[22.01.2017]
Happy 30th, sdf! Your birthday gives me an occasion not only to marvel at the
persistence of gopherspace so far into the twenty-first century ("Hello, 2017
CE!!"), but also to reaffirm my commitment to contributing to it this evolving
collection of documents conceived with only the modest aspiration to keeping
gopherspace modern, postcontemporary, and perhaps even a bit chic.
-----
I feel an essay coming on: "whither gopher?"
-----
A copy of Roger Sessions' treatise, "Harmonic Practice", arrived with the mail
yesterday. An acquaintance some forty years older than I studied with Sessions
back in the sixties and, at least as far as I could gather, found him to be an
uniquely profound, philosophically-oriented composer. And this squares with the
impression I receive from his obscure essay (almost as obscure as the treatise
that came with the mail!) "Composer-Performer-Listener", also long out of print
yet thankfully included in the wonderful anthology "Contemporary Composers on
Contemporary Music" - the composers and music in question being not exactly
"contemporary" anymore, but I digress... Sessions' argument, as I understand
it, is not "music history", yet it is nevertheless mostly historical, consisting
in an examination of three distinct archetypal roles - Composer, Performer,
Listener - in search of an originary impulse driving the emergence of music
performance as art, and concluding with the compelling insight that it is in
fact "merely" the activity of listening alone that truly defines the experience
of music as art. Intellectually deep without a hint of pretense or
condescension. Highly recommended. Anyway, these past few weeks have found me
on the lookout for all things Sessions. We'll see if this one's a hit or a
miss...
-----
Also at work, reteaching myself the calculus. Today's quarry:
linear approximation and linearization. Lines, lines everywhere...
