for the composing asks: 10, 12, 17, and 1 because even at yesterday's graduation ceremony, we could not escape it. i (as you know) don't even really have Opinions about music but i am sworn to forever hate the canon in D in solidarity with my brother, who plays the cello.
10. strangest thing you’ve heard a non-musician say about music?so i have no way of proving that this person was Not A Musician, but at one point back in high school i saw someone post in an online forum “remember everyone, music theory is a theory, not a fact” a la Creationist ~critiques~ of evolution. that was the entirety of their post, there was no further context or explanation, and they didn’t reappear in the thread during the subsequent confusion. tbh i think it’s kind of beautiful
12. favorite music theory pun?there are so many ways i could go here. on the one hand, there’s the uber nerdy “actual examples of musical puns” like the tonic becoming the third of bVI (which i’m always a sucker for) or the retroactive transformation of “Lisbon” into a giant anacrusis to “Horkstow Grange” in Lincolnshire Posy or the way German augmented sixth chords are also dominant chords in another key (BONUS POINTS if there’s tritone substitution going on the possibilities are ENDLESS) or this one piece called Endsong where the last note was a G b/c the piece [ends]on[g] or this one time where i was setting a text that took place on a beach and used repeated Cs to represent the waves of the sea or Satie’s response when someone told him he had no sense of form (ie Three Pieces in the Form of a Pear) and also literally all of PDQ Bach’s tempo indications, but OTOH there’s the classic “a C, an Eb, and a G walk into a bar, the bar tender says ‘hey! we don’t serve minors in here!’ and throws the Eb out, so the C and the G share an open fifth between them … ” esp in its extended version that ends with several sonorities being put under a rest and sentenced to several years of DC without chance of Coda, but like tbh who hasn’t heard that one before and i’m getting a little tired of it. so, uh …
in the afterlife, Messiaen decides that he’s said everything he wanted to with music, and takes up sculpture instead. rather taken with the genderless nature of the Angels of the Lord, he settles pretty quickly into only working from models who are outside of the Western gender binary. (he doesn’t work directly from the Angels. that would be Presumptuous.) he’s an industrious fellow, and is really churning these sculptures out, but soon people notice that, no matter how people pose for him, the statues always wind up in one of three identical poses. that seems a little odd, so finally somebody asks him about it. is this something he’s doing on purpose? “oh yes”, Messiaen replies, “it’s entirely deliberate. after all, i only work with limited trans positions”
(… i’ll show myself out)
17. if you had to kill one, which would you choose: shostakovich, tchaikovsky, or prokofiev?plot twist: THEY’RE ALL ALREADY DEAD #MyWorkHereIsDone
uh, more seriously tho: i would probably say Prokofiev. not because of any dislike of his music, but b/c he died on the same day as Joseph Stalin, so he never really got the funeral he deserved. like, what a shitty way to go. all of that totalitarianism and artistic suppression and then not only to you not get to outlive the tyrant, he totally obliterates your funeral notices as well. what a dick. so yeah, i’d definitely be down to give Prokofiev another chance at the death thing so he could do it without a genocidal totalitarian stealing his thunder
1. on a scale of 1-10, how deep is your hatred towards canon in d?like, maybe a 3? tbh i think it’s a nice piece of music, even if it is a little insubstantial. mostly i’m just annoyed by the EZ Listening Classics industry that it stands in for — i understand what the makers of those albums are going for, but like, the perception that classical music is (and only is) bland and relaxing high-class muzak is super frustrating to me and directly at odds with everything i love about this music, and the promulgation of things like 50 Most Relaxing Classical Tracks doesn’t do much to push back against that trope, to say the least. tbh i find Brahms and Wagner considerably more annoying to play
