Essays Vin Essays Vin

You Have The Power To Kill Them There’s Nothing Left To Think About Only How To Do It

What is New Music Bullshit, you might ask?

New Music Bullshit is music that is based on the premise that you, the listener, couldn’t possibly understand what the fuck you just heard. Yes, you hear pitches, noises, rhythms, silences, timbres, and lots of other arcane shit. You really want to make sense of it, and like all the other befuddled patrons around you, you page relentlessly through your program looking for a plausible explanation, any miniscule fact…

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Composing Notes Vin Composing Notes Vin

The Michael Jackson Diaries: On Composing "The Facts and Dreams of the World According to Michael Jackson"

In the car listening to whatever bullshit comes on my iPod. Somewhere between Closing Time and Come On Eileen I start thinking about Damien Hirst's Medicine Cabinets.  I remember looking at images of them and being drawn to the directness of the subject matter and the simplicity of how boxes and bottles of various mundane pharmaceuticals were arranged within the cabinetry.  White and colors. Simply put, he hung the shelving that you would see in pharmacies on the wall and voila, art…

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Essays Vincent Calianno Essays Vincent Calianno

Generating Resonance and Illusions of Polyphony Using Methods of Heterophonic Diffusion (DMA Thesis)

In a series of lectures given by Anton Webern in the 1930’s, entitled “The Path to New Music” and “The Path to Twelve-Tone Music,” Webern offers a teleological perspective of musical history which places twelve-tone music at its apex. He points to the fact that with the emergence and flourishing of polyphony in the late Middle Ages, a new musical space had opened up where the importance of the single voice had been replaced by homogeneous contra- puntal textures. As he continues to suggest, this polyphonic writing came to its peak in the works of J. S. Bach, before new ideas about accompaniment and melody emerged in the Classical era.

However, it was with the advent of twelve-tone music in the twentieth-century that melodic and harmonic parameters became synthesized in the design of the row. It is in this point of musical evolution where Webern found himself, a musical space where he could “sum up whole ideas in a single part, as an independent melody.”

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