21.3.05

Music of Laughter and Forgetting

I find the current production of Style Wars!, now playing at Composer's Forum and in its permanent run in Kyle Gann's blog (We are at war with serialism. We have always been at war with serialism.) desultory, tired, and sad.

But the worst of it is Mr. Gann's approving posting of this note from composer Art Jarvinen (whose music I like quite a bit):

I used to cover 12 tone basics in my Introduction To Composition class until a couple years ago. I realized that most of the students hate the music, don't like the technique for its own sake, didn't seem to get much out of the homework assignment, and generally find it all completely irrelevant to their own musical lives. Since I can say almost the same things for myself (with certain notable exceptions) and realized years ago that that stuff is basically dead in the water, I replaced it with another, much more amusing, topic: Plunderphonics.

Besides the inmates-running-the-asylum aspect of this move, 12-tone technique is kind of important, and 12-tonery is a precursor of minimalism in some substantive and important ways. But mainly I just want to let Mr. Jarvinen and others of like mind to know that, when they decide to remove 12-tone scores from the library, they can send them to me rather than go to the trouble of burning them.

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