 
musician.His music, while structurally  for the most part quite simple, 
certainly is as demanding as Schumann; the fact that he was swarmed and swooned 
over is really not his own fault. I think he was integral in popularizing 
an aspect of what truly must be thought of as 'classical' music; is he today 
thought of as a pop composer or a 'classical' one?While his music lacks the 
depth of - oh, say, any number of DWM composers, I feel the only real claim to 
his being described as a popular musician was simply in the fact that he 
popularIZED piano concerts.

Jenny Lind - oh, come on!Royal Swedish Opera for years, Agathe in 
Freischutz, Alice in Robert le Diable, so many other roles; association with 
Mendelssohn, her great love of Bach and performance of so many of his oratorios 
- the fact that PT Barnum wildly promoted her in her 93 (count 'em) American 
concerts doesn't mean she was a popular performer in our current sense of that 
adjective; she was popularizing classical music on her American tour!Her 
rep on those concerts was eclectic (with German conductor/composer Julius 
Benedict and Italian baritone Giovanni Belletti as demanded by Lind), but 
contained (besides American popular songs,) opera arias and other 'classical' 
rep as selected by Lind - who was proud of her standing as a serious artist.   
Does the fact that popular-entertainment maven Barnum produced her concerts 
make them pop concerts?Nope.   Again: she was popularizing eclectic 
repertoire - with emphasis on her serious 'classical' training.A crossover 
artist, perhaps, but a popular entertainer - in the way we use that term today? 
   No.A classically-trained, classical artist performing an eclectic rep to 
throngs - and introducing many 19th century Americans to classical music in the 
process.

Best,

Les

Les Marsden
Founding Music Director and Conductor, 
The Mariposa Symphony Orchestra
Music and Mariposa?  Ah, Paradise!!!
 
http://arts-mariposa.org/symphony.html
http://www.geocities.com/~jbenz/lesbio.html 

  - Original Message - 
  From: David W. Fenton 
  To: finale@shsu.edu 
  Sent: Saturday, May 26, 2007 10:49 AM
  Subject: Re: [Finale] OT: John Cage's first national TV appearance (1960)


  On 26 May 2007 at 10:33, Mariposa Symphony Orchestra wrote:

  > In the mid-to-late 1800s American symphony
  > orchestras and opera companies were sprouting everywhere; every last
  > small town had its Opera House which was routinely sold out when a
  > Jenny Lind or Louis Moreau Gottschalk came through. 

  Both of these would correspond to today's POPULAR music. At the time 
  they were not thought of as "art" music at all.

  -- 
  David W. Fentonhttp://dfenton.com
  David Fenton Associates   http://dfenton.com/DFA/

  ___
  Finale mailing list
  Finale@shsu.edu
  http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
___
Finale mailing list
Finale@shsu.edu
http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale

Re: [Finale] OT: John Cage's first national TV appearance (1960)

[Christopher Smith]

On 26-May-07, at 1:04 PM, David W. Fenton wrote:


On 26 May 2007 at 12:41, Andrew Stiller wrote:


I cannot, for example, imagine any
American boy nowadays being denounced as a "fairy" because he played
the clarinet.


You must live in an entirely different world than *I* live in!


Not me!

In my high school, the best male musicians in the band were the cool  
ones with the cute girlfriends, while the guys on the perpetually- 
losing basketball team were the dummies with girlfriends who didn't  
look as if they washed often enough. Guess which one I chose to go to  
after school? 8-)


(not that it helped my girlfriend situation at all, but I had the  
ILLUSION that the band would help my success with the ladies, which  
was the point that Andrew was making, I think.)


Christopher



___
Finale mailing list
Finale@shsu.edu
http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale

Re: [Finale] OT: John Cage's first national TV appearance (1960)

[João Miguel Pais]

This old chestnut is not really true. Bach's keyboard music, for
instance, never quite disappeared. And in Leipzig, he was well-known
and his music was studied and played. The Allgemeine musikalische
Zeitung (published by Breitkopf) has mentions of Bach's music as
early as the first volume, in 1798. The Traeg music catalogs of 1799
from Vienna list Bach's keyboard music, and that doesn't mean Traeg
acquired Bach's music in 1799, as it was the first catalog he'd ever
published (having been in business since the late 1780s).

What Mendelssohn rediscovered was the vocal music, but especially the
Passions. The cantatas as a body languished until the 20th century,
for the most part.


my bad, then. by the way, if you have them at hand's reach, could you  
quote some references to the reception of this bach's music during and  
after his life?

___
Finale mailing list
Finale@shsu.edu
http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale

Re: [Finale] OT: John Cage's first national TV appearance (1960)

[David W. Fenton]

On 26 May 2007 at 10:33, Mariposa Symphony Orchestra wrote:

> In the mid-to-late 1800s American symphony
> orchestras and opera companies were sprouting everywhere; every last
> small town had its Opera House which was routinely sold out when a
> Jenny Lind or Louis Moreau Gottschalk came through. 

