Month: April 2013

What We Talk About When We Talk About Music: Part 3 — Hybridity

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This entry is part 3 of 7 in the series What We Talk About When We Talk About Music

This post is part of a series. Since the posts build upon one another successively, I suggest you start with the first post in the series. Last time, in Part 2 of this series, I talked about “ear training” and the skills that are required by certain kinds of music if one is to listen to them competently–the requirement of a degree of work, a degree of slogging up a learning curve to grasp those kinds of music. The parallel for my overarching analogy of those mostly eat TV dinners and junk food on the one hand, and the self-described …

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What We Talk About When We Talk About Music: Part 2 — Ear Training

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This entry is part 2 of 7 in the series What We Talk About When We Talk About Music

This post is part of a series. Since the posts build upon one another successively, I suggest you start with the first post in the series. Right, so last time, I drew a parallel between my view of music in the modern industrialized world, and the way “foodies” think of food in that same setting: namely, as something that has been essentially debased for expediency of production by large corporations, in the name of profit. But I’m sure those who aren’t feeling deeply insulted by this still have some sort of question in their minds about what it is I …

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What We Talk About When We Talk About Music: Part 1 — Background, Caveats, and an Analogy to Consider

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This entry is part 1 of 7 in the series What We Talk About When We Talk About Music

I’ve been working for about a week now to put together a blog post that simply isn’t working. Like a story built to fail, the damned thing just is not cohering, no matter what i do: it veers off the road, it catches on fire, and when I put out the fire, the engine won’t turn over. So I’ve decided to break it down into pieces. Maybe. It depends whether that is still necessary at the end of this thing I’m writing now. It’s hard because, frankly, I think that what we conventionally include in the category of music includes …

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My Thoughts on Oblivion (Oh My God, It’s Full of Crap!)

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Maybe it’s seen as silly to hold on to 2001: A Space Odyssey as a high water mark for an SF movie these days, but the degree of ignorance, stupidity, and shallowness on display in Oblivion provokes such rage in my that I can’t help but compare. Be warned: here there be “spoilers” though, frankly, nothing I could do or say would spoil the movie more than the people who made it already have. But I’ll but a cut up so you need to click through to see why the film is moronic. Also, curse words. Because I am that disgusted. …

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Overtones

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I’m on my seventh day back to the sax. (I had to miss one day a few days back, as I spent three hours searching Saigon for sax accessories, unsuccessfully, and the rest of the day was tied up with other things.) Not much to report as yet, though I’m still doing the exercises I got from Phil Barone; the overtones exercises he gave me are the ones with which I’m making the most obvious progress, to the point where now I can get more than one upper partial on certain notes, at will. I am very much wishing I …

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