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from
Ron Thomas:
We
(or those like me, I should say)
make art because we yearn to discover
forms of our own devising, forms
which come to life by our own hands.
A man catches fish because he understands
the ways and habits of the fish.
A composer 'catches' music
because he understands the ways
and habits of music. Unlike the
fisherman, I can also invent
the fish......
Discontinuity. Free
association. Associative-chains.
Montage. Overlapping and Interactive
events. Tune-lists. Interlocking-patterns.
Non-endings. Hyperbaton, the violation
of an expected order of things,
the second phrase ahead of the
first, e.g., anaphora, the repetition
of an idea at the beginning of
phrases, ellipsis, the omission
of parts known to be necessary
to the whole, anacoluton, abandoning
one type of construction, taking
up unexpectedly another, collage,
montage, assemblage, etc. Tediousness,
a note repeats, it goes nowhere,
mediocrity; a passage of no particular
importance, sociology; quotations,
correspondences with internal reality;
passages with no transitions, patchwork,
fragment-collections, motifs, genre-schemes,
scraps, pieces, these interwoven,
entangled densities deployed to
re-present the complex, multiple
ambiguities of experiential reality.
inspired by Donald
Tovey:
A work of art, in
as far as its purpose is unmixed,
is a single coherent whole, and
as such expresses our faith in
the possibility of wholeness and
coherence. This conception is a
first step towards the view that
artistic wholeness or perfection
is a type of infinity. Could it be
that "infinity" is a
word Tovey uses to represent "timelessness" or
transcending space-time restrictions?
from Ron Thomas:
The
multi-level character of consciousness
is representable in music because
polyphonic correlatives are possible.
Again, the key word is PLURALITY
OF ASSOCIATIONS. Tonalities (Centralities,
or points-of-focus) are deployed
polyphonically in a flexible, always-redefinable
musical space. A tone (any tone)
is potentially a Sound-Center.
Around it a network of 'composed
(i.e. artificial) overtones' create
a tone-aggregate which may function
as a Mode (melodic configurations
deriving from and embellishing
this aggregate). When a 'Central-Tone'
remains fixed while surrounding
tones change, luminous kaleidoscopic
variations can be achieved. (Tone-Color,
then, may be just as structural
as it could be ornamental.)
inspired by
Northrop Frye's Anatomy of Criticism:
"Only one organizing
principle has so far been discovered
in literature, and in music too,
the principle of chronology. This
supplies the magic word 'tradition'
which means that when we see the
miscellaneous pile strung out along
a chronological line, some coherence
is given it by sheer sequence."
This "chronological fetish" is
the essential presupposition of
all modern avant-gardism. A sequential
basis of organization is an obvious
habit of mind when considering the
past. "But even tradition does
not answer all our questions. 'Total
music history' gives us a glimpse
of the possibility of seeing music
as a complexification of a relatively
restricted and simple group of formulas
that can be studied in the oldest
examples of that history. We next
realize that the relation of later
examples of this history is by no
means purely one of complication,
as we find the older formulas reappearing
in the greatest classics, in fact
there seems to be a tendency on the
part of the great classics to revert
to them." Perhaps his most influential
statement for me is that the maserpiece
always displays an enormous number
of converging patterns of significance.
This wonderful phrase adds support
to my "school" of "Associative
Pluralism" (!)
from Ron Thomas:
A
credo (derived from ideas of
Frederick Chopin: To stand apart
from the humorless and pretentiously
mystical debates and post-modernist
battles of western art, and to
abide instead in my own habits
of art and the spirit. --To
help myself abundantly to all the
laws of liberty. To prefer the
rare and the unfinished and not
great applause. --To construct
my work through dynamic points
of reference around which free
associations are arranged in steadily
settled designs. --To attain
to the holding of the very big
in the very little.
Chopin on Chopin....
telling little musical stories.......
peopling the darkness with a conclave
of fairies....
incomplete sketches.......
partial closure.......
the empty silences: doorways to imaginary
avenues for the mind of the listener.......
For me, the disciplines
of musical composition such as,
melodic writing, knowledge of harmonic
principles, form and continuity,
etc. exist for the purpose of treating
the musical experience as a dramatic
medium. Dramatic in its theatrical
and literary sense. The materials
of sustained musical expression
are controlled by a sense of the
inner narrative associated with
the sounds in my mind. However,
be sure of this ... it
is an intrinsic drama in the music
itself not a semi-realistic "added
on" or quasi-literary programmatic
attachment.
Quotes:
"... If you
are a professional ... music also
brings suffering and a sense of
your own insignificance. It's not
always comfortable to be one on
one with it....
--George Balanchine
"Art may be
beauty but it is not an easy beauty."
--Jacques Barzun
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