Both of these would correspond to today's POPULAR music. At the time 
they were not thought of as "art" music at all.

-- 
David W. Fentonhttp://dfenton.com
David Fenton Associates   http://dfenton.com/DFA/

___
Finale mailing list
Finale@shsu.edu
http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale

Re: [Finale] OT: John Cage's first national TV appearance (1960)

[Mariposa Symphony Orchestra]

I have to differ with Andrew: 'classical' music was really far more popular in 
18th/19th century America - and in fact especially in the 20th century than you 
imply.In the mid-to-late 1800s American symphony orchestras and opera 
companies were sprouting everywhere; every last small town had its Opera House 
which was routinely sold out when a Jenny Lind or Louis Moreau Gottschalk came 
through.And yes, of course the existence of such venues was not proof of 
the popularity of the art forms, and perhaps the presence of the fine arts was 
seen more as a prestige-requirement than anything else, but those fine arts 
were ubiquitous and experienced by a wide spectrum of the populace.Whether 
the cheering mining-camp reactions to touring Shakespeareans or Tchaikovsky's 
(1891) writings which document his astonishment while touring the US East Coast 
at the fact that he was far-better known, comprehended and more widely 
celebrated in America than in his own land, or the plethora of competing music 
critics in US cities major and minor, the fine arts flourished all over America 
in a popularity (I feel) great than today.Dvorak was celebrated - and 
extremely well-known in this country when Jeanette Thurber managed the coup of 
bringing him here to head the National Conservatory of Music, which was only 
one of many such American institutions in the 19th centruy, of course.  Nearly 
every parlor in nearly every American home had a piano which served as training 
ground for yet another Fur Elise rendering; Caruso's 78s were the 
greatest-selling recordings by far - and the age of radio and later TV produced 
far more wide-flung, non-specific broadcast dissemination of classical music 
than we have today - think only of the Metropolitan Opera broadcasts, Toscanini 
and his NBC Symphony Orchestra, broadcasts of the NYPhil, and - especially 
relevant: think of Bernstein's Young Peoples Concerts broadcasts.

With all respect, I really do think the past 150 - 200 years of American fine 
arts cultural access is much more relevant than you may think.   And perhaps 
was far more a palpable part of the broad American experience than the more 
narrow niche it seems to occupy today.

Best,

Les

Les Marsden
Founding Music Director and Conductor, 
The Mariposa Symphony Orchestra
Music and Mariposa?  Ah, Paradise!!!
 
http://arts-mariposa.org/symphony.html
http://www.geocities.com/~jbenz/lesbio.html 

  - Original Message - 
  From: Andrew Stiller 
  To: finale@shsu.edu 
  Sent: Saturday, May 26, 2007 9:41 AM
  Subject: Re: [Finale] OT: John Cage's first national TV appearance (1960)



  On May 26, 2007, at 12:00 PM, Dennis Bathory-Kitsz wrote:

  > At 09:14 PM 5/25/2007 +0200, shirling & neueweise wrote:
  >> this kind of generalization about the state of
  >> new music really disappoints me, and i have to
  >> admit, i come across it more from americans than
  >> any other population
  >
  > This seems to be my experience. The differences are sometimes 
  > striking, ...

  > I don't have any answers, but there is a cultural shift that isn't 
  > limited
  > to the US.

  IMO the cultural shift has been in the opposite direction. The 
  fundamental antipathy among ordinary Americans toward classical music 
  has its origins in the country's founding. In the 18th c., almost all 
  classical music was commissioned by royalty or by the established 
  church--both of which are outlawed in the US constitution. The American 
  people, therefore, came to view this music as inherently elitist. By 
  extension, its practitioners came to be regarded as effeminate, which 
  is why Ives was so defensive about the matter, and also is one reason 
  why such a high percentage of American composers 1890-1970 have been 
  gay.

  Prior to 1960, most Americans lived their entire lives without ever 
  experiencing and opera, a ballet, or a symphony. TV has changed all 
  that--and over the course of my lifetime I have definitely seen other 
  forms of improvement that make the current situation, dismal as it is, 
  much better than what it has been. I cannot, for example, imagine any 
  American boy nowadays being denounced as a "fairy" because he played 
  the clarinet. If "music" now means "pop music" and classical music 
  requires a modifier, that is at least a realistic dichotomy, and is a 
  clear improvement, IMO, over the immediately preceding usage in which 
  popular music was called "contemporary," while anything old was 
  "classical." At least the newer usage allows for the possibility that 
  there might be such a thing as contemporary classical music, or antique 
  pop.

  Andrew Stiller
  Kallisti Music Press
  http://www.kallistimusic.com/

___
Finale mailing list
Finale@shsu.edu
http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale

Re: [Finale] OT: John Cage's first national TV appearance (1960)

[John Howell]

At 8:42 PM -0400 5/25/07, Dennis Bathory-Kitsz wrote:


I taught elementary school music for six years.


