There's a really quiet spot some 150 yards from Amsterdam Centraal Train Station where my brother and I sat down to enjoy the sunny morning and to look at Sint-Nicolaaskerk, at the glittering water of the Oosterdok and at the train station. We both opened our sketchbooks, Cha to draw, and I to scribble down the melody that I had been humming without noticing.
Kopimi and CC0 are more or less the same so I can now have the same style of license button for all my posts. That's really the only lousy reason ;| Good luck to Kopimi, and bye.
--- Update: I removed the license button in every single post (it looked too cluttered). The twolicenses I'm using are at the bottom of the blog and in the tag-cloud.
Serialism is thematic unity on steroids. It's not the rule to "repeat a note only until all other notes have appeared" (which is also not true lol), but to make every note of the piece a step of the theme. Serialism was the evolutionary triumph of a old musical meme. Through the ages, the (evil) meme of Unity spread, (viciously) conquering new terrain. When the whole development of a movement came from the themes, the other movements became targets. When it was not enough to have all movements stemming from the principal theme, those pesky arpeggios and scales that could not be justified motivically had to go. And so on until the organizing powers of Tonality were also eaten up :( Serial music can be very good, very bad or anything in between. Just like any kind of music. What it is not is a break from the past, that would've been very silly of Schoenberg. Honestly, who wouldn't want to stand on the shoulders of all the giants that came before?
I've been studying this Suite in the last few days. It's a beautiful, beautiful work. I really admire Arnold Schoenberg and I love his music. This video contains the second and third movements of the suite. The second movement (0:00 - 4:44) is a Gavotte with a Musette as a kind of Trio, and the third (4:45 - 8:08) is an Intermezzo. The Musette (1:28 - 3:06) is my favorite part of the whole suite and my reason for posting this. I can just listen to it over and over and never get tired :) It sounds to me like a tiny music box, with lots of little metallic and crystalline sounds. Icy chords and delicate rhythms. Being a Musette it has a G always present, as a drone. I haven't been able to do this yet, but I decided this Musette will be my comeback whenever someone says serial music is all brains and no heart. As Schoenberg would say, heart and brain are one and the same thing.
I'm back from an incredible trip of -as put by my brother-"mental hedonism". A month of forgetting my studying and other responsibilities and just delivering myself to aesthetic experience. Instead of recording any Ephemeral Music in September and October I'll record the ideas I got during the trip and wrote down in my sketchbook. I'm trying to imitate a bit this journal style of presentation from Bashō's haiku books, simply because I love them. (And I highly recommend them to every one).
I'm a half English, half Mexican composer and accordionist.
Since my early teens I've been passionate about world and classical music. Both are bottomless pits of discovery, you jump in and you never stop finding new and beautiful stuff. I want to make sense of all the diverse music that truly moves me and find a common ground for it all in my own compositions.
I play in, and compose for, three bands: Kali Deryav (music from the Balkans, Turkey and the Caucasus), Ogham Ensemble (Celtic and Nordic music), and Tres Tristes Tangos (klezmer, tango and free improvisation).
You can email me or find me at
other places on the net.
