dec. ’23, the composer’s role in their music.
ownership dissolves in becoming.
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a composer can only claim any bit of ownership to their music if they are directly involved with its performance. this goes directly beyond simply writing a piece down, as a score cannot quantify as music.
to be facetious- scores do not abide by temporality, represent nothing sonically objective, and cannot contain nor convey any typical sensibility or entropy associated with pure performance. a score only serves as the last resort of communication between the composer and the performer- and from the moment sound is produced in response to the notation, the sound has supersedes ownership and embodies the work. the amount of communication that can be contained on a score is great, but it is nowhere near the inherent possibilities of expression.
It is better to make a piece of music than to perform one, better to perform one than to listen to one, better to listen to one than to misuse it as a means of distraction, entertainment, or acquisition of "culture."
john cage, silence lectures.
true dishonesty belongs to the academic, as the main role of the academic is to maintain a tradition rather than to ‘further’ it. the issue of ‘academic’ writing is the intent of the composer to make their music sound interesting. the main evidence of this is the orchestral work, one that was conceived with the idea stripping any agency from the players. x should be played like y, because we have essentially done it that way forever.
Students busy themselves with generalized analyses of harmonic, melodic, and rhythmic matters with the object of showing that in Socrate all these formal principles are found, defined, and re- united in a homogeneous fashion (as befits a masterpiece). From this student point of view, Pierre Boulez is justified in rejecting Satie. Le bon Maitre's harmonies, melodies, and rhythms are no longer of interest. They provide pleasure for those who have no better use for their time. They've lost their power to irritate.
ibid.
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better to start with the premise that i hate music, and find every decision afterwards based on the criteria to either further this suspicion or to annul it.
a composer hates blank scores because they mirror their true intent to say nothing. the need to say something is a novelty.
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finding the edge between the idea and façade, and using this to measure the composition’s plasticity.
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feb. ’24,
an image and its plastic negative.
image. 16 lovesongs.
negative.
an image can be represented (related) in myriad ways, which often means the source, disrupted to begin with, is being represented by at the very minimum of two manners at any given moment.
the image upon being captured is relegated to a small frame that is only distillable through the modus of the capturing device, for photographic metaphor’s sake a camera, but for the artist’s sake, anything. the manner is first depicted by a negative, which is inverted through some process to become representable and/or able of being depicted. what counts is that, the original image is ephemeral and stops existing the moment it transpires, and every effort to represent it afterwards only becomes an approximation. an artist will do anything to try to faithfully represent (mostly to themself) their images, but they realize that sometimes the only way to keep any original semblance of the image is to deceive the interpreter/interpreted by destroying the original image in some way. the artist is then forced when attenuating this discrepancy to oversaturate certain parts of their representation, and to leave other parts relatively inchoate.
If he does not wish to give up his attempts to control sound, [the artist] may complicate his musical technique towards an approximation of the new possibilities and awareness… Or, as before, one may give up the desire to control sound, clear his mind of music, and set about discovering means to let sounds be themselves rather than vehicles for man-made theories or expressions of human sentiments.
john cage, silence lectures.
the most insipid parts of art are often are noetically conceived.
finding the edge between the idea and façade, and using this to measure the composition’s plasticity.
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