[snip]


Beyond that, imagine eight-year-olds watching the complete ballet version
of "Rite of Spring" (on video) or going to a performance of "A Soldier's
Tale" -- both attended in rapt silence. Imagine a kid walking down the hall
hearing a younger group listening, and sticking his head in and saying
"Bartok!". Or four of them performing Larry Austin's "Square" as best their
young skills would let them.

Kids aren't fixed. Maybe later, when inundated with tonality, their aural
view will narrow. But it doesn't start out that way.


Dennis is absolutely correct, of course.  Which means that the 
obvious problem is the lack of preparation of elementary school 
teachers--including music education students--in 20th (and now 21st) 
century non-pop music.


But I do think Dennis may underestimate the enormous amount of tonal 
music pervading popular culture, including children's and youth 
culture.  Cartoon scores, advertising scores, movie scores, elevator 
and supermarket music are all there and unavoidable.  And this is 
mere background wallpaper compared with the pop music industry and 
its hold on the attention of not just teenagers but children and 
tweens as well.


So I think Dennis's point might best be interpreted in this way: 
Inundation with tonality is there and is unavoidable.  There's no 
"maybe later" about it!  But young minds and young ears ARE open to 
more than one kind of music, or more than one kind of ANYTHING!, and 
they CAN be attracted to anything that is skillfully and lovingly 
presented.  What it comes down to is not just learning, but good 
teaching, and good teaching means careful manipulation of peer 
pressure and not just accepting it ready-made.


John


--
John & Susie Howell
Virginia Tech Department of Music
Blacksburg, Virginia, U.S.A 24061-0240
Vox (540) 231-8411  Fax (540) 231-5034
(mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED])
http://www.music.vt.edu/faculty/howell/howell.html
___
Finale mailing list
Finale@shsu.edu
http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale

Re: [Finale] OT: John Cage's first national TV appearance (1960)

[Aaron Rabushka]

I've always found it interesting that young children can often groove on
music that their older siblings don't consider hip and their parents may not
even consider music. Case in point:  my youngest brother who never griped
about music I was listening to (e.g., Mahler, Webern, Nono) unless someone
else was there telling him that he needed to. I also recall a premium cable
statio production of Pinocchio (Lainie Kazan was the fairy) whose music, had
I not seen the composer's name (and no, I don't remember it) I would've
attributed to Stravinsky with some excusrions into Penderecki-like
glissandi. Great for it's target audience and anyone open to music as
expression period.

Aaron J. Rabushka
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
http://users.waymark.net/arabushk
- Original Message - 
From: "João Miguel Pais" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: 
Sent: Saturday, May 26, 2007 11:19 AM
Subject: Re: [Finale] OT: John Cage's first national TV appearance (1960)


> >  >Phil -- in my experience, it's not whether a piece is new or old, but
> > simply
> >  >if it's and .
> >
> > I agree.  But if it's non-tonal, it's not good.
>
> Oh. What do you have against folk and pre-baroque music? In which terms
> are they related to [not-so-]contemporary[-anymore] music, that it brings
> a similar reaction in you? When does tonal music stops? Is the tristan
> chord already out of limits? Are Petroushka and Le Sacre just garbage? Is
> Debussy a psychadelic hippie?
>
>
> > Anything that hurts my ears when I listen to it, I stop listening.
>
>
> Phil, pal, you are my model! That is, you are my anti-model. I'm still
> "young", but I hope that my ears and specially my mind never regress to
> such a vegetative, petrified state. That I keep eager to experiment new
> things, new music, new theatre, art, sights, flavours and smells. Although
> one's age rusts the body, it's one's head that rusts itself - in which you
> are a master (you are not only a master of music). Whenever I feel tired
> or down, I'll always think of you, and that will give me more energy not
> to stop.
>
>
> > It seems like a simple concept to me, but I guess a lot of music people
> > have much less sensitive ears than I do.
>
> Funny. I would say the opposite. Your simple-based comments and no urge
> whatsoever to engage in a meaningful discussion that goes beyond the level
> of "me no likey" or "he's good; he's a terrorist" reveal an enormous lack
> of sensitivity, to which I (fortunately) don't often encounter.
>
>
> I don't want to insult you, as my utmost feeling towards you is pity. I'm
> sorry that you live in a so closed of a world, where anything that goes a
> bit outside the norm ("defy" would be already a too strong of a word) is
> simply shoved off, without a chance to even understand what could it be
> about - you know, if someone (be it Cage, Pollock, Bach, or even you) gave
> his time and effort to create something, and you want to say something
> about it, the very least you could do is to even *try* (if that's not too
> much to ask) to see if there's anything to it. And if after you *tried*
> (and *tried* again) you don't like it, you can say "it's not for me".
> Between that and "it's not good" is a giant step, you know? But correct me
> if I'm wrong: we would like to know which are your founded, constructed
> opinions to Cage's music, Pollock's painting, or anything else - we're all
> willing to learn!
>
>
> By the way, JS Bach's music wasn't played almost at all in his last years,
> and it pratically disappeared until Mendelsson picked it up later
> (Beethoven and Mozart only got to some scores late in their lives). His
> contemporaries found it too far-fetched and overfull with counterpoint (a
> kind of nowadays Ferneyhough), and they found him already back of his time
> (you know, just like a guy "who don't know what current public option is,
> [is] out in the dark."), preferring his son's CPE's works. His violin
> suites (which apparently he could play - anyone correct me) are obligatory
> repertoire in any violinist who wants to live from his bowing nowadays,
> were considered not suitable or natural for the instrument. Is that enough
> of a hint for you about relativity, need of understanding, and not to
> consider yourself as the center of the world?
>
>
> João Miguel Pais
> ___
> Finale mailing list
> Finale@shsu.edu
> http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
>

