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Bookmarks for September 28th through October 1st [del.icio.us]

Bookmarks from September 28th through October 1st:[del.icio.us]

• Taruskin, vol.5, page 220 « The Rambler
  “I’ve just recently, and belatedly, started leafing through Richard Taruskin’s monumental History of Western Music, one of the musicological banner publications of 2005. Now, I’ve been an occasional fan of Taruskin’s work – his Grove article on Nationalism is flawed, but significant, and Defining Russia Musically was an inspirational book for me… There’s far too much to go into here about what winds me up about this book (how about the laughable Europhobia, in which European music after 1950 is merely a Cold War sideshow, and after 1960 non-existent), much of which will have been said elsewhere, but I just wanted to get my reaction to one page in particular off my chest. This is page 220 of volume 5, on which Taruskin is discussing (speculating on) the Cold War implications of Penderecki’s Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima. I fear, as an example of the lazy thought and downright falsehoods of this book, it may not be unique.”
• Music Apps Blur the Gap Between You and Clapton – NYTimes.com -
  “And this is where it gets back to being like a video game. Many musical apps offer the ability to record a track, then add layers on top of it. Doing this between disparate apps is impossible without external recording software, but a multi-instrumental app like Moocow’s Band gives novices the opportunity to record and edit tracks with drums, bass and guitar, and make sure it all sounds pretty good (even if one doesn’t know how to play a lick of music). It’s as much a game as Guitar Hero, only instead of trying to keep up with prerecorded music, the goal is to make music of one’s own.”
• About Last Night: MORE ABOUT “POPS” -
  “Q. Why Louis Armstrong? A. He was a genius, one of the true cultural giants of the twentieth century. America has never produced a more significant artist. I rank him right alongside Aaron Copland and Robert Frost and Frank Lloyd Wright. But unlike those men, Armstrong was also a great entertainer whose music was and is loved by ordinary people all over the world. In 1964 he actually knocked the Beatles off the top of the pop charts with his recording of “Hello, Dolly!” Aaron Copland never did that!”
• Five Years at Rose Hall for Wynton Marsalis’s Jazz at Lincoln Center – WSJ.com -
  “Outside New York, the jazz-club circuit is shrinking. Increasingly, jazz is presented at arts centers and universities. Within the jazz industry, some are troubled by Mr. Marsalis’s dominance in that arena. “What if all that funding was spread across the entire spectrum of jazz,” asked Scott Southard, whose International Music Network specializes in jazz, “instead of concentrated in one spot?” Then again, some credit Mr. Marsalis with engendering such support. For Randall Kline, who heads the San Francisco-based SFJazz, “Jazz at Lincoln Center was important in establishing legitimacy. Before, there were no models for jazz in the institutional world.”
• Jazz: The Music of Unemployment: The impossibility of the avant-garde -”The problem that follows is at least as old as mass media itself: how can there be an outside-of-the-mainstream, if anything can be absorbed and used by the mainstream? Once upon a time, there was this idea (probably hooey to begin with) that being a “true” artist was about staying a step ahead of whatever the latest cultural “norm” was. Our mission as artists (so we thought) was to figure out which components of a particular practice had been done to death, and then to innovate something new. We have that impulse toward innovation still, but what’s the upshot? It doesn’t even matter whether “everything has been done before” (the big complaint of young artists). When the raw power of anything can be instantly appropriated by the people who have the budgets, and the products to sell — recall Jim O’Rourke’s comments on “context” — there has to be some other reason to make art.”

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1. Bookmarks for September 6th through September 20th [del.icio.us]
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3. Bookmarks for August 9th through August 17th [del.icio.us]
4. Bookmarks for November 28th through December 3rd [del.icio.us]
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This entry was posted on Friday, October 2nd, 2009 at 2:45 pm and is filed under bookmarks and tagged with art, avant-guard, biography, blog/musings, context, controllerism, innovation, iphone, jazz, lincolncenter, louisarmstrong, mainstream, mass, media, medium, music, musicology, newgrove, news, obama, penderecki, politics, richardtaruskin, terryteachout, wyntonmarsalis. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.