Back and jet-lagging badly. Picked up a cold from my nephew, and the plane ride multiplied the effects nicely. Ug. But, back after a nice break with a long list of pre-end of year tasks to act on.
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Much reading over the break. Some highlights:
Stockhausen on “Intuitive Music”
P122 – “Playing intuitive music it soon becomes very obvious which musician has the most self-control; in fact, it’s alarming how quickly the musicians reveal their physical and spiritual state, whether they are in crisis or have reached a certain kind of equilibrium. Musicians are easily carried away by not listening, and this is often the reason for a performance turning into rubbish, in the sense that they start to play very loudly, so loud that nobody else can be heard, and they don’t realize what they are doing. Such players can become very totalitarian in certain situations and that creates awful situations for the group playing together. Also their sounds become very aggressive and destructive, and at a very basic level of communication and production of sounds, the destructive elements begin to work.
Understand, I am not talking about ugly or beautiful sounds, but about very debased, physical, bodily aggression expressed in a determination to destroy one another. Then they play all at once. When that threatens it is most important that I always reminde them, and myself as well, ‘Don’t play all the time, and don’t get carried away.’ After several hundred years of being forced to play only what has been prescribed for them by others, musicians today are particularly apt, once they starty playing intuitively in a group, to play all the time, and it becomes very loud very soon and they don’t know how to get soft again because everybody wants to be heard.
The best number is four or five players. Even with five, it takes a lot of self-discipline to keep quiet for quite long periods during a performance, so that solos, duos, and trios occur, and not only quintets all the time. And if musicians are dependent on technique, and they play in a technically self-conscious way, the intuition can’t work well: they always want more than they can do, then it becomes rubbish again.
The best intuitive musician is really at one with his instrument, and knows where to touch and what to do to in order to make it resonate so that the inner vibrations that occur in the player can immediately be expressed as material vibrations in the body of the instrument.”
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This, from “Afterword: Beauty and Necessity” by Robin Maconie
p172 - “A composer today may be ruled by public opinion and hope for material success as an entertainer, or strive to lead it and be condemned to a life in the shadow of poverty and public skepticism. Many of the greatest composing influences of the past hundred years have paid for their musical principles in physical and material suffering. There are no public memorials for the sacrifices of a Schoenberg, a Webern, A Varese, A Bartok. Instead, the familiar indifference of Western bureaucracies toward living artists is explained away by the cynicism that great art is necessarily born of personal adversity, or the complacency that iti is for future generations to decide whether an artist is deservedly or undeservedly left in the lurch.”
p176 - “Recording sowed the idea of a renewed intimacy and subtlety of expression. Repeated hearings of a recording implied a concentration of utterance which no longer needed repeats at crucial intervals, or to unfold in a logical way at the pace of the slowest member of the audience. (my emphasis) It both made a virtue of economy and, through published examples of the voices of famous celebrities and ‘sound pictures’ combining music and naturalistic sound effects, inspired new artistic freedoms to imitate the atonal melodic cadence of natural speech, and to combine music and noise as equal elements in a new form of aural art. Suddenly the ultimate logic of symphonic development, desirability of employing large numbers of musicians, and divine right of diatonic convention, no longer seemed the only legitimate options. “
“Stockhausen on Music, Lectures & Interviews, compiled by Robin Maconie”
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Tomorrow: catching up on communications and back to the Music of this so-called Music Diary.
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