Tuesday 2 February 2010

Viva il Papa

The trouble with dissent is that dissenters are very very bossy and they don't like silence, because we are all supposed to be listening to them.

Once you ignore legitimate authority, who do you believe? How do you decide what to do? How can the big questions get different answers in 2010 compared to 1510, 1010, 510...if we are dealing with eternity?

Random thought of the day 2

Have you noticed how modernist music is totally agin melody?
I wrote an essay on one of my finals papers on 'Melody in Boulez and Stockhausen,' where I basically went through their respective outputs describing the characteristics of melody and how their music does not possess them.

Schoenberg for all his serialism wrote some excellent books on composition and knew how to write a good tune. He just chose not to.

Where do we find melody par excellence? Plainsong. Funny that. Seems to be hardwired into human beings after all.

2 comments:

Delia said...

First sentence got it in one!

Patricius said...

"modernist music is totally agin melody"
I think melody is the intelligible part of music. It speaks to us directly. Modernists, however, appreciate that - as Oscar Wilde put it - "to be intelligible is to be found out" !