rouge's foam
a deadly secretion
no kidding.
stubbs seems like a proper lovely guy. i can see dan hancox in the audience.
stubbs seems like a proper lovely guy. i can see dan hancox in the audience.
It's a stupid premis for a book. People 'get' Rothko cos he's really easy. People don't get Stockhausen because he's really difficult.
It might be more fair to compare Stockhausen to another time-based art. Film?
It's a stupid premis for a book. People 'get' Rothko cos he's really easy. People don't get Stockhausen because he's really difficult.
It might be more fair to compare Stockhausen to another time-based art. Film?
Stan Brakhage would make a good equivalent. Interesting that at the Tate Modern, Maya Deren's 'Meshes of the Afternoon' and 'Un Chien Andalou' are looping constantly in little partially closed off rooms, and people wander in for a few minutes before moving on. Traditionally such a thing would seem somewhat unthinkable for music (even though music doesn't have clear representational narrative as much as film does) though it would be a great way to introduce people to Stockhausen and co - have a similar Stimmung room, for example, and I think it might be quite popular (given the generally liberal disposition of the Tate Modern and its audience). Stockhausen purists might hate it though, if they believed it was obligatory to sit still in intense concentration for over an hour.
Interesting that unconventional forms are worshipped in films like Memento and Fight Club which appear in the favourite films section of the facebook profiles of half of the people you go to college with (crucially cos there's a storyline basis for them I guess), but Bela Tarr, Tarkovsky etc are relatively unknown outside of the BFI.
I have to say, regardless of it's contents, this is one of the worst edited books I've ever read. Too many sentences make no grammatical sense whatsoever. Poor! Also an index and bibliography would have been nice. No?
Rant over...
This is a very interesting area I've been thinking about a lot. So many 'sad' songs are written in predominantly major chords - very surprising really. I'm not sure if it's the lyrical content that tips them that way, or whether it's an ambivalence about harmonies that goes deeper than the major=happy, minor=sad dichotomy.
On the other hand, music can also exhibit conspicuous indifference
to the situation, by progressing in a steady, undaunted,
and ineluctable manner: the scene takes place against this very
backdrop of "indifference." This juxtaposition of scene with
indifferent music has the effect not of freezing emotion but rather
of intensifying it, by inscribing it on a cosmic background. I call
this second kind of music anempathetic (with the privative a-). The
anempathetic impulse in the cinema produces those countless
musical bits from player pianos, celestas, music boxes, and dance
bands, whose studied frivolity and naivete reinforce the individual
emotion of the character and of the spectator, even as the
music pretends not to notice them.
To be sure, this effect of cosmic indifference was already present
in many operas, when emotional pitch was so high that it
froze characters into inaction, provoking a sort of psychotic
regression. Hence the famous operatic convention of madness,
with the dumb little music that a character repeats while rocking
back and forth, . . . But on the screen the anempathetic effect has
taken on such prominence that we have reason to consider it to be
intimately related to cinema's essence—its mechanical nature.
But is there an equivalent in music of the Kuleshov effect? Something that can bind together seemingly disparate fragments into a coherent whole and make them palatable and even revolutionary? Hang on, maybe that is Hip Hop. Goodnight.
Stockhausen's influence on contemporary music ? it matters not, his was just the most widely know electronische musik available, it relates little to those making beats of the future other than being electronic material.