Trip Journal: 14 August 2010 "Sint-Nicolaaskerk"

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.

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Replaced Kopimi for Creative Commons Zero in Ephemeral Music and Trip Journal

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.

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Update: I removed the license button in every single post (it looked too cluttered). The two licenses I'm using are at the bottom of the blog and in the tag-cloud.

Serialism is thematic unity on steroids

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?