• Home
  • About
    • What’s going on here
    • Kyle Gann
    • Contact
  • AJBlogs
  • ArtsJournal

PostClassic

Kyle Gann on music after the fact

Score-Reading at Concerts

I gave a little cheer this morning reading my friend Greg Sandow, confirming something I absolutely believe:

What about serious musical scholars, who sit there [at concerts] reading scores? Now, I — speaking now as a musician, though not all musicians would agree with me — think that’s one of the worst ways to listen to music. You notice the trees, not the forest. You police the composition (and, above all, the performance), but you don’t truly hear it. You notice details, but you miss both the flow of the composition, and the sheer taste and impact of the sound.

Hooray again! Pompous Uptown critics who think Elliott Carter is the greatest thing since silced bread look down their noses at us critics who don’t read scores at concerts, but I used to do it, and I learned that afterward I was able to point to dozens of notes that were played wrong, but had completely missed the emotional impact of the performance, and had nothing to report that a non-musicologist would be interested in. In fact, I think it was the practice of score-reading during concerts among certain critics that fostered a kind of specious enthusiasm for 12-tone music; the stuff could be fascinating to watch, and you didn’t want to hear the emotional impact anyway. Now I’ll look at a score before a performance and again afterward, but never during, and I wouldn’t trust the judgment of any critic who listened to a work with his face buried in the score.

On the other hand, Greg’s plumping for a hand-held device called the Concert Companion, which can provide rolling program notes during a concert, keyed to events in the music. As a composer, if I knew that such a device was going to be applied to a new work of mine, I would meticulously avoid writing into the piece any event that could be described. (Hmm, sounds like the way I’m composing lately anyway.)

What’s going on here

So classical music is dead, they say. Well, well. This blog will set out to consider that dubious factoid with equanimity, if not downright enthusiasm [More]

Kyle Gann's Home Page More than you ever wanted to know about me at www.kylegann.com

PostClassic Radio The radio station that goes with the blog, all postclassical music, all the time; see the playlist at kylegann.com.

Recent archives for this blog

Archives

Sites to See

American Mavericks - the Minnesota Public radio program about American music (scripted by Kyle Gann with Tom Voegeli)

Kalvos & Damian's New Music Bazaar - a cornucopia of music, interviews, information by, with, and on hundreds of intriguing composers who are not the Usual Suspects

Iridian Radio - an intelligently mellow new-music station

New Music Box - the premiere site for keeping up with what American composers are doing and thinking

The Rest Is Noise - The fine blog of critic Alex Ross

William Duckworth's Cathedral - the first interactive web composition and home page of a great postminimalist composer

Mikel Rouse's Home Page - the greatest opera composer of my generation

Eve Beglarian's Home Page- great Downtown composer

David Doty's Just Intonation site

Erling Wold's Web Site - a fine San Francisco composer of deceptively simple-seeming music, and a model web site

The Dane Rudhyar Archive - the complete site for the music, poetry, painting, and ideas of a greatly underrated composer who became America's greatest astrologer

Utopian Turtletop, John Shaw's thoughtful blog about new music and other issues

Return to top of page

an ArtsJournal blog

This blog published under a Creative Commons license