Quote reblogged from Crossett-copia with 133 notes
Time isn’t an orderly stream. Time isn’t a placid lake recording each of our ripples. Time is viscous. Time is a massive flow. It is a self-healing substance, which is to say, almost everything will be lost.
Source: crossettlibrary
Link reblogged from Symbolicum with 1 note
Music + the odd Deleuze reference = The Ritournelle
The Ritournelle is therefore a form of incantation for a claimed spatiality, but it is also a sort of song that, despite is supposed lightness is calling for the power of the cosmos. As Deleuze turns it: “This is like if the stars would…
Source: symbolicum
Quote reblogged from Bitterstrings with 47 notes
I think I am probably in love with silence, that other world. And that I write, in some way, to negotiate seriously with it. If poems are records of true risks (attempts at change) taken by the soul of the speaker, then, as much as possible, my steps are toward silence. Silence which is the absence of speech, or the ability to speak, the reason or desire. Silence which drowns, but also which ignores us, overrides us, silence which is doubt, madness, fear, all that which makes the language bend as slip. I need to feel the places where the language fails, as much as one can. Silence which is awe or astonishment, the speech ripped out of you. All forms of death and mystery, therefore, working in each poem against the hurry of speech, the bravery of speech. And I think it is very important to feel the presence of that ocean in the poem, in the act of writing the poem. Its emissaries are the white space, of course, the full stops. But, also, all acts of grammar, which are its inroads. And the way the lines break, or slow. I’d like to think you can feel, by its accurate failures, the forces pressing against the sentence, the time order. And certain kinds of words, too, are messengers of silence. Not just vagueness and inaccuracy, but prepositions and conjunctions, for instance; and diction deliberately flattened to deaden pain. And certain sounds that deepen and slow the poem into sounds you can’t hear—all the long vowels in the sharp teeth of consonants. And echoes, and what is said by implication, by default… Because there is, of course, always the desire, the hope, that they are not two separate worlds, sound and silence, but they become each other, that only our hearing fails.
Source: bitterstrings
Post reblogged from lanugo with 6 notes
“The essence of our art lies in creating a lingering dream, good or bad, that others souls can enter. Dreaming one’s soul into another’s is an urgent business of the human mind: the dreaming itself, not whatever agenda can supposedly be extracted from it. As art, it plays on the nerves and the senses like a dream. It unfolds over time like a dream. It makes its own often disturbing and often inexplicable appeal to memory and emotion, creating itself again in the consciousness of the reader or hearer”—
Marilynne Robinson, “On ‘Beauty’” Tin House 50
I would like to consider this as an ideology for musical composition. I’m not sure if it is required that a composition enter the nervous and sensory systems, but surely it must penetrate the most topical layer of the receiver’s perception—that the 5’ composition be preferable to 5’ on facebook.
Source: flightbox
Quote reblogged from A la recherche du temps perdu with 127 notes
When I think of a landscape I am thinking of a time.
When I talk of taking a trip I mean forever.
I could say: those mountains have a meaning
but further than that I could not say.
Source: proustitute
Quote with 1 note
What is different about the word-tone debate is not primarily the question of intelligibility or morality, which, after all, are arguments that the ascetic reformers could easily glean from their reading of St Augustine; it is rather the question of disenchantment that effects the relationship between word and tone, forcing music into a kind of instrumental functionalism where tones are no longer things with a magical ontology but tools of efficient utility. In Foucauldian terms, the analogical unity created by the system of resemblances is replaced by a representational system where tones are made to represents words to achieve a unity of thought. This unity, however, divides.
Link reblogged from Did You Make It Clear? with 6 notes
Jackson Pollock’s methods for painting were a type of pure Dionysian art, where his process was to passionately throw colours onto a canvas. The result, often was something that looked quite complex but was made rather simply. It’s interesting to compare this to the modernist music of say,…
isn’t the beauty of Pollock’s artworks and similar ideologies underpinning the art of the Gutai movement the fact that the process is as integrally artistic as the result. Maybe one could even say (and this contradicts what I just typed, I realize) that the process is so integral to the creation of the art that the relics are not as much a piece of art as it was at the time of its inception.
Source: imaginarydances
Link reblogged from Godthings with 341 notes
“Vulnerability is something we instinctively reject because we are taught from kindergarten on that we must protect ourselves, control our behaviour and our lives. But, in becoming man for us, Christ made himself totally vulnerable for us in Jesus of Nazareth, and it is not possible to be a…
Source: libraryland
Thus there can be no such thing as an avant-garde among the artists of this kind of art, for the simple reason that there is nothing of which one can avant or in the rear. Since this kind of art is the expression, not of a world of formlessness that for the first time is emerging into form, but of a continuous reality in full formal operation, the only ultimately valid questions to be asked when trying to assess the value of such a work are to what degree has the artist’s imagination been informed by the archetypes of this reality and to what extent has he succeeded in communicating his apprehension of them in living terms.
I’ve been reading more of Philip Sherrard’s, ‘The Sacred in Life and Art’ and have excerpted a few sections to preserve here for usefulness and posterity’s sake.
A point that he makes quite clear, at the beginning of Chapter 3, is that one thing that cannot be disputed about works of art (although it very well could, if one had a rather obtuse definition of art) is that they are “not self-generated or autonomous. They are born from or at least through living men and women.” I appreciate this distinction, as it puts me in an empowering position as a composer: I have the control to make the works of art that I create really say something because it is not the art who is in the driver’s seat, but me myself and I.
It is said by Sherrard that an art that is endowed with sacred qualities must (paraphrase) “be removed of its opacity and made into a symbol of a higher level of reality. In this way it serves as a vehicle that puts man in mind of his spiritual origins and helps him in his efforts to return to them.” Sherrard urges that the artist must speak in the language of the vernacular, so if one is creating art in a society that does not subscribe to notions of religious iconography in the byzantium sense on the whole, then the artist should draw from his experiences in order to discover how to make these messages speak in the vernacular of the time. This makes good sense, but it seems to me that the artist now in 2011 is endowed with much more baggage to wade through than in the first several decades following the crucifixion of Christ.
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