Reading: Michael Nyman 13/03/15 11:56 PM

Morton Feldman’s ideology seems to be quite interesting but perhaps the ideology I related most to is Christian Wolff’s. Simply because I have experienced the need to get rid of all ‘methodology’ in approach to music before. Cage’s talk about channelizing sounds, ‘letting them be’ seems to be quite a zen-like approach. Feldman’s approach of having fixed times but indefinite pitch seems a bit more mathematical than probably most players are used to. The concept behind Intersection and Marginal Intersection seems a little complicated. I wonder how simple or complicated it would be for a player to sit and try to figure out things and use their brain in making their own decisions rather than blindly play what’s written on a paper. Perhaps if it was something like a film scoring context the way that we are exposed to, it probably wouldn’t fly that well in a studio situation. But it’s interesting and I think I see some similarities with decision-making between blocks of music in certain game audio techniques. Moving back to Morton Feldman’s notation and systems, the diagram for his notation seems not very clear to me. However, once again I suppose it’s more of uncertainty-based. It does seem similar to some of the horizontal blocks often encountered in modern day sequencers. The way Feldman talks about music is interesting simply because it relates with this problem I have where I think of orchestral music with more of an electronic approach sometimes throwing in notes and then taking them out for a few beats and then back in. I feel like that kind of shuffling between instruments and parts sometimes comes off as very odd to a lot of people that compose orchestral music in a more traditional way. Earle Brown definitely seems to be more analytic in nature with his approaches to music. Here is a person that understands paradox and art. I think Brown’s work was probably a lot more ambiguous than Feldman’s from what I read. To me there seems to be a huge difference between making music and then chopping it up to make it indeterminate. But I feel that if you think if it as an indeterminate entity before you even write the first note, it’s a completely different ballgame together. I feel that’s really

the difference between Brown and Feldman. It would be great to hear your opinion about it. All in all, the four composers have all different approaches and mannerisms that define their own way of thinking of music, and I believe it’s interesting when you really dive down to a micro level and try to understand how their brains worked regarding composition. And it consolidates my belief that there really is no wrong or right way to go about music composition, only different methods and different results.

13/03/15 11:56 PM

13/03/15 11:56 PM