Wednesday, December 14, 2005
The Poietic Fallacy Fallacy
Any devoted reader of Richard Tarusking will recognize the phrase 'the poietic fallacy.' He explained the meaning of the word poeitic in an fairly recent article in The Musical Times in which he bashed Schoenberg and Allan Shawn's book about him (and Allan Shawn, for that matter, and anybody who claimed to like either of them): "The word 'poietic' comes from the field of semiotics, from which a now somewhat old fashioned tripartite model of analysis, first proposed by the French linguist Jean Molino, was long fashionable in musicology. Communications have senders and receivers. An analysis that is concerned with the sending of the message, hence with its devising, is a poietic analysis (from the Greek poiein, 'to make', but distinguished by the unusual spelling from 'poetic' to avoid confusion with the more ordinary usages.) An analysis that is concerned with the receiving is an esthesic analysis (from the Greek aisthesis, 'perception' similarly distinguished from 'aesthectic.')" (Richard Taruskin. from "Poetic Fallacy',The Musical Times, Spring 145, Vol. 145, No. 1886. pp. 10-11.)
Among the things (Fowler calls them sturdy indefensibles)usually said about modernist (twelve-tone, antonal, gnarly, ugly modern--use your favorite pejorative adjective) music and the people who write it are: composers of that kind of music don't care about what it sounds like--as opposed to how it's made--, don't care about pleasing/moving/whatever a listener, are only writing for each other, are practicing mannered serialism, are not trying to write music that people might actually enjoy, etc., etc., etc....
I was struck to read in the obituary of the late and very lamented Donald Martino in the Boston Globe an excerpt from an interview with him from 1980: "My music is not austere and academic. It is a fantasy that anyone writes academic music. People write music for other people; the intention is to warm the spirit. I write music for people to listen to, to react to; I want them to say, 'Hey, this is nice!'" This from an unreconstructed, dyed-in-the-wool Princetonian serialist. (And the target of one of Taruskin's nastiest and most notorious attacks.)
While I'm at let me also offer a little quote from another oft-reviled (around S21, anyway) modernist:
"...I wrote it with the idea of a practical performance in mind...I was a composer with training that had given me the idea of what a public could be, and had taught me to listen to the music I heard in my head the way a possible public might listen to it if it were played in a live situation...if a composer’s training is any good, he had the ability to hear his music as another person would hear it...” (Flawed Words and Stubborn Sounds: A Conversation With Elliott Carter by Allen Edwards, pp. 35-36).
I don't think I've ever met a composer who didn't think and wouldn't say something more or less along those lines. Anyway, Writing music, despite the fun of actually doing it and the charge of a good performance, is often times a difficult and discouraging proposition, and often times unrewarding except for the fun and that charge. Why would anybody do it, if not to try to do something that was meaningful to other people, and how else can s/he determine what that is except by going by what seems meaningful to her/him?
posted by Rodney Lister
7:40 AM
Monday, December 12, 2005
Applying Myself
Applying to grad school can bite me. Getting into grad school is great, and attending grad school even better. But the application process -- it can bite me. So yes, dear reader, that's why I've been absent -- what little free time I have has been devoured by application season. For those readers in positions of influence, I submit the following ways grad school applications could be improved:
1. Don't require the GRE. I'm glad there's no music GRE, but does the benefit of the regular GRE measure up to the costs to the applicants of studying for and then taking it? If you want a sense of my verbal ability or my ability to analyze and write about a position, ask me to submit an academic paper. Any why knowing that (a+b)(a+b)=a^2ab+b^2 should be a factor for a composition program is beyond me. If you care that I'm well rounded, ask me to tell you about my well-rounded-ness. If you care about math because it relates to music theory, ask me to do some music theory. And if you don't look at the GRE scores but the university requires you to ask for them, explain up front that I should take the test cold because the university wants it but that you don't use it as a factor in making admission decisions. Or if the GRE is in fact useful and considered by the committee, can somebody can tell me what I'm missing? And also what kinds of scores are considered good for music programs?
2. At least one school's application asked me about the academic acchievements of my parents. I can see how that might be relevant in applications to undergraduate programs, but not to graduate programs.
3. At least one school asks for a listing of math courses I've taken. I assume that the university put together an application suitable for all departments, and some programs find that information useful. How about special instructions for the graduate composition program letting me know what fields I can safely leave blank so that I don't have to decide between digging up information that I haven't kept track of and risking looking like I'm lazy. And doesn't all that information show up on my transcripts, anyway?
4. Most of the on-line applications don't leave enough space to enter information like job history and other open-ended short-answer questions and I end up making hideous abbreviations. Can somebody ask the folks at Embark.com to leave a little more room?
5. Speaking of Embark.com, can somebody ask them to have more fields available in your standard profile that automagically get inserted into every application? Most schools ask a lot of the same questions, and if you're filling out 10 or so applications the redundancy is a pain.
6. Most schools ask for approximately the same sort of portfolio -- generally three pieces with scores and recordings. But at least one school wanted three 10-minute-long excerpts from pieces with correspondingly excerpted scores. I appreciate that they are trying to make sure that they don't get 3 90-minutes works to wade through in their entirety, but not everybody writes music where 10 minute excerpts makes sense. I sure hope you don't mind that I just sent a few full-length shorter-than-10-minute pieces.
7. It would be great if the deadlines were the same. Many fields coordinate this nationally, but I'm looking at December 1, December 15, and a some early January deadlines as well. So either you make sure to be all done by the first deadline, and don't get the advantage of the later deadlines, or you do a rush job on the first one an only have the polished version.
8. Finally, most departmental pages I've visited could do a better job of presenting all the department-specific information you need to know for the application.
Okay, enough complaining for now. Anybody else out there share these complaints, or have anything to add? I have to go fill out some forms.
posted by Galen H. Brown
12:10 PM
Deciding How Long a Piece Should Be
Kyle Gann has a question for this august group: I've got a student who frets that none of her pieces end up longer than 3 minutes. She's not wild about my advice: I tell her that one of the first decisions I make about any piece is the approximate length, like an artist deciding how large a canvas he's going to paint on (and, once finished, I usually find that I've hit it within 30 seconds). I tell her if she knows in advance that she's got to fill 11 minutes, then she'll compose differently.
Her music tends to be non-sectional, with a variety of ideas introduced in the first ten measures. I tell her that to write longer she'll probably need to either, 1. plan on having contrasting sections, or 2. husband her ideas and introduce them more slowly. It does seem to me that there's kind of an inherent, natural ratio between length and the rate at which new material is introduced. But I'm afraid that may only be relevant to the (screwy) way I compose. People who compose more organically than I do may have a different method. Does anyone have any other advice? Do most composers have a length in mind before composing? (I don't think writing vocal music with a long text, which can boost length, is an option for this student at the moment.) Deciding on a length in advance just seems too arbitrary to her. To me, that's "romanticizing" the composing process and putting too much faith in inspiration, but everybody's process is different. Thoughts?
posted by Jerry Bowles
12:34 AM
|
