Articles from my Blogs - Music first
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Articles about general musical topics |
A Word Please. About the fact that the few words that do appear in musical scores tend to be regarded as names, whether they really are or not.
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Sacred Texts. This is a general article - setting out my basic position as it applies both to music and to philosophy. This will feed into articles about both religion and reverence for scores.
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Faithful to the Score. It is a common assumption that musicians, especially conductors, are humble, self-abasing original-intent priests. Does that work?
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Larger essay about the Aesthetics of Music. Conjectures about what music is, and how it works. This is mainly philosophical, with some speculative psychology. It is the text of a presentation I gave to the Usability Professionals Association, an organization mainly concerned with computer software design, in Phoenix. I shall be returning to their conference in Denver this year to present a paper on "Music and the narrative basis of everything." I shall post that presentation on this web site once it has been delivered.
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About specific musical problems
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Beethoven's finales. The first article about the "finale problem" that had troubled most composers of symphonies ever since symphonies got more serious that being mere entertainment. This starts out be mentioning Bruckner's unintended solution.
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Beethoven's finales part 2. In which I continue discussing different approaches, especially by a comparison of the 5th and the 6th symphonies.
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About specific composers and compositions.
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Mahler's 6th Symphony. the danger of assuming the mood of a piece a "priori"
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Parsifal. Wagner said he composed by instinct. He was also an intellectual who had very clear ideas as to what his music was about. I think the instinct won, and he may have been mistaken about the central theme of this very strange opera. This is a serious essay, so don't be put off my the flippant start.
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Schoenberg. What a puzzle! He recedes into the past, but remains forever forcefully modernistic.
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Mozart. Some very dangerous thoughts that I probably should not utter.
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Britten's War Requiem. This is the first of two articles. This one is how I used to feel, but I have now completely recanted why old naive response. The second article, in which I reveal the TRUE hidden message behind the War Requiem should be posted in a few days.
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Matters other than music
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Reflections on the Devastation of New Orleans |
Trying to understand as a narrative. Considering being glued to the TV, and what we hope to gain from that.
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The heritage of slavery. Later reflections, concluding that this terrible thing was not so much a failure of specific people at a specific time, but the outcome of the whole history of the area.
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Impatience with so-called Intelligent Design |
Darwinism was intelligently designed. My first shot at refutation. Too ambivalent.
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Creationism gets science backwards. A later counter-argument. A bit technical, perhaps, but a stronger argument, I think. I've got a third one coming, based on the logical inconsistency of the whole idea of an omnipotent God micromanaging specific details in history.
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Miscellaneous Matters |
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