Thursday, September 02, 2010

Writing as if Composing

Run-on and runaway sentences; hanging sentence fragments; needling repetition; odd punctuation; obscurities and neologisms;  abrupt shifts of register, both up and down; anacoluthons; non-sequitors; too much stuffed away between ellipses, brackets, braces, or parentheses (when not hidden in footnotes below); seemingly arbitrary settings of text in italic or boldface character; metaphors mixed and mashed; knowingly faulty logic; opinions presented as facts; abused rhetoric (all 38 of Schopenhauer's Arts of Being Right on display and then-some)...  Guilty as charged!  All I can ask is that you, dear reader, bear with me even if these aspects of Renewable Music's house style book grate like so many fingernails on blackboards or even more ants in a bento box on a Saturday picnic turned to thunder, lightning, rain, gentle rain, then too much rain... The idea — and there really is one, here — is that the webblog is still a new medium, and one which has not yet found its extents and limits as a form of prose (or not-prose), and one which is not yet immune to the methods of an experimental composer, thus the breathless and short-of-breath and stuttered lines, the sudden interjections, jarring accents, and ragged articulations, and all those sounds, those troubled, troubling, consoling, caring, sweet, everyday, exotic, exhalted sounds...  What could be better than to aspire to a condition of music?  My fault, my failure then, may not be the experimenting but rather the stubborn fact of not having experimented enough. 

[Except, of course, for careless errors in spelling, grammar, or typos.  The fault, there, belongs to the damn computer.]

3 comments:

Elaine Fine said...

Gosh. I do that too. Actually, I make very little distinction between writing music and writing prose, except one tends to go faster than the other, because it is usually monophonic rather than polyphonic (or multiphonic, but only rarely in my music).

Repetition is an issue that doesn't transfer well to written language (at least for me, and at least in prose). It's welcome in music. It's necessary in music. It tends to be redundant in language. Repetition is an issue that doesn't transfer well to written language (at least for me, and at least in prose).

It is true what Wittegnstein says, "The limits of my language are the limits of my world." Particularly when it comes to music.

Anonymous said...

When I think about Bach's grandiose Art of Fugues:

http://dr-morpheus.blogspot.com/

I tend to ask myself: sure, it is a work of genius! BUT. Is it perfect? