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now i'm in a quandry.
what happens next?
um...
well, one thing that's obvious is that the argument side of the exchange above would have dissipated in a few seconds in 3-d because it seems mostly rooted in messageboard tone problems.
second thing is that, in general terms, i have some trouble with 19th century classical music--i listen to alot of music from beethoven and before, and then fade back in with folk like schoenberg/stravinsky. i think this might follow from something schoenberg said about palestrina--that the compositions are about line. and much newer music is about line as well. there are exceptions in my skipping of most of the 19th century--like satie..
anyway, i am not as taken with euroclassical that's dominated by shorter phrases that do not particularly develop over bigger harmonies. and i don't think that many 19th century composers knew how to deal with horn sections. and 19th century music in the main never shuts up. satie is of course an exception. actually, now that i think of it, there's alot of exceptions in smaller ensemble and solo stuff. (if you play a bach piece and an early schoenberg piano piece (say) one after the other, you'll hear what i'm talking about. different ways of thinking about space. that's all.)
back to the pre-parenthesis....so its the move toward bigger and bigger orchestras that particularly bugs me. it all seems to me to lead somehow or another to wagner, whose music makes me think of driving nails into my forehead.
what i meant about training one's ears into 19th century forms and ways of dealing with the relation of harmony to line was basically that we're saturated with it. it's everywhere all the time. this doesn't particularly bother me as such--but i've found that it creates trouble for folk who are trying to work their way into, say, 12-tone music (or into ornette coleman's stuff for that matter). because folk tend to forget that their default assumptions also come from training themselves, they think that other modes of organizing sound are "off" especially at first.
this last thing is germaine here, i think, in particular.
but i just got back from the beach and am still thinking about it, so i'll stop at this for now.
have you gone out to get david tudor's rainforest yet? what are you waiting for?
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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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