Quora user Andrew Stein asks: Musicians: How do you deal with playing songs that have very monotonous parts? I’m going to use James Brown’s Sex Machine as an example. Don’t get me wrong, I love the song. However, the rhythm guitar seems to be nothing but 2 chords played over and over and over with …
Tag Archives: classical music
User Interface Design for Music Learning Software
Computers have revolutionized the composition, production and recording of music. However, they have not yet revolutionized music education. While a great deal of educational software exists, it mostly follows traditional teaching paradigms, offering ear training, flash cards and the like. Meanwhile, nearly all popular music is produced in part or in whole with software, yet …
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There’s joy in repetition
Susan McClary “Rap, Minimalism and Structures of Time in Late Twentieth-Century Culture.” in Audio Culture, Daniel Warner, ed, Continuum International Publishing Group, 2004, pp 289 – 298. This essay is the best piece of music writing I’ve read in quite a while. McClary articulates my personal ideology of music perfectly. Also, she quotes Prince! Here …
A modern classical fan responds
I’ve talked a lot of smack about high modernist music on this blog recently. Yesterday I got an email from a composer named Evan Kearney with some thoughtful reactions. Here’s what he had to say: [Y]ou wrote that you didn’t ‘get’ High Modernism (serialism, Webern, Pierre Boulez, Elliot Carter, etc.) and what it offered for …
Toward a better music curriculum
I love music grad school and am finding it extremely valuable, except for one part: the music theory requirement. In order to get my degree, I have to attain mastery of Western tonal harmony of the common practice era. I am not happy about it. This requirement requires a lot mastery of a lot of …
Who cares if you listen?
I pride myself on having big ears, on listening to everything I can and trying to find the beauty in it. I’ve learned to enjoy some aspect of just about every kind of music. Every kind except one: high modernist twentieth century classical music. I just can not deal with it, at all. But I’m …
Inside Morton Subotnick’s studio
Update: one of the photos below currently appears on Mort’s Wikipedia page. Pretty cool. The seminar I’ve been taking with Morton Subotnick is sadly drawing to a close. As part of the end of the semester, we were invited to Professor Subotnick’s home studio, a few blocks from NYU, to get a demonstration of the …
Originality in Digital Music
This post is longer and more formal than usual because it was my term paper for a class in the NYU Music Technology Program. Questions of authorship, ownership and originality surround all forms of music (and, indeed, all creative undertakings.) Nowhere are these questions more acute or more challenging than in digital music, where it …
What we talk about when we talk about Kanye West
Here’s an email conversation I’ve been having with my friend Greg Brown about Kanye West’s recent albums. Greg is a classical composer and performer with a much more avant-garde sensibility than mine. The exchange is lightly edited for clarity. Greg: I’ve been listening to 808s and Heartbreak and Twisted Fantasy. I’m really enjoying them. Far …
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Encoding emotion
Steven R. Livingstone, Ralf Muhlberger, Andrew R. Brown, and William F. Thompson. Changing Musical Emotion: A Computational Rule System for Modifying Score and Performance. Computer Music Journal, 34:1, pp. 41–64, Spring 2010. The authors present CMERS, “a Computational Music Emotion Rule System for the real-time control of musical emotion that modifies features at both the …