Musique Concrete

The other day, I discovered that because of the way we teach music history, we wind up leaving some gaps. I had some freedom in the schedule, so I spent a day talking about musique concrete. I didn’t get to everything that I wanted to, so I’m posting a...

19th century Mid-western minor poet biographies

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...

Assembling clichés

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...

Peter Kivy’s Philosophy of Music #1

I am happily working my way through Peter Kivy’s Philosophy of Music during Spring Break amidst some writing and a lot of grading. Though I am only halfway through, I can heartily recommend the book as an excellent introduction to the central issues in...

The dangers of dancing in Wisconsin in 1914

Today my eldest son, Zach, gifted me with a copy of Carl Manthey-Zorn’s Christenfragen.  I think he said he picked it up at a Goodwill. It is a catechism of sorts published in 1914 in Milwaukee. It’s one of those books that was published for German...

Heart and Brain in music

One of the projects I always do toward the end of freshman theory is to spend the day with Schumann’s “Ich grolle nicht”. The freshies usually have enough tools at that point in the year to start talking in some more depth about structure and...

The scatalogical Tonnetz

Typos happen to the best of us, but this one is remarkable. It posits a new attribute to the P transformation in neo-Riemannian theory. I am thinking of developing a new description of this relationship called a Clump-in-hauer network. The composer that showed me the...