Blog: November

Listening conditions

Composer Stefano Gervasoni came to seminar this week. One of the ideas he discussed resonated in me. The idea that it is not enough for a composer (or for him at least) to define the sound sequences; one should also define the listening conditions. There are many listening conditions a composer cannot control, but there are some that he can. The choice of instrumentation is itself a listening condition. It is not the same experience to hear a sound X coming from a device A (e.g. a violin) than to hear a sound X' (very similar or identical to X) coming from a device B (e.g. a general purpose computer). A program note handed in at a concert or written in a CD booklet is another listening condition very much controllable by the composer...

Posted on:
2008.11.21 -0600

Tags:
art , music

LilyPond bug: grace notes, breaks, proportional

Ok, this is the first serious bug i run into in LilyPond. Line/page breaks immediately before \grace notes or immediately after \afterGrace notes when proportional notation is ON makes LilyPond throw programming errors and formats incorrectly: 

\version "2.11.64"
\include "english.ly"
\layout{
   \context{ \Score
      proportionalNotationDuration = #(ly:make-moment 1 34)
      \override SpacingSpanner #'strict-note-spacing =##t
      %\override SpacingSpanner #'strict-grace-spacing = ##t
      %\override SpacingSpanner #'uniform-stretching = ##t
   }
}
{
   \new Voice{
     \time 1/4
     c'4
     \break
     \afterGrace c'4 {g'64}
     \break
     c'4
     \break
     c'4
   }
   \new Voice{
     \time 1/4
     c'4
     \break
     \grace{ g'64 }
     c'4
     \break
     c'4
     \break
     c'4
   }
}

Posted on:
2008.11.20 -0600

Tags:
music

The native under control

[...] And what follow are schemes for separating the natives [...] from the white man on racial and religious grounds, then for reconstituting them as people requiring a European presence, whether a colonial implantation or a master discourse in which they could be fitted and put to work. Thus, on the one hand, one has Kipling's fiction positing the Indian as a creature clearly needing British tutelage, one aspect of which is a narrative that encircles and then assimilates India, since without Britain, India would disappear into its own corruption and underdevelopment [...]. Or, on the other hand, one has the shadowy discourse of colonial capitalism, with its roots in liberal free-trade policies (also derived from evangelical literature), in which, for instance, the indolent native again figures as someone whose natural depravity and loose character necessitates a European overlord. We see this in the observations of colonial rulers like Galieni, Hubert Lyautey, Lord Cromer, Hugh Clifford, and John Bowring: [...]. And we see it in the monographic rigors of scholarly colonial social scientists like the economic historian Clive Day, who in 1904, wrote, "In practice it has been found impossible to secure the services of the native [Javanese] population by any appeal to an ambition to better themselves and raise their standard. Nothing less than immediate material enjoyment will stir them from their indolent routine." These descriptions commodified the natives and their labor and glossed over the actual historical conditions, spiriting away the facts of drudgery and resistance.

[...]

At the apex of high imperialism early in this century, then, we have a conjunctural fusion between, on the one hand, the historicizing codes of discursive writing in Europe, positing a world universally available to transnational impersonal scrutiny, and, on the other hand, a massively colonized world. The object of this consolidated vision is always either a victim or a highly constrained character, permanently threatened with severe punishment, despite his or her many virtues, services, or achievements, excluded ontologically for having few of the merits of the conquering, surveying, and civilizing outsider. For the colonizer the incorporative apparatus requires unremitting effort to maintain. For the victim, imperialism offers these alternatives: serve or be destroyed. [p.168]

Culture and Imperialism
Eduard Said

Posted on:
2008.11.01 -0500

Tags:
homo homini lupus , texts