Music

Esto es un ensayo en desarollo, basado en una presentacion que hice en SEM 2012. Les agradezco cualquier comentario, pregunta o sugerencia.

This is a work in progress based on a paper I delivered at SEM 2012. I welcome any comments, questions or suggestions.

This article narrates the collaborative composition of a song in response to the fatal repression of protests in Cali, Colombia, in 2021, It simultaneously provides an analysis of both the final recording and the mediated in- teractions of the people involved in its creation. I argue that such online musical collaboration can be a fitting re- sponse to situations in which direct protest may put par- ticipants at risk. The musical sounds of the song, incor- porating elements from participatory practices, are not to be understood simply as representing some possible collaborative ethos. Rather, they are direct evidence of the collaboration among participants, as well as solidar- ity and empathy with those directly involved in protest and the victims of its repression.

This talk was the first academic presentation deriving from an ongoing study of the musical settings of John McCrae's WWI poem, "In Flanders Fields." I have added footnotes and corrected a few minor errors, but otherwise the text is as I delivered it, even though the research has advanced substantially since then.

After Yeats is not a score for performance but rather a method for determining a score; it extends W. B. Yeats’s practice of poetic declamation to languages other than English. After Yeats describes a collaboration between a performer, who declaims a Yeats poem in translation, self-accompanied by a plucked string instrument, and a composer, who works at a remove to observe and amplify the implications of the declamation.

A contextual analysis of three compositions—One anti-personnel type-CBU bomb . . . by Philip Corner, ‘Majority’ by Charles Ives, and Lecture on the Weather by John Cage— reveals that each is ‘impossible’. Each manifests its impossibility in a different domain: moral, physical and perceptual. But the three scores were each resituated by comments made by the composers, independent of the scores; and these comments make these ‘experimental’ works viable as expressions of aspiration rather than mere achievements.

Chapter 6 in _Silence, Music, Silent Music_, ed. Nicky Losseff and Jenny Doctor (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate Publishing, 2007), in (slightly corrected) proof form. Writings and compositions by John Cage and Charles Ives are examined from a perspective grounded in the philosophy of William James.  Particular attention is given to Ives’s two “contemplations” on Central Park and Unanswered Questions; to Cage’s account of silences in his earlier music, of which Experiences II and the Sonatas and Interludes are taken as examples; and to the genesis of the “silent piece” and its relation to Cage’s experience in the anechoic chamber.  Figures that indirectly link Cage with James, such as Gertrude Stein and Daisetz Suzuki, are also discussed.

John Cage is universally associated with the phrase experimental music. But what did that phrase mean, for Cage and for Cage's predecessors? I begin with Cage and Lejaren Hiller, both writing important texts on ‘experimental music’ in 1959. From there, I trace the phrase backwards, eventually reaching Émile Zola, Gertrude Stein, and William James. A final section traces the phrase forward to Cage and Hiller’s collaboration on HPSCHD (1969).

A handout prepared for the presentation and panel discussion "How to Improve the World (Matters Could Hardly Be Worse)" at the Society for American Music international conference, 25 March 2017. I spoke ex tempore, using this handout as a basis.

This paper, given at the "Performing Indeterminacy" conference at the University of Leeds on 1 July 2017, is very much a work in progress. It was motivated, as was much of my life in 2017, by my revulsion at the state of political thinking (indeed, at the utter _lack_ of political thinking) in the United States at the time. I intended to expand this to continue a series of "In re" publications, several of which can be seen below. At this point, however, I think it is unlikely that it will be shaped into a separate, published article. The threads set out here will instead be woven into a larger study, I hope.

This article appeared in _Perspectives of New Music_ 31:2 (Summer 1993). Since then it has become clear from writings about Cage's compositional methods that I had made incorrect inferences about the actual mechanics used in making _Hymns and Variations_. However, I believe the general principles, the analytical method, and the aesthetic implications are still valid.