I teach music at University of Chicago, direct the Gray Center for Arts & Inquiry, and am mostly unconscious. Stuff: https://t.co/k8gL44yLO8
Mar 28, 2023 • 14 tweets • 3 min read
One wager: the word "modernism" still triggers in music bc it failed to adequately periodize itself. It still "lives on." But the reason for *that* is bc music's relation to representation in both the imaginary & political sense is arguably more precarious than w other media. 1/
Modernism as, say, an ecology of semiotic crisis response producing further semiotic crisis, finds a v weird material in music, which is obv too abstract AND too concrete for the sign, but for precisely that reason all the more culturally regulated. In this context 2/
Mar 13, 2023 • 8 tweets • 2 min read
gonna go out on a limb & say: criticism should be for everyone, criticism is not/should not be that hard—save for one thing. You have to be able to sit with your thing until its enigmas emerge & then be able to make something interesting from those enigmas. But
that seems terribly, mortally difficult for folks, probably bc enigmas are generally felt today to be terrible mortal things—or utter bullshit, which amounts to the same thing now in the form of aggression. If we're living in
Mar 12, 2023 • 7 tweets • 2 min read
Reupping for Oscár night. Rooting for Tóp Gún, but meanwhile do wish folks would take more seriously the way Tár isn't just "about" classical music, but actually cuts a path from this niche culture to tragedy/possibility of universalism. The movie uses the orchestra as
something more than just a metaphor for western secular liberalism, the orchestra & all its cultural supports become a real materialization of it, its flesh. & the ending makes a stark claim: the orchestra has always been a dream, a rebus, veiling colonial/imperial domination.
Mar 3, 2023 • 13 tweets • 3 min read
As someone who's worked for years on what could be called auteur music—in my case, written-out single-authored scores for classically trained musicians—I cannot stress enough how this mode of production can dominate & exclude by default, not bc
its makers want to dominate & exclude but simply bc the very station of sole authorship allots no proper place to *collectively practiced* hybridity, which becomes its obscene other side. That other side can be referenced and enjoyed as
Feb 21, 2023 • 11 tweets • 2 min read
But no joke the whiteness thing in contemporary classical music is scary & deep & v real & esp well-masked by the same forces that historically protect & isolate music—"craft," "technique," a formalism that might've opened a space for thought but instead provides an abdication.
It's no surprise, historical DNA of "new music" is the sonic dream factory of the 19C imperial-colonial project, but—that DNA also inscribes the act of breaking & breaking away, & of inauguration as a *formal principle*, a crevasse in which the potentially-anything might appear.
Dec 27, 2022 • 8 tweets • 2 min read
Tár is really about classical music. If it weren’t it would still be a desperately well-made movie but not a great one, & possibly even a bad one. Haven’t seen anyone panning it who also thinks it’s really about classical music. They pan it bc they think it’s about other things.
I mean, who knows what it’s really really about, ok. But assessing the movie through the paradigm of character & its implicit judgement by its maker—does it adequately critique Tár, does it excuse her, does it enjoy her to much—seem boring cf critique of an institution+history.
