Short Night

Last night I completed a staggering feat. I started working on a research paper in the afternoon, and turned it in early the next morning. Granted, my subject knowledge was already exceedingly strong, and I already knew the sources from which I wanted to draw my support, but it was still a grim battle with fatigue to churn out such a staggering work of astute comparative analysis.

One never really realizes how much church there is during holy week, until the rest of one's time has been greedily gobbled by work and homework. Only in retrospect can I see the crunch, I did not even think of it at the time, and I was so concerned with other matters, that the paper sort of snuck up on me. It does not make matters easier that Bartky does not believe in giving a month's notice, as he realizes the class will procrastinate the first to weeks anyway. So he elects to procrastinate for us, and gives us the paper without any extra procrastination time.

The result is that today I am tired. For most this would be a big problem, and I will probably find myself crashing in the middle of my last class/my drive home, but to this point in the day I have only marked an increase in my ability to assimilate information with which I am presented...which could not have come at a worse time.

Today, music for the listener class was dealing in Modernism. My poor, confused, addled, and possibly unbalanced, teacher was talking about it in almost rapturous terms. He finds music from this period to be the most interesting....Interesting, I say, is certainly a word for it.

Atonal, poly-tonal, arrhythmic, and disquieting; the "music" drifted from one place to another with no semblance of development--as is found in previous classical music--and no real functional harmony or recognizable melody--as is found in, what is that word I am looking for, music. It was a serious of increasingly dissonant and ugly sounds, which ended--by God's mercy and providence alone--without once resolving any of the tension. I did not get any catharsis to purge all the bad juju that was being pumped into my system, and toward the end I was left with a vein pulsing unpleasantly in the side of my head.

I am not someone who is a stranger to discord in my music.,and I can definitely appreciate dissonance as a device in music. While dissonance adds interest to a consonant piece, a piece that is made up entirely from dissonant ideas is not interesting; it holds as little interest as an unadorned consonant piece, and it is painfully ugly to boot. I have been searching for an adjective that truly encompasses the achievements of modern music, and I think I finally found it.

Blegh

Comments

  1. 12 tone music is the best!

    Just because these schmos couldn't be as good as Bach and Beethoven within the rules of tonality they decided to throw it all out and pretend to be "artistic."

    Blegh, indeed.

    ReplyDelete

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