Category: Uncategorized

Today I’m on a Paul Lansky –> Radiohead rabbit hole. Paul Lansky used to write a lot of electronic music, but I know him from percussion music, first hearing Threads in undergrad.

I just wrote a (bad) paper on Textures related to minimalism and found this interview of Lansky. Turns out his earliest electronic work got sampled by Radiohead.

As a pianist and percussionist I’m fairly interested in pursuing his music more to learn how to write cool music for percussion. I didn’t expect this cool foray into an album I haven’t heard before.

I’m also thinking that for the whole composing/sound design thing it’s good to be hearing this interesting ambient music. It would sound great for documentary.

—

Otherwise I’ve been listening to Mahler 4 since it’s mentioned in Adler’s Orchestration text. I play this piano reduction with a recording and think about distilling it to basics.

The beginning is just action above your standard tonic, IV, V. The nonharmonic tones are HINTING at action to occur later. The C#s intimate the commitment to D major at m 38. But otherwise it’s screwing around with V of V of V’s away from G Maj and then wandering back.

m 14 is basically a tritone sub (on Bb) of E7 to hinge back toward V/V (A).

Bear in mind that “E7” here I am meaning edimb9. The resolution to “A” on beat four is actually an “F” chord. Call it a mixed modal thing that works because of shared chord tones.

Then m 16 is your I6/4 with some strong nonharmonic bass for the whole cadence of I6/4, V, I.

How is that academics practicing in a hermeneutic milieu also find themselves passing judgment on historical figures for things we currently find immoral? If hermeneutics has to do with “positioned” knowledge, then why this laundering of history? Why judge the past from the present?

A similar problem: that these academics would probably say morals are a choice, and local. Yet they interrogate the past for problematics using a “universal” rubric, as though everyone in the past “should have known better.”

Why do relativists insist on their views? Does their action foreclose the validity of what they say? How can a relativist try convince you they have the better view? Aren’t they beating you with foam hammers?