Saturday, June 20, 2015

Hate Mail - Post Literate Brain Trust Speaks Again

SkepticTank  Steve Simels, blog malignancy • 2 hours ago
His greatest retort to you would be to write an actual piece of music criticism. I'll bet he finds it way harder than it looks and well beyond his limited talents. It would be hilarious to see him try. A lot more fun than his endlessly recycled orations against the materialists.

Done that, dopes.

1.  Arthur Berger

2. Charles Tomlinson Griffes' Sonata

3. High Anxiety Bones' cd Too Scared to Play

4.  The Merling Trio Performs Works By Curtis Curtis-Smith

5.  William Bolcom Gospel Preludes

6.  World Premier of William Bolcom’s Canciones de Lorca

7.   Music of Kenneth Gaburo

8.   Imagining Arizona Dranes c. 1905-?

9.   Washington Phillips and the Harps of Gold

10.  John Lennon Is Dead His Song is Stupid

I could go on, there have been plenty more.  I didn't find it hard at all, but, then, I had written scads of papers on music in college, some for teachers far more exigent than I would imagine what passed for editors at that ad vehicle that .... Well, only if provoked will I go into that.   Don't mind saying they were wowed with my two papers in my senior seminar in music history, one took three classes to give.

I generally don't write about music I don't like or respect because so much of the music that is worth noticing doesn't get noticed or reviewed.  No one ever paid me to write a review of a disc or criticism of music.   Mind you, if any recording companies would like to send me free cds to review, I promise I will listen to them and if I like them I will write a review of them.   That is if I get to keep the cds.  If you wanted to tempt my integrity by offering payment I might agree to do that, but only for any recordings I actually liked.   But, alas, as the great American composer, Carla Bley said,  I could be corrupted but no one cared enough to make an offer.

Update:  Oh, and apropos of my earlier post, in that old review of Griffes' Sonata I heaped praise on a composer, one of the very few fine composers who was -- wait for it -- AN ATHEIST.  I could add this review I did of the atheist AND LOGICAL POSITIVIST!  Milton Babbitt.   I don't know but wouldn't be surprised if Kenneth Gaburo were an atheist, not to mention a number of others I've said nice things about.

Update 2:  Good heavens, what do you imagine being a musician or a music major consists of.   I don't think there has been a day in my life since I first started having a consciousness of musical form that I didn't do some analysis of music.  It's inevitable that someone who does music and thinks about it will hear music analytically.   If that's why I don't find it hard to write about music, I don't know, I didn't think about that until that idiot claimed it was hard.   It just came with the package of being a musician and I took it for granted, I guess.

4 comments:

  1. You left out 11. Watching Paint Dry -- An Appreciation.

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    1. Simps, how could you have said that, missing I already had, #10.

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  2. I seem to remember a column by a music critic for RS (if memory serves from so many decades back) which put me off music criticism forever.

    He pointed out how many music critics were just English majors, writing about lyrics and words and "meaning" without ever actually discussing the music: keys, chords, time signatures, things like that.

    Then there was that music column in the Austin Chronicle I read for years, with the title I finally figured out. It came from the phrase: "Writing about music is like dancing about architecture."

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  3. It's obviously inadequate to try to transfer one art to another one. I know a lot of composers have written pieces about, or at least inspired by paintings. The pieces aren't really a replacement of seeing the pictures. The first piece I listed sort of makes that point. I don't find it hard to write about music I like but I doubt it can do more than encourage people to listen to a the music I write about.

    I really, really would hate to have a job where I had to write about music or performances I didn't like. I'd have hated to be a newspaper movie reviewer. I hate the flicks. And rock... well, there are lots of things I'd rather do. Even teaching algebra to 9th graders.

    On the other hand, there are things like Keat's poems on those looted marbles from the Parthenon and looted vases. Those are pretty good.

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