mulberry road

16:22 21st Mar 2013

Notes: 225

Tags: music S4MU Carnegie Hall listening

Knowing facts about music isn’t the same as knowing how to listen. Knowing the theory or the structure behind music doesn’t mean you know how to listen well. Listening is an art into itself.

Spring 4 Music University (S4MU) from Carnegie Hall offers a a new free online course that teaches you how to listen to and enjoy orchestras. Complement with this wonderful vintage guide to the art of listening.

(↬ Open Culture)

12:20 1st May 2012

Tags: art Fluxus poetry music

In our time aesthetic precincts have to be secured in order to guarantee an arena in which violations or outrages might register. Futurism’s provocations would never find front-page billing nowadays.

—

CONCEPTUAL WRITING WAS INTRIGUING AND PROVOCATIVE: Harriet the Blog : The Poetry Foundation

Johanna Drucker is quoted at length here, on conceptual writing (on which the Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetics is silent). I’ve been reading about here because Ampersand Duck has put her blog into a networked form and I’m finally catching up with her report on the Impact 7 conference, where she spoke to Drucker about Fluxus on Skype.

11:22

Notes: 14

Reblogged from jasonweinberger

Tags: music

image: Download

jasonweinberger:

In 1958 Dick Cole snapped this shot of Buddy Holly right here in Waterloo, Iowa. We’re thrilled to have Dick joining us at rehearsal tonight to photograph our preparations for tomorrow’s Buddy Holly tribute shows.

[via wcfsymphony]

13:58 22nd Apr 2012

Tags: poetry music

I want to thank the court, in the person of your honour,” Cohen told an LA county superior court judge, “for the cordial, even-handed and elegant manner in which these proceedings have unfolded. It was a privilege and an education to testify in this courtroom.

— hi spirits: Leonard Cohen’s poetic thanks as former manager and lover is jailed for harassment

16:33 21st Nov 2011

Tags: music

aaah, yesterday…

According to Allen Barra at Bookforum:

…a time when the English-speaking world took its popular music very seriously. A somber British television reporter put it in perspective when Paul McCartney announced he was leaving the Beatles: “The event is so momentous that historians may mark it as a landmark in the decline of the British Empire.”

19:44 29th Aug 2011

Tags: music writing

The Medusa vs. The Odalisque: The Decemberists play Eschaton

Amusing and helpful literary appraisal of the Decemberists’ latest video from James Ley.

13:39 31st Mar 2011

Notes: 45

Reblogged from the-feature

Tags: music

Wall of Sound - from n+1 mag, republished in Slate. By Niki Saval

The social world of opera-going may be headed the way of polar bears and ice caps, but society hasn’t disappeared. A hierarchical social world has managed to absorb the omnipresence of music pretty effortlessly. You can see this in the violent intragenre squabbling that animates indie rock circles, and in the savage takedowns of avant-garde opera performances in art-music magazines. Meanwhile the proliferation of genre names represents an ever finer process of social differentiation, each genre’s acolytes determining (as Serge Gainsbourg put it) qui est “in,” qui est “out.” The rise of generic distinctions has lately reached a climax of absurdity, such that we can name off the top of our heads: house, witch house, dub, dubstep, hardstep, dancehall, dance-floor, punk, post-punk, noise, “Noise,” new wave, nu wave, No Wave, emo, post-emo, hip-hop, conscious hip-hop, alternative hip- hop, jazz hip-hop, hardcore hip-hop, nerd-core hip-hop, Christian hip-hop, crunk, crunkcore, metal, doom metal, black metal, speed metal, thrash metal, death metal, Christian death metal, and, of course, shoe-gazing, among others. (Meanwhile, 1,000 years of European art music is filed under “classical.”) Some people listen to some of these; others, to only one; and others still, to nearly all. And this accomplishes a lot of handy social sorting, especially among the young, whenever music is talked about or played so that more than one person can hear it.

22:32 14th Jan 2011

Tags: music

found while rrrrramblin'

thanks to Archive and Conquer for the link.

15:06 19th Nov 2010

Tags: music

In fact, music is never so powerful as when it breaks down the self’s defenses. John Cage once defined it as the art of listening to other people, and it’s an idea worth living by. From time to time, subject yourself to a sound that seems to lie outside your sympathy or understanding. Investigate a genre that you think you hate. Go to a concert where you recognize the names of none of the composers. Attend an evening of traditional melodies from a country you can’t easily find on a map. If you don’t get it, read something on the Internet, wait a day or a year, and listen again. From time to time, the alien will suddenly become second nature, and you will feel a shade more free.

—

The School of Life : Alex Ross on Music

…this is a really good blog, Lisa D, and thanks for the heads-up.

I was brave enough to noodle on in the comments box. OW. Did I really do that?