___
Finale mailing list
Finale@shsu.edu
http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale

Re: [Finale] OT: John Cage's first national TV appearance (1960)

[Aaron Rabushka]

Wait a minute--how can anyone be wrong about what they like? Like any great
composer Bach offers more than just a single attribute, and I think that all
three comments here are very perceptive. When people make blanket statements
to the effect that "all atonal music is crap" I remind them that they
disqualify the 40th symphony of Mozart (the bit right ofter the double bar
in the finale) and the entrance of Glenda the good witch in "The Wizard of
Oz." And Bach's "Chromatic Fantasy and Fugue"? I'd say it pushes a limit or
two.

Aaron J. Rabushka
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
http://users.waymark.net/arabushk

- Original Message - 
From: "Randolph Peters" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: 
Sent: Saturday, May 26, 2007 10:32 AM
Subject: Re: [Finale] OT: John Cage's first national TV appearance (1960)


> Mariposa Symphony Orchestra wrote:
> Sure, I like Bach; I marvel especially at his contrapuntal
> creativity; I enjoy the sound of his music.
>
> Andrew Stiller wrote:
> Me, I like his grinding dissonances!
>
> dhbailey wrote:
> I like the percussiveness of so much of it...
>
> And I say:
> You're all wrong!
>
>
>
> -Randolph Peters
> ___
> Finale mailing list
> Finale@shsu.edu
> http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
>

___
Finale mailing list
Finale@shsu.edu
http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale

Re: [Finale] OT: John Cage's first national TV appearance (1960)

[David W. Fenton]

On 26 May 2007 at 12:41, Andrew Stiller wrote:

> I cannot, for example, imagine any 
> American boy nowadays being denounced as a "fairy" because he played
> the clarinet.

You must live in an entirely different world than *I* live in!

-- 
David W. Fentonhttp://dfenton.com
David Fenton Associates   http://dfenton.com/DFA/

___
Finale mailing list
Finale@shsu.edu
http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale

Re: [Finale] OT: John Cage's first national TV appearance (1960)

[Andrew Stiller]

On May 26, 2007, at 12:00 PM, Dennis Bathory-Kitsz wrote:


At 09:14 PM 5/25/2007 +0200, shirling & neueweise wrote:

this kind of generalization about the state of
new music really disappoints me, and i have to
admit, i come across it more from americans than
any other population


This seems to be my experience. The differences are sometimes 
striking, ...


I don't have any answers, but there is a cultural shift that isn't 
limited

to the US.


IMO the cultural shift has been in the opposite direction. The 
fundamental antipathy among ordinary Americans toward classical music 
has its origins in the country's founding. In the 18th c., almost all 
classical music was commissioned by royalty or by the established 
church--both of which are outlawed in the US constitution. The American 
people, therefore, came to view this music as inherently elitist. By 
extension, its practitioners came to be regarded as effeminate, which 
is why Ives was so defensive about the matter, and also is one reason 
why such a high percentage of American composers 1890-1970 have been 
gay.


Prior to 1960, most Americans lived their entire lives without ever 
experiencing and opera, a ballet, or a symphony. TV has changed all 
that--and over the course of my lifetime I have definitely seen other 
forms of improvement that make the current situation, dismal as it is, 
much better than what it has been. I cannot, for example, imagine any 
American boy nowadays being denounced as a "fairy" because he played 
the clarinet. If "music" now means "pop music" and classical music 
requires a modifier, that is at least a realistic dichotomy, and is a 
clear improvement, IMO, over the immediately preceding usage in which 
popular music was called "contemporary," while anything old was 
"classical." At least the newer usage allows for the possibility that 
there might be such a thing as contemporary classical music, or antique 
pop.


