Marya Hart Music

Everything has ground to a halt. Heavy snow a couple of days ago and I have no ambition at all. The piano trio arrangements I am working on for a new version of “In Dreams…” are baffling me. The most straightforward of the pieces–which I thought I would whip off–seem impossible to put in any terms but piano. The more outside a piece is, the easier for me to reimagine it. Today I lack confidence. I will let it rest. It will come back.

Arnold Schoenberg

After going to a performance of two Schoenberg pieces, Verklärte Nacht followed by Pierrot Lunaire, I remarked to my companion that VN felt like an exploration of every possible conventional harmony. She said, “I’m pretty bored by Western harmony.” I’m not, but the harmonic cycling-through that happens in classical and romantic era music is starting to bother me. I’ll hear three Mozart symphonies in a row tomorrow afternoon. I wonder what effect that will have.

Played a hilariously varied variety show–Global Hotdish–at the History Center today with Jim Price and Ross Sutter. I don’t think I’ve seen lutefisk and West African drumming on the same program before. Desdamona and Carnage did some hip hop.

Carnage

I got to thinking about how mainstream hip hop has become; from being an outsider art form in the seventies to now being uncontroversial, barring some sour people who say, “I don’t like that rap stuff.” And then I thought about the history of blues music, and Tony Glover’s famous 1980’s remark that Chicago blues is the Dixieland jazz of the eighties. If the pattern holds, we can expect that in a less than half a century hip hop will be performed in crummy little bars across the USA by old white people who have straight jobs as lawyers and stuff.