I see that Alex Ross is trying to muscle in on Overheard in New York's turf. This could get ugly.
In other blogospheric news, Kyle Gann has a terrific post on George Rochberg (a composer I should really listen to more often) that touches on one of my pet issues: the tendency of an awful lot of music schools -- and, let's face it, an awful lot of musicians both inside and outside of academia -- to define themselves more by what they reject than by what they embrace:
The other thing I find attractive is Rochberg’s characterization of history. As he scopes it out, the history of music was always inclusive and cumulative, each era receiving what was valuable from the previous one and building on it - until the mid-20th century, which decided to exclude and prohibit aspects of the musical practice that preceded it. Rochberg felt that this negative new attitude was a sure road map to oblivion, that a prohibitionary approach to composing would inevitably become a dessicated practice that would blow away with the first wind. For me, this is why bebop harmony is a more sane continuation of the theoretical tradition than the sterile pitch-set analysis I learned in school, because it folds in, retains, and elaborates what came before. And I do find something weirdly schizophrenic in the fact that I spend my afternoons teaching students how to use a certain harmonic vocabulary, and that some composers tell those students that, having learned that vocabulary, they’re not allowed to use it. Old, Eurocentric curmudgeon Rochberg may have been, but like me he believed in a Post-Prohibitive Age, and he was elaborating that belief before I was old enough to know what the issues were.
I would only add that I don't find pitch-set wonkery inherently sterile -- perhaps because coming from the jazzy side of things, my natural tendency has always been to try to integrate all those austere pitch-set techniques into my native language, bebop and post-bop harmony -- or, these days, a more stripped-down rock-oriented sensibility. And again, if we're embracing a "post-prohibative age," there's no reason why pitch-set manipulation can't be just another tool in the toolbox. Just so long as you're not trying to build a house using only a set of needlenose pliers…
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