O is for Ordinary

The radical music has often been focused on the extremes — of pitch, duration, amplitude, perception, attention, memory, from the micro, minimal and miniature to the macro, maximum, and epic — but it has also always been just as much about the familiar, the middle, the ordinary. When Stravinsky reduced his written-out dynamics to piano and forte in the Octet, he was at once pointing to older repertoire for which such a binary pair sufficed but also indicating that there was a lot more music to be found within those familiar confines.  Or this: that sudden all-white-key-dominant-something-without-a-tonic-in-earshot-chord in Cage's Water Music.   Or this: those wonderful and wonderfully disconcerting post-Boulangerie pieces of Glass: Music in Parallel Motion, Music in Contrary Motion, Music in Fifths... all the way through Another Look at Harmony.