Andrew Stiller
Kallisti Music Press
http://www.kallistimusic.com/

___
Finale mailing list
Finale@shsu.edu
http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale

Re: [Finale] OT: John Cage's first national TV appearance (1960)

[David W. Fenton]

On 26 May 2007 at 17:19, João Miguel Pais wrote:

> By the way, JS Bach's music wasn't played almost at all in his last
> years,  and it pratically disappeared until Mendelsson picked it up
> later  (Beethoven and Mozart only got to some scores late in their
> lives).

This old chestnut is not really true. Bach's keyboard music, for 
instance, never quite disappeared. And in Leipzig, he was well-known 
and his music was studied and played. The Allgemeine musikalische 
Zeitung (published by Breitkopf) has mentions of Bach's music as 
early as the first volume, in 1798. The Traeg music catalogs of 1799 
from Vienna list Bach's keyboard music, and that doesn't mean Traeg 
acquired Bach's music in 1799, as it was the first catalog he'd ever 
published (having been in business since the late 1780s). 

What Mendelssohn rediscovered was the vocal music, but especially the 
Passions. The cantatas as a body languished until the 20th century, 
for the most part.

-- 
David W. Fentonhttp://dfenton.com
David Fenton Associates   http://dfenton.com/DFA/


___
Finale mailing list
Finale@shsu.edu
http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale

Re: [Finale] OT: John Cage's first national TV appearance (1960)

[Dennis Bathory-Kitsz]

At 09:14 PM 5/25/2007 +0200, shirling & neueweise wrote:
>this kind of generalization about the state of 
>new music really disappoints me, and i have to 
>admit, i come across it more from americans than 
>any other population

This seems to be my experience. The differences are sometimes striking, but
then my experience is limited to the eastern US and western Europe -- and
save for my own concerts, very little exchange with the general public.
Even my websites are specialized and of interest mostly to composers and
other musicians.

On the other hand, there is a different general public. For example, last
August, I posted the scene from my chamber opera on YouTube. Because of the
topic (Erzsebet the Blood Countess), it gets lots of views (about 5,000
plus another 5,000 of various 'bootleg' copies on YouTube) ... considerably
more than, say, "Spammung" (39 views and posted the same day last year).

The comments come from all over the world, public and private. Those
American visitors run negative (one printable comment: "wuts wit the
horrible music in the background?") but those outside the U.S. don't ("es
una música maravillosa, la adoro, es una ópera bellísima, me encanta, ¿has
echo más?, adoro esta música."). Private emails follow the same pattern.

I don't have any answers, but there is a cultural shift that isn't limited
to the US. The post below appeared on the Two New Hours list a few days ago
(Larry Lake is the host of Two New Hours, canceled in March after a quarter
century on the air).

Dennis


From: "Larry Lake" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Date: Thu, 24 May 2007 09:24:53 -0400
Subject: [Morenewhours] We're not alone

Here is Russell Smith's column in today's Globe and Mail:

-
How pop has taken over the arts

RUSSELL SMITH

May 24, 2007

The word "culture" in media now means what was once called mass or popular
culture; the word "art" - when it is used at all - means what we once called
entertainment. Examples of this are everywhere: Almost no North American
newspaper has a section called "Arts" any more because it would be
dishonest. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution recently eliminated the job of
book editor, and the Los Angeles Times merged its book section with another
section and reduced its number of pages. A debate is under way on the
Internet as to whether professional book reviewers are necessary at all,
given the abundance of literary opinion available on blogs.

An interesting Canadian example of the change in the media's
conceptualization of art is the entertaining new CBC Radio show Q, a show
about "art and entertainment" that deals almost exclusively with popular
culture and whose musical soundtrack consists solely of pop music. Pop
culture is valuable, of course, and there's nothing wrong with publicly
funded programs to analyze it. But the fact that it's not billed as such
demonstrates that the word "art" itself has changed its meaning: It has got
a whole lot narrower.

The word "music" has suffered the same fate. Popular music no longer must be
specified as such; it's just music. It's the other forms of music that need
a qualifier. In other words, "music" tends not to include classical music,
which is an obscure niche not unlike the "fetish" section of your adult
video store.

It's not included in most discussions of the form. (Actually, that's
probably a bad example. Fetish porn is usually discussed or at least
acknowledged in discussions of pornography, whereas classical music simply
does not exist in most mediated discussions of "music." If you wanted to
extend the pornographic metaphor a little, you could say that classical
music is a bit like the old videos that the pornographers now label
"natural" and classify as a fetish. They put the videos of un-enhanced women
in the freaky section beside Latex Hotel and Plushy Party.)

Similarly, any "culture" section of a TV or radio news hour now means pop
culture: It means discussion of hip hop and new trends in home decor. Again,
I'm not denying that these things are culture, just pointing out that
they're a particular kind of culture and not, I would say, representative of
all culture.

