Many thanks to everyone who has responded to my request for help to get me to the International Conference on Music Perception and Cognition at the University of Seoul, Korea this August to present my work on Tonal Refraction.
Please feel free to further this enterprise: www.tonalrefraction.com
Thank you.
Tuesday, April 8, 2014
In Praise of Boredom
If it were not for boredom we probably would not have the Early Music scene, which has so enlightened us on so many musical essentials.
The connection between the two may not seem obvious but it is implicit in the post of a few days ago on minuets coming back into style. Back in the day -- well, not THAT far back, actually -- three beats to the bar on paper was what you were expected to play and hear. The notion of variation within meters was virtually non-existent. Then a number of people must have protested: Enough! Surely Handel, Haydn, etc. could not have been that dull!
And so was born a renewed curiosity in the phenomenon of rhetoric, or the inability to produce a literal repeat of any musical element.
The connection between the two may not seem obvious but it is implicit in the post of a few days ago on minuets coming back into style. Back in the day -- well, not THAT far back, actually -- three beats to the bar on paper was what you were expected to play and hear. The notion of variation within meters was virtually non-existent. Then a number of people must have protested: Enough! Surely Handel, Haydn, etc. could not have been that dull!
And so was born a renewed curiosity in the phenomenon of rhetoric, or the inability to produce a literal repeat of any musical element.
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