ABOUT THIS BLOG

I have this nightmare. Actually, I have many nightmares, but this particular one is certainly the most memorable of them. It happens sporadically: sometimes it will occur three times in a row; Sometimes I will go weeks before I stumble upon it in the depths of my most placid slumber. By now I should greet it as an old friend. But every time it occurs it sends me into thralls of some of the deepest dread I have ever experienced.

In this nightmare, I am trapped in an exhibit in the Museum of Modern Art in New York. It's a large space, with pristine white floors and ceiling, void of chantonnes or chintzes. However, this space is completely encapsulated by glass. Here we are, thirty other starving individuals and I, as the denizens of some phantasmagoric otherworld. They ignore us, and frankly, why shouldn't they? We have nothing of interest to them. There's a pile of starved  bodies on the floor. And we're all ciphers because we don't want to appeal to the thousands of faceless projections that crowd the MoMA floor. But we just refuse to try to get their attention.

I am a freshman at the Jacobs School of Music, pursuing a combined performance and composition degree. And that scares the hell out of me. I, like my colleagues, am in this field because I can't see myself doing anything else with my life. But when we graduate, we'll be in a world that, for the most part, has felt alienated by the intellectualization of art music since the advent of process music in the twentieth century. We need to demand people's attention. We need to make art music exciting again. As an artist, I am terrified of making uninteresting music. I never want my music to be a curiosity that cannot keep somebody's attention with anything other than pretentious intellectualizations, the soprano singing inversion  this, the bass retrograde that.

I am not saying that process music is bad. In fact, some of my favorite pieces are by serialists. But a process is just that: a process. All of the theory we know is extremely important, but they're just tools, colors for our growing palette. A good piece of art is not explained in technicalities; it's explained in emotional impact and the statement it is trying to make. This blog is about music that appeals to me; from Brahms to Fela Kuti, to Talib Kweli to the Walkmen, to World Inferno Friendship Society to Alan Berg, to Bad Brains and so many more. This is not a blog about thorough analysis. This is a blog about music, and what makes it appeal to everybody.