Variations on a Theme

The Sounds of Now: Tristan Murail and Sounding Stasis

[2.Jul.08] :. What happens to the ear when it receives musical sound? Do we hear "our" music as music and the rest as noise?

The Practicality of the Impossible: John Cage and the Freeman Etudes

[2.May.08] :. John Cage replaces the comforting order of the cosmos with the recalcitrant, indecipherable organization of a part of the universe. Each sound, radically set off from the others, demands that we hear it in isolation.

Every Good Boy Does Fine

[21.Feb.08] :. Required to take a music class in high school I signed up for chorus, but the teacher offered me $50 to drop the class – and other ruminations about learning to play the piano.

Restoring Intellectual Day

[17.Jan.08] :. It rankles my sensibilities that great music is considered "timeless" and therefore Handel's music still "means" today whatever it was it meant in his own time.

Schroeder’s Dilemma: The Christmas Carol, as Lucy Likes It

[6.Dec.07] :. The Christmas carol is neither high art nor popular claptrap; it is neither austerely sacred nor tritely popular; it is both timeless and timely, traditional and modern.

The Bull of Phalaris, or the Ambiguity of Musical Violence

[12.Oct.07] :. By working directly on the body, music as a whole has access to a form of violence that far outstrips the petty accusations foisted upon certain of its constituent parts, such as hard rock and rap.

The Sounds of Now: Steve Reich and the Transmogrification of the Banal

[8.Aug.07] :. As human beings, interpretive animals that attempt to navigate the world by coming to some sort of "understanding" of it, we are addicted to purpose.

The Profound Consolation: The Use of Bach’s Music in the Films of Ingmar Bergman (Part 4)

[20.Jul.07] :. The music in Bergman's Saraband sets up numerous tensions that it never reconciles: listener and performer, individual and group, passive aestheticism and practical enactment. Music in Bergman's world offers hope, but it does not offer answers.

On Lexus, Hairapy, and the Scherzo from Beethoven’s Ninth (with a nod to Kubrick)

[8.Jun.07] :. By making Beethoven's Ninth an image of our humanity, we have conditioned ourselves to filter out all of those elements in the music that make it a worthwhile (if troubling) listening experience.

Classical Radio Communities: Thoughts on Mediation

[27.Apr.07] :. Classical music radio gives rise to a prophylactic form of community: we are somehow participating with other listeners without having to engage directly with those others. The music becomes a pretense for communal participation.

Why Don’t the Planets Speak?: An Inquiry Into Music and Language

[23.Mar.07] :. Speech involves saying something individual in a rigid system of conformity. Music seems to attempt something similar -- or, more appropriately, people attempt something similar through music.

The Sounds of Now, Part Three: Anthony Braxton and the Ethics of Improvisation

[23.Jan.07] :. Jenkins's latest installment in a series of contemporary composer profiles discusses Anthony Braxton, who seems to have looked to music as a means not to erase or ignore cultural dissonance but rather to confront it directly.

The Profound Consolation: The Use of Bach’s Music in the Films of Ingmar Bergman (Part 3)

[3.Jan.07] :. What Vogler hears in Bach is both the acknowledgement of the eternal sameness of our lives and the spiritual longing for untainted pure being -- Bach attains transcendence only through the transmutation of human despair and eternal sameness.

The Profound Consolation: The Use of Bach’s Music in the Films of Ingmar Bergman (Part 2)

[15.Nov.06] :. In the second installment of an ongoing discussion of Bach and Bergman, Jenkins examines the communicative power of Bach's sarabande in Through a Glass Darkly.

The Profound Consolation: The Use of Bach’s Music in the Films of Ingmar Bergman (Part 1)

[13.Oct.06] :. In Bergman's films, Bach's music functions to give access to a rarified atmosphere of revelation and emotional depth; it reveals something previously inaccessible within a character.

An Overheard Conversation Concerning Musical Taste

[11.Sep.06] :. 'But who determines the criteria by which one determines if something is well formed?' A debate of taste rages in a small field outside Maryland.

The Sounds of Now, Part Two: Meredith Monk

[11.Aug.06] :. For the second installment in an ongoing series profiling contemporary composers, Jenkins reports on Meredith Monk, whose compositions and performances integrate the personal aspects of the body in a manner wholly removed from the majority of current musical production.

Melodic Patriotism: A Look at Some Lesser-Known Pieces for the Fourth of July

[30.Jun.06] :. In observance of Independence Day, Jenkins examines some overlooked classical manifestations of American patriotism that may be more appropriate than Tchaikovsky's US-adopted 1812 Overture.

The Devil’s Music: Franz Liszt’s Musical Representation of Mephistopheles

[9.Jun.06] :. Liszt's Faust symphony offers a solution to the conundrum that faced so many Romantic and post-Romantic composers: how does one create a musical form that continually and progressively unfolds and yet manages to hold together, to be all 'of a piece'?

Judging a Bach By Its Cover

[19.May.06] :. If people are no longer as interested in classical music as a cerebral escape from the banalities of the everyday, then certain producers of classical recordings are willing to embrace this cultural condition by selling Bach not as an alternative to popular image culture, but as a part of it.

On the Necessity of Listening As Confrontation

[20.Apr.06] :. How can you possibly know why you 'like' something you assume you like unless you confront that which you have dismissed? Jenkins discusses the importance of spending time with the music that immediately displeases us.

The Sounds of Now: Brian Ferneyhough

[2.Mar.06] :. In the first of a series of contemporary composer profiles, Jenkins discusses Brian Ferneyhough, whose complex scores force performers to confront the boundaries of the possible.

Stop Playing with Your Ticket: An Investigation of Concert-going Practices

[1.Feb.06] :. Feeling stifled by symphonic stodginess? Jenkins reviews concert-going practices of previous centuries and suggests ways to improve the concert experience in our own.

Songs Without Words, or So They Say: A Meditation on Titles

[11.Jan.06] :. Exactly how should the title of a wordless piece of music influence our experience of the music itself? Jenkins muses on how titles interact with the instrumental pieces they represent and, furthermore, on musical selections with no titles at all.

Out of Proportion: Understanding the Medieval Motet

[16.Dec.05] :. There is a parallel heard in the complex, seemingly conflicted harmony of 13th century music to today's dissonant world. As we struggle to fold our differences into an orchestrated 'global' accord, we might do well to challenge ourselves to stop, and truly listen.

A Historicist Manifesto: Why Classical Matters

[23.Nov.05] :. Classical music, as a culturally archaic archetype of stodginess, has long been disassociated from a contemporary relevance. Can we make it meaningful again now that we've told Beethoven to roll over?