This has to have an effect on the role of the arts in society. When language
changes, ideas become entrenched. So it's not insignificant the word "song"
is used in current English to refer to any piece of music, even those that
are not songs. The manufacturers of digital music players like to advertise
how many "songs" their devices can store, which doesn't tell me much because
very little of my music is songs. Creators of dance music have solved the
problem by referring to all units of music as "tracks." In the classical
tradition, this was solved centuries ago with the word "piece," which can
refer to a flute solo or a full-fledged symphony. Academics often use the
word "text" to refer to all works of art, precisely in order to avoid having
discussions on the definition of individual genr

Re: [Finale] OT: John Cage's first national TV appearance (1960)

[João Miguel Pais]

 >Phil -- in my experience, it's not whether a piece is new or old, but  
simply

 >if it's and .

I agree.  But if it's non-tonal, it's not good.


Oh. What do you have against folk and pre-baroque music? In which terms  
are they related to [not-so-]contemporary[-anymore] music, that it brings  
a similar reaction in you? When does tonal music stops? Is the tristan  
chord already out of limits? Are Petroushka and Le Sacre just garbage? Is  
Debussy a psychadelic hippie?




Anything that hurts my ears when I listen to it, I stop listening.



Phil, pal, you are my model! That is, you are my anti-model. I'm still  
"young", but I hope that my ears and specially my mind never regress to  
such a vegetative, petrified state. That I keep eager to experiment new  
things, new music, new theatre, art, sights, flavours and smells. Although  
one's age rusts the body, it's one's head that rusts itself - in which you  
are a master (you are not only a master of music). Whenever I feel tired  
or down, I'll always think of you, and that will give me more energy not  
to stop.



It seems like a simple concept to me, but I guess a lot of music people  
have much less sensitive ears than I do.


Funny. I would say the opposite. Your simple-based comments and no urge  
whatsoever to engage in a meaningful discussion that goes beyond the level  
of "me no likey" or "he's good; he's a terrorist" reveal an enormous lack  
of sensitivity, to which I (fortunately) don't often encounter.



I don't want to insult you, as my utmost feeling towards you is pity. I'm  
sorry that you live in a so closed of a world, where anything that goes a  
bit outside the norm ("defy" would be already a too strong of a word) is  
simply shoved off, without a chance to even understand what could it be  
about - you know, if someone (be it Cage, Pollock, Bach, or even you) gave  
his time and effort to create something, and you want to say something  
about it, the very least you could do is to even *try* (if that's not too  
much to ask) to see if there's anything to it. And if after you *tried*  
(and *tried* again) you don't like it, you can say "it's not for me".  
Between that and "it's not good" is a giant step, you know? But correct me  
if I'm wrong: we would like to know which are your founded, constructed  
opinions to Cage's music, Pollock's painting, or anything else - we're all  
willing to learn!



By the way, JS Bach's music wasn't played almost at all in his last years,  
and it pratically disappeared until Mendelsson picked it up later  
(Beethoven and Mozart only got to some scores late in their lives). His  
contemporaries found it too far-fetched and overfull with counterpoint (a  
kind of nowadays Ferneyhough), and they found him already back of his time  
(you know, just like a guy "who don't know what current public option is,  
[is] out in the dark."), preferring his son's CPE's works. His violin  
suites (which apparently he could play - anyone correct me) are obligatory  
repertoire in any violinist who wants to live from his bowing nowadays,  
were considered not suitable or natural for the instrument. Is that enough  
of a hint for you about relativity, need of understanding, and not to  
consider yourself as the center of the world?



João Miguel Pais
___
Finale mailing list
Finale@shsu.edu
http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale

Re: [Finale] OT: John Cage's first national TV appearance (1960)

[Andrew Stiller]

On May 25, 2007, at 11:30 PM, Darcy James Argue wrote:


Andrew,

Why are you wasting your time? Of course Phil wants to go there. His 
musical tastes ossified at age seven, and he's actually proud of that 
fact. I feel rather sorry for him that he's grown so attached to his 
blinkers, but, what'cha gonna do?




Well, if you look back over this thread, you'll see that my 
contributions have been studiedly peripheral, because other people were 
making the necessary arguments as well as I could. Eventually, tho, I 
needed to get my lick in.


I will now withdraw--unless Phil issues a demurrer.

Andrew Stiller
Kallisti Music Press
http://www.kallistimusic.com/

___
Finale mailing list
Finale@shsu.edu
http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale

Re: [Finale] OT: John Cage's first national TV appearance (1960)

[Randolph Peters]

Mariposa Symphony Orchestra wrote:
Sure, I like Bach; I marvel especially at his contrapuntal 
creativity; I enjoy the sound of his music.


Andrew Stiller wrote:
Me, I like his grinding dissonances!

dhbailey wrote:
I like the percussiveness of so much of it...

And I say:
You're all wrong!



