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September 26, 2006
Issues in Music Composition Pedagogy
Dan Becker, a composition professor at the San Francisco Conservatory articulates what I believe to be among the most crucial issues today in music education and the development of tomorrow's composers. He calls for a restructuring of the world's music education institutions, referencing composer Edgar Varèse, poet W.H. Auden, musicologist Richard Taruskin, and philosopher Krishnamurti. You can read his article on New Music Box.
Balancing Act: Some Thoughts On Teaching Composition by Dan Becker
Posted by crock038 at 08:49 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
September 20, 2006
Great Struggles
We go about our day-to-day mostly dealing in superficial pleasantries or straightforward information exchange so we can all keep the world running, keep doing our thing. I desperately wish to hear more discourse on the things that matter. Wisdom, Patience, Honor, Humility, Respect, Indecisiveness, Luck (or the lack of it), Doubt, and the list goes on.
This has become a new impetus, a new spur for me to compassion: I remind myself, when looking down on someone, when pitying someone, when despising someone... that we, he and I, she and I, we have Great Struggles in common.
Our struggles are different, surely, because we are individuals with different histories, but there is this: we all struggle, and our struggles are colossal for us. They will keep us moving forward for a lifetime, ever giving us reason to rise from sleep. And rise to our dreams. I suspect also that themes will emerge when many people's struggles are taken in sum. I want to find out what these themes are—what are THE Great Struggles of humanity, from a survey, not from what I imagine them to be according to this or that archetype or stereotype.
Please, share your great struggles with me. We all have them... artistic, or moral, or political, social, psychological. What questions confront you again and again in all areas of your life? I honor you, respect you, and thank you for anything you might share, for confronting head-on the big questions in your life.
Posted by crock038 at 10:00 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Ah, TV Crews
Dreamt last night about being on the set of a news broadcast. But we (the staff of the news show) were playing some kind of joke because it was a holiday of some sort, like April Fools Day, but not. I was in charge of sound, mainly doing live foley. And there was the news anchor, a guy whom I do not recognize from any other part of my waking or dreaming life.
Actually that's worth a little digression... that's pretty rare for me... the news anchor seems to have been a genuinely new dream-creation... I'm trying to think of anyone he reminds me of, but no one comes to mind... the tiniest bit of the main character from Gattaca I suppose... but wackier... this news anchor had a real jokester personality... weird.
In any case, he and I were reporting on some bombing that was a conceptual image mixup between the Unabomber and a suicide bombing in present day Iraq.
And the news anchor sat there in silence for a lot of the news cast and just stared at the camera...
Maybe he reminds me of John Stewart...
And maybe this has something to do with my first real encounter with a live TV crew last week. The University of Minnesota School of Music is making a commercial. You know, show everyone how awesome we are. All our great stuff and great people. In any case, I was unholy-cheap student labor to help them run our sound studios. And they were not effective communicaors. About lots of things. But I won't go into that.
Haha... oh well, on with the day -- heeYAH!
Posted by crock038 at 09:23 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack