Posts Tagged ‘composer’
“After silence, that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music”*…
Artistic approximation…
Charles Ives set himself an impossible problem [in his 114 Songs of 1922]. He wanted to use pitch distance to represent the fact that God is infinitely close to man. But what is an infinitesimally close pitch distance? In the end Ives gave up and left it to the singer to decide. Maybe what Ives wanted was a smallest perceptible pitch difference. There is no standard notation for this.
Wilfrid Hodges, “The Geometry of Music,” in John Fauvel, ed., Music and Mathematics, 2006
Vaguely apposite (but in any case beautiful): “Mystical Photographs Taken Inside a Cello, Double Bass & Other Instruments.”
Via Futility Closet.
* Aldous Huxley
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As we ponder proximity, we might send liberated birthday greeting to another musician deeply concerned with wrangling pitch: Ornette Coleman; he was born on this date in 1930. A saxophonist, violinist, trumpeter, and composer, he was the principal founder of the “Free Jazz” movement, which abandoned the chordal and harmony-based structure found in bebop for an avant-garde (sometimes jarring) approach to improvisation. Coleman’s “Broadway Blues” and “Lonely Woman” became genre standards; his album Sound Grammar received the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for Music.
“Wherever you go, I don’t care where you go, just send me something in the mail from where you are”*…
Just one of the hundreds of postcards from the J. Smith Archive that one can enjoy on the “virtual road trip” that is Cardboard America.
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As we hit the road, we might sing “Happy Birthday” to Mildred J. Hill; he was born on this date in 1859. She wrote the music: In the early 1890s, she composed the tune which (with lyrics by her sister Patty) was called “good Morning to All” and was published in 1893 in Song Stories for the Kindergarten. In 1912, her music was appropriated (with lyrics by an unknown author) and published as “Happy Birthday”– which has gone on to become (according to the Guinness Book of Records) the most recognized song in the English language.
Famously tied up by copyright (to wit the rarity of its appearance on TV or in movies), Hill’s estate still receives royalties from it performance.
Mildred (left) and her sister Patty
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