In a typically thoughtful contribution to my post Why not play the premier league composers more often? Richard Bratby - who is professionally involved in classical music - mused "speaking solely from my own experience - there is a very noticeable falling-off in ticket sales when a symphony orchestra programmes pre-Beethoven repertoire, irrespective of the quality of the performance or the music, or the energy with which it is marketed. But why?" Now Kea has answered Richard's question with the following comment: Wagner, Mahler, Shostakovich, etc, all sound more or less like film music (or -- more accurately -- film music sounds more or less like recycled bits of Wagner, Mahler, Shostakovich, etc) and therefore don't require any intellectual involvement or serious effort to listen to. Understanding the music of Bach, Mozart or Haydn, etc (or for that matter Schumann, Brahms, Webern, Cage, etc) actually requires people to listen actively rather than being pulled alo...
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It would be just dandy if string theory merely predicted those extra dimensions. The problem is that string theory depends on those extra dimensions (a total of 11 at last count) for its very existence. Absent those extra dimensions, string theory collapses as a viable theory of anything, much less everything.
ACD
Hi, I enjoy your blog. Your post on string theory made me wonder whether you've bumped into the connection between higher dimensional geometry and music, but there are some interesting connections.
http://cosmiclog.msnbc.msn.com/archive/2006/07/07/950.aspx
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1582330,00.html
Am actually writing about one of the "On an Overgrown Path" pieces, which makes a very interesting use of scales ...
Dmitri Tymoczko
Assistant Professor of Music
Princeton
http://music.princeton.edu/~dmitri