by Kurt Knecht | Apr 19, 2014 | Uncategorized
For reasons that will be mysterious, I have been perusing a set of 19th Mid-Western poets. The poems are almost unbearably bad, but each poet has a biographical sketch of 1 to 4 lines. They are much more entertaining than the poems. I don’t know any poets that...
by Kurt Knecht | Apr 10, 2014 | Uncategorized
To enrich our discussion of post tonal music, I had my class read an interview that Edward Cone did with his former teacher Roger Sessions. In the article, Sessions tells an anecdote about an interaction with Schoenberg. Sessions says to Schoenberg, “I hear this...
by Kurt Knecht | Apr 9, 2014 | Uncategorized
“I go back always again to what Bloch said: ‘In two years you’ll be able to do anything you want.’ I think this is what craft really is. It’s the aim of craft. The danger I see today among some young composers is that they learn to write...
by Kurt Knecht | Apr 5, 2014 | Uncategorized
It is interesting to watch composers work under pressure and time constraints. When there are deadlines to be met, you have to go with what you know will work. There is something about the sheer craftsmanship of assembling sounds that allows you to assess a...
by Kurt Knecht | Mar 29, 2014 | Uncategorized
One of the central arguments of the formalist position is that music – and here we are always talking about instrumental music – has a syntax and logic without any semantic content. Kivy nicely sums up the argument here:”According to the formalist...
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