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once upon a time, i had a music theory tutor. he was a composer, an interesting cat. i was young and was finding out about alot of music that was entirely new to me and so was in that phase, which in my world is a discrete and powerful phase, of having-discovered cecil taylor and so of doing many many bad cecil taylor impersonations. but i didn't know enough theory to be able to move around with it---i concentrated mostly on being able, to the extent that i could, get myself technically to a place of being able to do what was, to my ears at the time, a convincing pseudo-cecil on occasion. and there was something kinda fun about threatening the well-being of upright pianos by playing them that hard. but i didn't have the theory background to go much past that.
so i had a tutor. first thing he did was to show me 3 pieces: anton webern's op. 30 for piano, messaien's quartet for the end of time, and an eliot carter piece i can't remember which, from the late 40s with a giant fugue in it. he also gave me the scores, which was important for me, even though my sight reading wasn't up to being able to play any of what i was hearing.
of them, the webern really stuck with me--i found it beautiful and quite unlike anything i had heard before. and having the score to look at--even though i couldn't play it--enabled me to make sense of 12-tone music. but what mattered even more was listening to it without thinking about how the rows are manipulated, but instead listening to the piece as a vocabulary for phrasing--figure ground stuff---event silence and the relations between them.
i've listened to it countless times since, learned to play it eventually, forgot again, it keeps showing up (i think) in bent-up ways in stuff i do---i think i ultimately did what derek bailey said he did--mistook webern for an improvisor
and assimilated his work from that angle
but the point really is that webern showed me an entirely different way of thinking about the relation of actions to silence than anything i had heard in straight european music up to that point, and of a way of thinking space that was different from what i knew about jazz (whatever that means) at the time.
i tell this tiresome little story just to indicate that there are many many ways to think about very basic things like pitch selection and placement, that no approach is more legitimate than any other--we live in a world of recordings, the old monopolies that underpinned the hegemony of 19th century euro-music are finished, even though the institutions continue to operate--which is good, in the main (i think)---so nothing is more legitimate than anything else---rachmaninov is to my mind tedious beyond imagining--but other folk like it, think it's legit, think it's purty--so fine: there's tons of contemporary music you can hear on the basis of a nineteenth century euro-formation--but there's also a ton of it that you won't hear--you understand that something is happening, but you won't hear it.
like tuning systems, compositional strategies are internally coherent and that's it. it's better to know alot of them. the more the merrier. there are possibilities everywhere.
difficulty is not a marker of much of anything.
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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