A video from Didier using a GI-IC piece

Another video from Didier using a GI-IC piece

Newselves and Causeway are new on the upper widget - why not give them a try.

Hanslick's On Musical Beauty has arrived. He was an important figure on the 19C music scene. I was just listening to part of Siegfried from the Met and Hanslick's review of the first performance was quoted. He is seen as the person who developed Kantian aesthetics in the musical realm. To me it seems that his big idea is that musical form and content cannot be separated. This needs some probing - if a musical statement is repeated with different orchestration is this a change in the form. H seems to think it is. More like a yes-but to me.

Andy Hamilton suggests that the reason Kant ranked music low in the hierarachy of arts was that he lacked examples of formal musical analysis. It seems to me that with (say) Infinite Music by Adam Harper we are now in the opposite situation. Harper shows that with Alan Lomax's framework for analysing folk music there are more genre possibilities than there are stars in the universe.

I now have the music section of Kant's Critique of Judgement. Looking at individual sentences provides extra stimulus - eg why exactly in terms of his aesthetic model he rated poetry so highly. This has sent me off investigating poetic form. In the US there is a new form called The Bop.

Lastly J Rose's Haunting of SP has arrived. I need to refresh myself on her model of Haunting.

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