-Randolph Peters
___
Finale mailing list
Finale@shsu.edu
http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale

Re: [Finale] OT: John Cage's first national TV appearance (1960)

[dhbailey]

Darcy James Argue wrote:

Andrew,

Why are you wasting your time? Of course Phil wants to go there. His 
musical tastes ossified at age seven, and he's actually proud of that 
fact. I feel rather sorry for him that he's grown so attached to his 
blinkers, but, what'cha gonna do?




I never look on these discussions as wasting time, because blinders can 
be broken off.  I know that I've had several sets (maybe even more than 
several) torn off because of such discussions, when I've found that I 
really was making stupid arguments trying to defend my positions and 
eventually had to admit that my positions had no merit and I actually 
began to look past where my blinders had been and ended up very grateful 
for gaining new insights which helped me grow as a musician and as a person.


And I love to read the various anecdotes and citations and the logic 
presented (even if I don't agree with it) on both sides of a debate.


I personally find much of value in these discussions, even if most 
participants never change their minds.



--
David H. Bailey
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
___
Finale mailing list
Finale@shsu.edu
http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale

Re: [Finale] OT: John Cage's first national TV appearance (1960)

[dhbailey]

Dennis Bathory-Kitsz wrote:
[snip]>

Kids aren't fixed. Maybe later, when inundated with tonality, their aural
view will narrow. But it doesn't start out that way.


How true that is!  What's that line from South Pacific about kids having 
to be taught to learn hate before they're six or seven or eight?


It is so true of the arts, as well as everything else.

--
David H. Bailey
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
___
Finale mailing list
Finale@shsu.edu
http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale

Re: [Finale] OT: John Cage's first national TV appearance (1960)

[dhbailey]

Andrew Stiller wrote:


On May 25, 2007, at 3:15 PM, Mariposa Symphony Orchestra wrote:

Sure, I like Bach; I marvel especially at his contrapuntal creativity; 
I enjoy the sound of his music.


Me, I like his grinding dissonances!



I like the percussiveness of so much of it -- I used to use it as typing 
music back in the day when I had my handy Remington portable manual 
typewriter in college.  It was so much easier to get the papers typed 
more quickly and the music freed part of my brain to concentrate on my 
typing and I made fewer mistakes than when listening to the Moody Blues 
or Led Zeppelin or even Duke Ellington.


--
David H. Bailey
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
___
Finale mailing list
Finale@shsu.edu
http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale

Re: [Finale] OT: John Cage's first national TV appearance (1960)

[dhbailey]

Andrew Stiller wrote:


On May 25, 2007, at 9:19 AM, Dennis Bathory-Kitsz wrote:

And so it is at the heart of answering the prosaic question of why 
music as

art differs from music as commerce. There is only one moment of
transformation, one pivot-point, that belongs to a work of art.


Fascinating. I have always thought about it oppositely: that a pop tune 
gives up all its secrets on one listening, whereas with a classical 
piece there are often new insights with every hearing.




While I agree with Andrew about music as art giving up new insights on 
repeated listenins, I can also understand Dennis's point -- I have found 
that there is some moment, one pivot point at which I pass from the 
merely curious response to the enthralled response to a work of art. 
And there is no way of predicting when that will happen -- for some it 
happens very early on, even on first listening, for others it happens 
after many different hearings, and for some it never happens.  And for 
those works of art which don't even evoke the merely curious response, 
they don't get a second listen usually, there being so many others to 
move onto.


Music as commerce has to get that enthralled response (shallow as it 
often is in commercial music, although there is a lot of commercial 
music which is not shallow) right off the bat or it doesn't get much 
commercial response (i.e. sales.)


But I have also found with music as art that for some works there comes 
a time when repeated listenings yield no new insights.  Then it becomes 
drive-time music on a local classical music radio station.




--
David H. Bailey
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
___
Finale mailing list
Finale@shsu.edu
http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale

Re: [Finale] OT: John Cage's first national TV appearance (1960)

[dhbailey]

Andrew Stiller wrote:


On May 25, 2007, at 1:20 PM, David W. Fenton wrote:



All of these people would benefit from absorbing the message of
Wagner's Meistersinger.



That people should support German composers???



No, that people should bring comfortable cushions to sit on for so long.

--
David H. Bailey
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
___
Finale mailing list
Finale@shsu.edu
http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale

Re: [Finale] OT: John Cage's first national TV appearance (1960)

[Raymond Horton]

I felt like saying nearly the same words to Andrew, also, but I 
appreciated reading his post, because he makes such good arguments - 
including that excellent Louvre guard line which I had not heard before.



RBH



Darcy James Argue wrote:

Andrew,

Why are you wasting your time? Of course Phil wants to go there. His 
musical tastes ossified at age seven, and he's actually proud of that 
fact. I feel rather sorry for him that he's grown so attached to his 
blinkers, but, what'cha gonna do?


Cheers,

- Darcy
-
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Brooklyn, NY



On 25 May 2007, at 10:46 PM, Andrew Stiller wrote:



On May 25, 2007, at 7:04 PM, Phil Daley wrote:



I agree.  But if it's non-tonal, it's not good.



