Getting a little tiny bit stressed for blog ideas, today I turned to saying the word "blog" a bunch of times at increasingly hysterical speeds, along with some cello tapping, slide whistle and the unavoidable floor tom. I'm not crazy about the sound of my own voice (I sound like a scrawny teenage boy, in my opinion) but after much processing I think it came out kind of cool. In the middle is me reading a passage from one of John Harbison's "Tanglewood Talks" I found in a random book ("Composers on Modern Musical Culture"). By "reading it" I mean substituting the word "blog" for every syllable. You'll get the idea. The quasi-speech is a bit like this thing, a piece by Robert Erickson that requires the trombonist to dress up as General MacArthur and play from a flag-festooned podium.
Text is in the comments, if you're interested.
"But we can't change our basic nature, only discover it, so that audiences and critics who take credit for our accessibility or bristle at our difficulty are assuming more control of our fates than we have. "He sold out," we often hear, as a comment about an accessible piece the hearer didn't like. But no one ever sold out! Instead, their character, their genes, their fatal pull emerges."
ReplyDelete- John Harbison, "Tanglewood Talks."