Th idea of this page is a place to state some short stray ideas in company with other such ideas that seems to demand some place to live. thus this page can and will be updated without notice. it looks like new post are no longer possible here so this might be the last page by default even thugh much of the material is older
1. When composing if the thought of another composer enters and pulls my music in a particular direction, I pause and wait for an alternative. Otherwise accept that one has been tricked into a homage.
2. There has always been this idea that microtones are successful when everyone will use them. There is still a lot of great music in 12 and frankly i listen to more than the present state of microtones. But if we look at other movements the best music was done when not everyone did it, but when it attracted the best. you can see this in serialism . when just about every composer was a serialist less of importance seemed to result. In fact when every one was doing it was more an ending of a movement more than a beginning.
3. In the context of experimentation , experimenting does not mean people doing the same exact experiments using the same technique, that is fashion. the more different ways something is approach the better, each act then contributes to expanding music as opposed to confining it. So at a certain point it is better if people do not disclose how they do what they do. Often more is accomplished by people imagining what others do. misunderstanding . Ligeti commented that what of western music he heard in Hungary turned out to be so mixed in with radio distortion and that is what lead him into writing his series of texural pieces. for myself i heard that La Monte Young wrote pieces on one chord and i assumed he played with different inversions. I had no access to any recordings to know different but i ended up do a series of pieces on different inversions of a single chord. Frederic Rzewski thought a big problems was that composers were too aware what other composers are doing, thus distracting them from their own direction.
4. If there now a war on diversity, then maybe minimalism needs to be set aside for the time being. Its weakness is that it very nature promotes a lack of diversity thus supporting the factions who are truly not on our side.
