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

PostClassic

Kyle Gann on music after the fact

A Necessity Outlived

This is a rather idle comment, so don’t take it too seriously and get all outraged. I’m sitting here putting in, and fixing, footnotes in my book. I try to put them in as I’m first writing, but sometimes I write one from memory and don’t pause to look it up; or I find it in another book and don’t have the original book to look it up in; or I’m quoting something I had used in a less scholarly publication; or I’m just on a tear and don’t want to pause for footnotes. So I’m making a final pass, and I see an incomplete footnote. It’s from a book I already returned to the library. So I put the phrase in Google, and it takes me to a page of that book in Google Books, and I put in the page number. The next footnote is from a book that’s sitting on my piano, but it’s six feet away, and I’m comfortable in my Adirondack chair with my cigar. So I put the phrase in Google, and it takes me to Google Books and I get the page number and publication information. And then I start imagining footnotes I’d like to put in. Like, I had wanted to quote Richard Strauss’s boast that he could represent a fork in music, but I’d never really read that, I only heard it. So I Google “Richard Strauss” + fork, and bang!, fourth try, there it is in Brian Gilliam, The Life of Richard Strauss (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), p. 81. And it’s even better: Strauss claimed that he could differentiate between a fork and a knife in his music. And since I’ve looked up a hell of a lot of published footnotes myself lately, it occurs to me that it would be simpler for my reader to put the phrase in Google himself and find where I quoted it from than it would for him to note the chapter and page number he’s in and leaf through the footnote section in the back of the book until he finds the right footnote number.

So remind me: why, in the age of the internet, are we still using footnotes?

 

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