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In 1958, High Fidelity magazine published the following article by avant-garde composer Milton Babbitt. Babbitt is known for taking serialism to the extreme and for being an active proponent of the modernist movement. This isn’t as cool as it might sound. Fortunately, the sort of attitude in which he took so much pride is increasingly [...]
This is an essay I wrote during a recent period in which I was interested in the question of to what extent, if any, emotion as an inherent property of music contributes to our emotional experience of music as listeners. I first look at some of the prevelant existing ideas on the topic (especially from philosophy [...]
We have a tendency to categorize and, in doing so, create hierarchies. This tendency leads to systems that confer a status of seemingly tangible reality to our ideas about the world, thereby confirming the hierarchy. For example, if we are given a collection of 20 randomly chosen rocks and asked to put them in some [...]
I have here another podcast recommendation. This podcast is Stephen Fry’s, which, if you don’t know it already, I recommend introducing yourself to via the excellent episode titled “Language” (Series 2, Episode 3). In 33 minutes he touches on so many topics (from structuralism to epistemology to a rant against linguistic pedantry and on and on…) [...]
I referred to the Philosophy Bites podcast in a previous post. Being Christmas day and all, this would be a good time to link an episode, for the latest is about about Jesus Christ himself. I also highly recommend going through the archives, as there is a lot of great stuff to check out: Don Cupitt [...]
I have recently begun listening to Marc Maron’s smart and funny WTF podcast. Yesterday I heard an episode in which comedian Janeane Garofalo was his guest (also smart and funny). Near the end of the conversation, Garofalo brought up the question, “What is an artist?” Maron responded by saying, “To me, an artist is somebody [...]
