Yikes! I’ve gotten comfortable with Dover pricing; Universal and Barenreiter are not so kind. I will probably have to get one of them and edit the parts; I’ll see what edition Prof. Smith has in the UW library. Thanks for the advice.

Mikko

I often have the pleasure of rehearsing/performing in city-owned facilities where the heating and cooling controls aren’t even located in that building! They’re some blocks away in a central facility so the city only has to hire and pay one person to “manage” multiple venues. We don’t really need to discuss how well that “works…”

About the only thing you didn’t mention is that past a certain age, the eyes don’t function as they used to any more, and no amount of concentration or determination can change that. I might have been able to see my music with minimal lighting when I was 20, but I simply can’t now. That’s not me whining or being lazy, it’s just a fact of physiology. And I know the soloist has his/her music memorized, but he/she is touring with maybe 4 pieces total this year, while I’m playing a different 75-90 minutes of music every week.

Hi Mikko

Avoid Dover. Also- not all the Dover’s that claim to be Robbins Landon are. You have to check carefully. Haydn is always worth investing in either Robbins Landon or the new Barenreiter. However, you can’t combine the two- there are significant differences, in my experiences between Robbins Landon and Barenreiter, where both are available.

Don’t use any old Breiktopf materials, Peters or other dodgy old editions.

Hope that helps

Ken

Thanks Bryan-Kirk. Hope all is well there- I look forward to the new Collected Works edition of your music! Get a good editor and save us all centuries of arguing over note length and tempo.

Worse yet might be the sound people who think that providing support for an outdoor orchestra performance is akin to a rock band. That’s my rant for the day!

Aside: Lets not forget the cold piano, and tuning it for concerto / recording work, and the havocs there. Just had to put in my own rant =(

You can’t. It’s an illusion. The only thing an audience can respond to are the cold events in the work as prescribed by the composer and that is if the composer decides to leave any of these markers for semantic and episodic memory. Everything else is up to “interpretation” or “non-interpretation”. There are many ways to listening to music and sound. Not all of them need to be from the perspective of an acoustical space with seating, a program and white gloves on hand, and the prescribed social approaches of intent listening. Another way is to just let it pass through you without any judgements or deconstructing agendas. Again, there are no laws that it has to be memorable or not. It can just exist and your gestalts come by your own unique interacting with it.

Besides, you can never be sure that a composer starts from the narrative of an inner life. He can and most often lies and says he did. Or someone else imposes their will on the work. Moreover, to interpret from a perspective of another life experience can never be 100% sure that his intentions are honest ones or are exactly yours. Besides, why should we really give a [moderator edit] about his angst or life experiences anyway? If you DO want to judge, look for the memory markers. Personally, I don’t read the program notes and steer away from Meet the Composer interviews before the concert anymore. They are deflecting from the music. Worried about charlatans or tricksters? Why bother? You still have to listen to it to judge and then its too late anyway! Read the testimonials; samples from iTunes. There are too many outlets of entertainment looking for your attention today to be able to criticize each one in a lifetime. Its a minefield.

Music and sound are not chocolate. Music and sound expresses nothing but the vibration of a light spectrum between 20 hz and 20 kHz. Everything else is a matter of taste, a matter of infinite human experience, and maybe nothing at all.

The bottom line is you choose what it is or what it isn’t from the basis of your own experiences. You get to choose what is or what isn’t in your life. You do this through unmusical means. Adorno doesn’t get to do it for you.

UPDATE: The computer application described in the above has been improved to provide specific brands of coffee based on who is playing with it. For example, if Kenneth Woods decided to show up, it would grind a good italian bean from Stumps Coffee. If I showed up it would grind a mean Sumatra from Peets. This also has an effect on the performance. I personally believe Peets is more intense. As the music and playing evolved the scores generated on the fly would become more complex. A pastry module I hear is in the works.

This is the problem of all human communication – what is real, what is illusion? How do we express inner subjective states so that other people can understand what we are feeling and be sure that understand what we mean? It gets harder, the further from practical exchange we get. Indeed, it can be argued that music is the only means that begins to get close to expressing our interiority , and that falling back on words and emotional projections is already to diminish the musical content and its meaning.

But we have surely to make judgements – either practical or moral – about the things we allow to get under our skin. If I eat too much chocolate, I get heart disease and die, so it is in my interests not to eat too much chocolate, or to allow thieves into my house or confidence tricksters to sell me insurance. The same exists in art – where there are plenty of charlatans, phoneys and seducers vying for our attention. Add to that the deranged and deluded, and there’s plenty of scope and necessity for aesthetic judgement.

It is best to judge music (as people) against the claims they make for themselves. If they are what they say they are, we are free to like or dislike according to our own taste, and I would not dismiss anyone who has honest intent. However, if they puport to be something like an exclusive track for all music, but are in fact merely being intolerant and abusrdly judgemental, we have grounds to say – no thanks!

Adorno is about like someone who observes that there is a lot of chocolate-eating damaging the health of a culture, so insists on banning everything but branflakes; and then branflakes made according to one manufacturer. Now we can agree with him there is too much chocolate-eating, but his solution is not going to work because it is unenforcible and unreasonable. under his regime there would be a lot of secret chocolate-eating. It would raise eating chocolate to the status of a religion. It would create pathology around chocolate, and soon everyone would want to be a junkie. Then you find out that even the regime’s hardliners are all secret addicts too. A campaign for a balanced diet would have been so much more successful.