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Who Cares If You Don't Listen?
Adventurous new music reaches wide audiences and they applaud it, so this is a good time to sort out rhetorical falsehoods from rhetorical flourishes in the great debate over new music.
By Alan Fletcher
Published: 5/7/2008
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New Destinations, New Identifications: A Dutch Pianist Setting Sail to the World of American Music
While openness has only lately started to trickle slowly through the creative minds of the European musical establishment, it seems to have been a characteristic element of American repertoire from the beginning.
By Ralph van Raat
Published: 3/26/2008
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How Wagner Birthed a Musical Ungulate
During Parsifal, in a coup de théâtre, virtually the entire libretto of Our Giraffe snapped into my head.
By Charles Flowers
Published: 3/12/2008
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Rhetorical Encore
What kind of music could benefit from repeated performance on the same program?
By Richard Guérin
Published: 2/6/2008
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A Subtle Analysis of Composer-Performer Resentment
The most predictable, preposterous, despicable absurdity of the "classical" performer, confronted with new work, is to say "Why can't you just be more like this?" gesturing to Haydn Strinq Quartets, or Beethoven Symphonies, or Debussy Preludes.
By Jeremy Denk
Published: 1/30/2008
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The Arbiters of Doom
The modernist presumption that audiences exert a negative and coercive effect on our artistic options is often an inversion of the truth.
By Scott Johnson
Published: 12/26/2007
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Classical Music: Alive and Kicking
I doubt that rejection of modernism is what drove Baby Boomers away from classical music; they weren't there in the first place. Part of their act of rebellion was to put a minus sign on anything their parents found important and classical music was seen as part of the conformity and stuffiness of the middle class life they rejected.
By Roger Rudenstein
Published: 12/26/2007
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The Audience is Not the Only Arbiter
What is the purpose of the "gift" if the composer doesn't follow his muse?
By William Kraft
Published: 12/5/2007
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IV: The Phantom Tonic
The subdominant is a mystery: no matter how high one goes in the harmonic series, a fundamental pitch will not produce a perfect fourth above the fundamental. Yet, every standard Western scale and church mode except the Lydian contains it.
By Kenneth LaFave
Published: 10/17/2007
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Street Cred: Non-Composers Teaching Composition—A Personal Perspective
The argument that, unless one is prepared to get off the critic's chair and get one's own hands dirty, there is always going to be a dimension missing in one's composition teaching is probably true enough, though I don't think it's a fatal flaw.
By Richard Toop
Published: 9/12/2007
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