By Christopher Fulkerson
The well-known aeronautical incidents known as "9/11" are but a footnote in a proper study of the musical science of counterpoint. On that day, America, and probably the whole world, was forcibly enrolled in counterpoint class. Though it was served a notice of academic delinquency, it has failed to show up for the first day of class.
Absolute popularity corrupts absolutely.
Most "popularity" is manufactured and enforced by interested parties.
The work has an eternal duty to re-create its creator.
The sense of realness found in good music from any era (what Adorno calls its "Truth Content") is an objectifiable, created thing, not an elusive, intuitive thing. It is based on certain technical features of well-composed music. It can be described, taught, and learned. MORE
The Soviets beat America over the head with their plowshares until the Americans gave up what little hold they had on modern Classical music. American popular music is throughout the world the chief weapon of the Dictatorship of the Proletariat, and the chief reason I oppose the - continuing! - Soviet regime is its music policy, which still controls the minds of Americans. At my most leftist moments, I never approach the policy of Socialist Realism in music. But make no mistake: I believe that corruption and populism are the worst characteristics of both Capitalism and Soviet Socialism, and neither the Left nor the Right in either system, current or former, perceivable or invisible, uses the arts properly.
In music, you never want just two violinists playing a single part together. You want only one, or at least three, because whenever two fail at playing a single part perfectly, and this is always, there is the question of who is correct, and who is wrong. With three or more, there is a group effort. This can be generalized into a philosophy of life.
Democracy provides Rock and Roll instead of justice.
Chinese music sounds like a parody of Chinese music.
Most of the last 25 years have been pretty dismal in terms of modernism. It's a good time to live in the past... in about the year 1988.
Being an American Classical composer is like being a European born in exile.
Attendance at a live performance is attendance at the Court of Awareness. What you can read at a live performance is limited only by your awareness.
"Minimalism" is a match struck in a library.
The first several times you hear them, the dissonances in a musical composition seem louder than they are. Composers: when writing a dissonance, don't mark its dynamic level up unless you have to. Listeners: when hearing a dissonance, realize that its apparent "loudness" might only be how you are perceiving it. Unless you are used to hearing dissonance, it is likely it will seem louder to you than it really is, and you are called upon to hear things as they really are, not as you think they are. These remarks could be generalized into a philosophy of life.
Popular music is a form of cattle ranching. Through popular, consumer culture the Marxist "Dictatorship of the Proletariat" has been effected in America, except that Capitalism has finessed the situation, so that the potential power to the people has been converted into a type of marketing resembling farming or ranching. Marxism predicted what conditions under which the people would stampede, and this is still possible, though unlikely, since the people are, in effect, born in the same stockyards in which they are slaughtered. There are harvests of opinion, and the people are given options, but they always "opt out" of their power. Once in a while the people may stampede, but that happens less and less; generally, they keep to the predictable behavior of farm animals.
For a singer, every technical problem is solved the same way: by singing legato. For a singer, learning a passage of music is the process of realizing how the legato works in that passage. An intelligent singer is constantly thinking about how the legato must be applied from moment to moment, as though it is forever being rediscovered, in the very act of performance. The phenomenon is the same for instrumentalists, but their performance is not as affected if they make an exception. Of all musicians, singers have the highest duty to keep the beauty continuous.
Good singing is to a public what good sex is to an individual, and only those singers whose production accords with the principals of Classical Italian singing are good singers.
Most of the time, dramatic characterization in choral sound, when it exists at all, is given illusorily, by the accompaniment, and not by the voices. As is usual and proper, the singers' main task is to sing legato (see the previous note).
Non-musicians are very impressed with Beethoven for having written music while almost completely deaf. But every composer is supposed to have this skill. Bach however dictated the Art of Fugue while blind. That is impressive.
Ezra Pound's metaphor that artists are "the antenae of the race" is obviously mixed, since people don't have antenae. But we are supposed to have eyes. When a society refuses to support a proper avant garde, it is poking its eyes out. I testify that at the voting polls, I have seen it make this motion in my time. For more about the vision of the Avant Garde, CLICK HERE.
Never write a work about a living political figure; or on a political issue that has not settled into history, preferably through both the issues being settled (one way or another) and the persons involved having passed on; or with conspicuously incomplete knowledge of the subject. Of late the most conspicuous violator of all three of these principals is John Adams, the most industrial-strength lowbrow in America, who wrote Nixon in China while the former president was still alive; wrote an opera on Near Eastern issues that are still not settled; and wrote an opera about the development of the atomic bomb in which no mention is made of the equivalent Japanese biological warfare program, which only lacked a delivery system to have decimated populations on the American West Coast, thus obviating any chance Mr. Adams' opera would ever have had to come into existence. For more about minimalism, Mr. Adams' chosen idiom, CLICK HERE.
Never demonize someone's religion, unless the connection is very clear (for example, it might be OK to demonize a self-avowedly Satanic cult - if you really want to do them the favor), or specific to the individuals involved (for example, a particular priest who violates his vows would not reflect on his faith).
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