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SEQUENZA21/
340 W. 57th Street, 12B, New York, NY 10019

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Jerry Bowles
(212) 582-3791

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David Salvage

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Ian Moss
Lanier Sammons
Deborah Kravetz
(Philadelphia)
Eric C. Reda
(Chicago)
Christian Hertzog
(San Diego)
Jerry Zinser
(Los Angeles)

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Record companies, artists and publicists are invited to submit CDs to be considered for review. Send to: Jerry Bowles, Editor, Sequenza 21, 340 W. 57th Street, 12B, New York, NY 10019

Thursday, January 27, 2005
Considering George Rochberg and John Dewey

Just crawled out from under a 15-20-page research paper I had to write in two weeks, and I thought, by way of de-briefing, I'd blog about it.

I wrote about the aesthetics of George Rochberg and John Dewey. The two men share some interesting connections. Both formulated their theories under the shadow of scientificist trends in their respective fields: modernist composition and analytic philosophy. Rochberg believed that composers (like Xenakis, though he doesn't name names) who based their compositions on scientific formulas and methods broke with the basic human impulses that had sustained western music history for centuries; these composers abandoned a connection with humanity for a music of groundless experimentation. Dewey, on the other hand, rejected the analysts' tendency to freeze concepts into abstract dichotomies. Specifically, he had no use for the division between aesthetic and real experience. A work of art, for Dewey, is what the "product of art does with and in experience." In other words, art, in order to function, requires the medium of personal, human experience. The "everyday" and "aesthetic" are endpoints on the same existential continuum: the more intense one's perception of form, the more "aesthetic" the experience; the more weak one's perception of form, the more "everyday" one's experience.

Anyhow, if you haven't read Dewey's "Art as Experience," drop everything and buy yourself a copy; for me it's been one of those books that changes the way you see most everything. And, if you want to read how serialism and aleatoric music prefigure nuclear holocaust and the end of civilization (I'm not kidding), go to the NYPL and check out Rochberg's "The Aesthetics of Survival: A Composer's View on Twentieth-Century Music." It comes with an introduction by none other than William Bolcom. -- David Salvage
posted by David Salvage 1/27/2005



 
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