How Virgil Thomson Decided Music Made No Sense

It was also at Thones-les-Bains that Virgil Thomson, in a hotel room, lying on a down quilt he had placed on the floor for sun bath purposes, received the revelation that "Music makes no sense." He had, of course, been preparing himself for such a revelation in all his previous work. For, if one can break the rules given by a strict teacher and receive, nevertheless, the teacher's congratulations, obviously music makes no sense.

Passage deleted by Virgil Thomson from John Cage's manuscript, eventually published in the Cage/Hoover Virgil Thomson: His Life and Music. (Source: Tommasini: Virgil Thomson: Composer on the Aisle.)

If it isn't the hybrid semi-Babbitt, bring in the dusky tribal drums

From a review of the new television adaptation of George R.R. Martin's Game of Thrones:

At points, the soundtrack departs from its strongest mode—cool semi-serialism, a hybrid of Milton Babbitt and Hey, is that my phone?—and the presence of dusky tribal drums signal that people are doing it doggie style.

The Politics of Notation

The letters Q, W, and X are banned in Turkey.   

Bona nox!

I sometimes think that catches, like limericks, divide into two categories: clean ones and good ones.(Click image to enlarge.)

12 Strikes and You're Out

Amazon identifies a title,  From Chords to Simultaneities: Chordal Indeterminancy and the Failure of Serialism, as belonging to a series of Contributions in Criminology and Penology. 

Seek & you shall find

Recent Google searches which landed here include:

white bread music
piano without electricity
prostitution in kalmykia

O — — — — — — — —

Claudio Monteverdi: Il Ritorno d'Ulysse in Patria, Act III, Scene I

Going to Extremes, or maybe not

1. Robert Gable announces a new online mix of audio tracks with the title the american minimalists. Mr. Gable notes that he avoided a number of tracks "due to reasons of length and/or extremism".

2. The poet Ron Silliman announces the publication of a poem of ca. 1000 pages, The Alphabet, a work composed over a period of 29 years. He goes on to announce that "Now it’s time to turn my attention to trying a long poem, Universe."

Shere's good fortune

Charles Shere ends a delightful report on concerts of Schubert and Purcell with this:

And what came of that was the thing that unites Purcell and Schubert: their fundamental innocence, their good cheer, their generosity of spirit. This is something they share with Mozart and Satie and, I think, John Cage, and with so few other composers. They're not in business for their egos. They're as amazed at the beauty they discover as we fortunate listeners are. They are, I think, in a way, angels, Ariels. How lucky we've been to share two evenings in three days with them!

Quotas

Fred Himebaugh observes:

Just as we expect 5 percent of all music sales to be classical, it seems nowdays we expect 5 percent of each movie soundtrack to be classical as well.

More radical than me

Composer William Houston has this message on his website:

"Although I have decided to at least temporarily continue to make my music available, I am entirely finished with the music establishment. No mainstream American music institution will be permitted to perform my work (Not that there's much chance of it anyway). Why? Because it's a rigged game and because it's run by the elite; the same people who profit from dead Iraqi women and children. Some of the same people who stage terror attacks. Am I saying that, for instance, Esa-Pekka Solonen is a terrorist? No, but I am saying he works for terrorists, among others. I don't want that job."

Never!

"Menschen wie wir sollten nie Concessionen machen!" (People like us should never make concessions!) -- Gustav Mahler, from a letter to Richard Strauss, 1894.

Further Adventures in New Year's Spectaculars

SFMike of Civic Center and M.C- of The Standing Room, a pair of excellent photo-and-commentary blogs from San Francisco, have teamed up with an article on a Chinese New Year's event presented by the Falun Gong organization. I've had some training as an ethnomusicologist, and have done a share of fieldwork, but was never quite prepared for an event like this.

Getting 'em young

The Boy Scouts, in cooperation with the MPAA have now developed "an activity patch for learning about the evils of downloading pirated movies and music".

Fermata

Fundamentalists and materialists have this in common: both are unable to sustain a poetic wonder and humility in the living world.
-- Mary Catherine Bateson (found here)

Looking up

"He had moved back to Angers, since Paris was threatened by Zeppelin attacks..." -- Jean Barraqué, Debussy

"(Schoenberg) was a lovely and delicate man, very nervous when airplanes flew over U.C.L.A.; who once hushed us, too, in order to hear a bird outside." -- Lou Harrison, introduction to his Suite for Piano

Before my time

Critic Alan Rich on George Crumb's Ancient Voices of Children:

"I had smoked my first joint shortly before Ancient Voices came around. The disc has made it possible to repeat the experience anytime, straight. It was the first head music respectable enough to appear on a concert stage."