by Kurt Knecht | Apr 26, 2014 | Uncategorized
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...
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...
by Kurt Knecht | Mar 27, 2014 | Uncategorized
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...
by Kurt Knecht | Mar 26, 2014 | Uncategorized
Naturally, we all have to do some things in order to eat. Life becomes very dangerous if you do something successful. Tremendous pressure and financial reward are brought to encourage you to produce “sequels”. I certainly don’t begrudge anyone the...
by Kurt Knecht | Mar 23, 2014 | Uncategorized
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...
by Kurt Knecht | Mar 21, 2014 | Uncategorized
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...
by Kurt Knecht | Mar 16, 2014 | Uncategorized
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...
by Kurt Knecht | Mar 13, 2014 | Uncategorized
I have known a few piano technicians in my day. One of my favorites was a particularly eccentric fellow I knew in Florida. Now, piano techs usually spend enormous amounts of time alone, so when you get them talking, it’s often hard to get them to stop. I...
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