Really? Berg's violin concerto is not good? Wozzeck and Lulu are not 
good? *All* of Varèse is not good? Three of  the four movements of 
Ives' fourth symphony are not good? Pierrot Lunaire and Erwartung are 
not good?


Are you *sure* you want to go there?

--The story is  told of a visitor to the Louvre who struck up a 
conversation w. the security guard, criticizing this painting and 
that, finding fault with all and satisfied with none. Finally the 
guard could take no more of this and said "Pardonnez moi, monsieur, 
but it is not  the *pictures* that are on trial here."


--A word to the wise.

And another thing: non-tonal and atonal are not synonyms. Most music, 
in fact, is non-tonal: Medieval and Renaissance music,  non-Western 
music (all of it), rock music... Being charitable, I assume your 
blanket condemnation does not extend to any of these musics, but is 
limited to that properly called atonal. Even that puts you *way* out 
on a limb.



Andrew Stiller
Kallisti Music Press
http://www.kallistimusic.com/



___
Finale mailing list
Finale@shsu.edu
http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale

Re: [Finale] OT: John Cage's first national TV appearance (1960)

[Darcy James Argue]

Andrew,

Why are you wasting your time? Of course Phil wants to go there. His  
musical tastes ossified at age seven, and he's actually proud of that  
fact. I feel rather sorry for him that he's grown so attached to his  
blinkers, but, what'cha gonna do?


Cheers,

- Darcy
-
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Brooklyn, NY



On 25 May 2007, at 10:46 PM, Andrew Stiller wrote:



On May 25, 2007, at 7:04 PM, Phil Daley wrote:



I agree.  But if it's non-tonal, it's not good.



Really? Berg's violin concerto is not good? Wozzeck and Lulu are  
not good? *All* of Varèse is not good? Three of  the four movements  
of Ives' fourth symphony are not good? Pierrot Lunaire and  
Erwartung are not good?


Are you *sure* you want to go there?

--The story is  told of a visitor to the Louvre who struck up a  
conversation w. the security guard, criticizing this painting and  
that, finding fault with all and satisfied with none. Finally the  
guard could take no more of this and said "Pardonnez moi, monsieur,  
but it is not  the *pictures* that are on trial here."


--A word to the wise.

And another thing: non-tonal and atonal are not synonyms. Most  
music, in fact, is non-tonal: Medieval and Renaissance music,  non- 
Western music (all of it), rock music... Being charitable, I assume  
your blanket condemnation does not extend to any of these musics,  
but is limited to that properly called atonal. Even that puts you  
*way* out on a limb.



Andrew Stiller
Kallisti Music Press
http://www.kallistimusic.com/


___
Finale mailing list
Finale@shsu.edu
http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale



___
Finale mailing list
Finale@shsu.edu
http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale

Re: [Finale] OT: John Cage's first national TV appearance (1960)

[Andrew Stiller]

On May 25, 2007, at 7:04 PM, Phil Daley wrote:



I agree.  But if it's non-tonal, it's not good.



Really? Berg's violin concerto is not good? Wozzeck and Lulu are not 
good? *All* of Varèse is not good? Three of  the four movements of 
Ives' fourth symphony are not good? Pierrot Lunaire and Erwartung are 
not good?


Are you *sure* you want to go there?

--The story is  told of a visitor to the Louvre who struck up a 
conversation w. the security guard, criticizing this painting and that, 
finding fault with all and satisfied with none. Finally the guard could 
take no more of this and said "Pardonnez moi, monsieur, but it is not  
the *pictures* that are on trial here."


--A word to the wise.

And another thing: non-tonal and atonal are not synonyms. Most music, 
in fact, is non-tonal: Medieval and Renaissance music,  non-Western 
music (all of it), rock music... Being charitable, I assume your 
blanket condemnation does not extend to any of these musics, but is 
limited to that properly called atonal. Even that puts you *way* out on 
a limb.



Andrew Stiller
Kallisti Music Press
http://www.kallistimusic.com/


___
Finale mailing list
Finale@shsu.edu
http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale

Re: [Finale] OT: John Cage's first national TV appearance (1960)

[Dennis Bathory-Kitsz]

At 06:03 PM 5/25/2007 -0400, Andrew Stiller wrote:
>Fascinating. I have always thought about it oppositely: that a pop tune 
>gives up all its secrets on one listening, whereas with a classical 
>piece there are often new insights with every hearing.

Yes, for the most part I agree (pop music has 'stuff' too).

What I wrote makes more sense in the context of the whole blog entry that
day -- about the moment of transformation for the person experiencing the
art. If there are a dozen transformational artistic experiences in a
lifetime, I'd think that would be a lot -- the artistic/musical version of
the reputed "born again" experience.

The sentences were the beginning of a longer section here:


Dennis



___
Finale mailing list
Finale@shsu.edu
http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale