i listened to some terrible playing downstairs. Really bad.
I had a friend in high school who's nickname in art class was kinderhulk, because his drawings reminded someone of a kindergartener and the hunk, combined. This pianist shared in the spirit of kinderhulk, if that gives you an idea. He played chopin without emotion, mechanically and sped-up to create some sort of warped pseudo-virtuoso showpiece out of nocturnes. Poor chopin.

Then some really banal something or another, sickeningly sweet stuff, reminiscent of contemporary non-denominational church music. Then back to the chopin nocturnes, beat black and blue. bizarre accelerandos in places they dont belong, mechanical playing. He hit all the right notes all wrong. Kind of amazing, actually.

Then he played some good ol ragtime. He could play that well.
And then i realized, he was playing chopin nocturnes like ragtime pieces. ahhh, it made sense now.

But all this terrible music and terrible playing is good for the soul, i think. It keeps you modest. You sit down and play, and think- how much difference is there between his playing and mine? how much do you think is actually perceptible to a non-music person? Eh, I stand by my claim... its good to know whats bad, its good to hear bad every now and again.

The Transcendental Deduction of the Pure Concepts of Understanding

This has got to be one of the nerdiest things i've seen in a very long long while. I received it in an email from a professor, but here it is... The Kant Song

I actually made an analogy today to something in music to something in Kant, and now i cant remember what it was...

expressionistic?

Currently listening to Micheal Gordon's Decasia (unfortunately i dont have the video, though i've heard the images are beautiful) and i've gotta say, im kinda surprised how minimalistic it is. For whatever reason, probably from the descriptions i'd heard already, i had an expectation for something else.

But im not disappointed, this is beautiful stuff, often severe, but beautiful all the same. Someone else has commented on how Gordon's deliberately mis-tuned violins work well here and its absolutely true, in his hands they create a haunting halo of sound, full of echoes and emotion. Strong discords frame many of the hamonies, but im so damned jaded to discord i would forget about it if i wasn’t thinking about other listeners. The sound is rich and as fresh as it is expressive, this music opens up some very interesting sonic possibilities.

Everyone has favorite parts of a piece. I prefer the end middle-end of part 6 and part 5 which gets more bittersweet towards the end. All of the six parts flow into each other, a continuous stream. There is not as much contrast as one could hope for, and its not as radical a departure as i may have hoped. The music is generally dark in tone and even brooding. It could be criticized for histrionics, but i wouldn’t- i doubt that some sort of hyper-morbid drama was the main focus or aim here. All in all im very happy to be able to listen to this music. There is a visceral elegance about it all... fascinating stuff.

that infamous stravinsky quote

For I consider that music is, by its very nature, essentially powerless to express anything at all, whether a feeling, an attitude of mind, a psychological mood, a phenomenon of nature, etc....

Many people have heard this quote, and at the surface it seems rather absurd and even outrageous, it is also taken out of context. If you read the rest of the paragraph you will see what Stravinsky is trying to say is not what we might read from that first sentence. I remember actually seeing this quote before listening to any of his post-rite music and being turned-off to hearing later-stravinsky as a result. "why would i want to listen to the music that was conceived under this concept? meaningless music?" Meaninlessness, absurdity, has always bothered me and nagged at me. I questioned the avant-garde for years because i was concerned about the possibility of a kind of absurdity and pointlessness in it, which is something im not going to gamble with, and it is a pointlessness which seemed stravinsky was suggesting in this quote.

But of course, Stravinsky heard an outcry from those words and decided to make his point clearer to those still stuck on the first sentence:

The over-publicized bit about expression (or non-expression) was simply a way of saying that music is supra-personal and super-real and as such beyond verbal meanings and verbal descriptions. It was aimed against the notion that a piece of music is in reality a transcendental idea "expressed in terms of" music, with the reductio ad absurdum implication that exact sets of correlatives must exist between a composer's feelings and his notation. It was offhand and annoyingly
incomplete, but even the stupider critics could have seen that it did not deny musical expressivity, but only the validity of a type of verbal statement about musical expressivity. I stand by the remark, incidentally, thought today I wouldput it the other way around: music expresses itself."

Igor Stravinsky and Robert Craft (1962). Expositions and Developments.

He puts it very well at the last bit there. I cringe now when i see that quote floating around, as if to provoke outrage, writers will publish it from time to time. Its very wrong, its very stupid to continue to take this quote out of context and present it as some sort of concrete summing up of stravinsky's aesthetics. In fact, something that i found once very upsetting i find out to be in reality, actually agreeable. Language can confuse sometimes, funny thing, this expression bit.

New recording and good news.

A recent (shitty) recording of my playing here in the dorms on my dear electric. Its nothing too severe and its pretty typical of what i play downstairs. I'd like to think i can do much better, but maybe im delusional. The mic apparently had a few things to say, too.

In other news... exciting, Animal collective is playing here on the 2nd. Then The books are coming to my school the next month. joy of joys. I've really appreciated their works, the lemon of pink is their big album and its great stuff.

excitement.

NOTE: The Alarm Will Sound performs a John Adams program at the University of California, Berkeley, on March 5 .... thats my birthday.

I think its a sign.

ok, ok. I dont, but i wish it were.

In the last few days i've received a lot of attention at the piano i play downstairs. I think its the music i play... which is whatever i feel like at the moment, usually very tonal, but tonal dissonances and tritones not avoided. I work in a mode that can sometimes be somewhat severe, often i make extremely rapid changes in tonality which are in themselves tonally logical, but sped-up to the being close to ramming the tonalities into each other. I will move from D major to A major and with only a quick hint of E major to a sudden B major and then back in the same fashion. This rapid addition and subtraction of accidentals into the music i think upsets some people... or maybe the irregularity of many of the phrases and my affection for the extremes of the piano... but the music is not dissonant, per se, nor bi-tonal, nor the chromatic (a)tonality of wagner, Schoenberg and a like * i cant stress this enough, its not late-romantic or even straussian-type chord progressions.

But it upsets some people. Last week i got my first complaint, so to speak. A guy came up to me stuttering slightly, seeming nervous "please... could you stop playing?" I wasnt even doing anything loud, just irregular and only very mildly dissonant. i said "sure" and couldn’t help but smile. I dont own the place, after all.

There are doors that open up into the lounge where i play. The next day while i was playing as i do, someone made a clear gesture by closing the doors and giving me a death glare. I heightened the mood by hitting some sweet minor seconds for them. Im sure they appreciated my gesture too.

Two days pass.... and then im playing in my normal fashion, something i assume not to be very popular and then i get some very friendly people who come and talk to me. One was a Russian grad student of sociology, a lover of prokofiev, Scriabin and other russians. I had a good talk, and the other was a guitarist and jazz-lover i'd met briefly before who seemed interested in what i was doing.

Anyway i got positive feedback, which made me feel better. After those first two days i was wondering if i had become a local musical nuisance to the people. I have received more positive feedback recently, once after playing in a manner of philip glass (no, not just empty arpeggios, think music in a similar motion or 12 parts) ...only with the transitions and progressions sped up for the sake of the listeners and myself)..and its a sort of variation of the style of philip glass, which is always a fun pastime for me, good for dexterity too. I got applause from the pool-players for my minimalism! i was shocked. I rarely get applause, even for my most blatantly and stupidly showy pyrotechnic-improvisations.

But im still of mixed feelings. I know i irritate people. Every once in a while i'll pull out some atonality.... i've certainly never gotten applause from that.