Friday, April 27 2007
Classical Radio Communities: Thoughts on Mediation
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.
Friday, March 23 2007
Why Don’t the Planets Speak?: An Inquiry Into Music and Language
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.
Tuesday, January 23 2007
The Sounds of Now, Part Three: Anthony Braxton and the Ethics of Improvisation
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.
Monday, September 11 2006
An Overheard Conversation Concerning Musical Taste
'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.
Friday, August 11 2006
The Sounds of Now, Part Two: Meredith Monk
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.
Friday, June 30 2006
Melodic Patriotism: A Look at Some Lesser-Known Pieces for the Fourth of July
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.
Friday, June 9 2006
The Devil’s Music: Franz Liszt’s Musical Representation of Mephistopheles
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'?
Friday, May 19 2006
Judging a Bach By Its Cover
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.
Thursday, April 20 2006
On the Necessity of Listening As Confrontation
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.
Thursday, March 2 2006
The Sounds of Now: Brian Ferneyhough
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.
