Blogger Book Club II: The Dragon Appears

That was very helpful. I hear what Hickey's saying about those various genres and modes, with the possible exception of the Rolling Stones reference -- I suppose that was the case when the Stones played (revolutionary then, background music for car advertisements now), but even then I think it had more to do with their tone, temperament, and attitude than with the specific chord structure, which certainly wasn't unusual, let alone particularly associated with them.

Per Amanda's comment on the previous thread, jazz as it was coming into its own certainly spoke to and of a secondary citizenship.

As for "pattern and pulse," I'm not sure what composers Hickey's talking about. Anyone who digs the pattern and pulse in "Heart of Glass" will find something to love in Philip Glass.

I agree with Marc—Hickey needs to go to more concerts. And as everyone who looks to put down modernist music does, he really means "easily perceptible pattern and regular pulse". Some of us like the irrational grooves, too. (Contemporary critics of my acquaintance, of course, sneer at modernism. They should listen to "Eonta," which rocks harder than the Stones ever did.)

Hickey's examples circle back to yesterday's "abstract" music back-and-forth. I wouldn't advocate for a hard divide between programmatic and absolute—no art is created in a vacuum—but I do think that there's a continuum, that some musics more readily advertise their extra-musical cultural overtones. (In Hickey's formulation, some composers are more eager than others to create music that's likely to acquire cultural meanings.) Let me try this on for size: as music becomes more "abstract," the marginality it stands in relation to becomes more universal—that question becomes less "what are this society's cultural norms?" than "what is music, anyway?"

I think Hickey is talking about the composers he knows personally, at the Univ. of Nevada perhaps.

Or... Maybe he wasn't referring to Blondie's "Heart of Glass" but a rare album of love songs by Philip Glass.

Matthew's definitely on to something on the growing universality of a piece of music gaining ground the more abstract it can be - look at the history of the symphony. It became a canvas (sort of) for people to attach any message to they wanted. Mark Evan Bonds wrote an entire book on it (Music as Thought) and a college music education usually includes some sort of class on the thoughts that were thought to be included in the course of a symphony, and its formal unity, etc. At the same time, though, it's lack of a clear message untied to any words put on it by its creator seems to take away any revolutionary or breaking-of-social-codes its creator could have intended.

There's a Charles Rosen essay in the New York Review from a couple months back where he says that the tonality used by today's American neo-Romantics is so different than that of Mozart, et al, as to constitute a different language. This is, he says, because they don't use functional tonality, and the listener therefore has a different sort of argument to follow today than in Mozart's day. I wonder what Hickey would say to that? Should artists go back to painting in the style of Caravaggio? (I don't have the book in front of me right now or else I'd check. It's probably in one of the hundreds of underlined passages.)

This aside: I think the non-content approach I am advocating offers the most rational route to explaining the imperial nature of formal innovation----its tendency to transform instrumentalities like the amplifier, the turntable and the recording device into instruments unto themselves. This from my hero Link Ray: “Distortion means loud and aggressive, so the music doesn’t have to be loud and aggressive to give that meaning.” Just a thought with nowhere to go.

Best, Dave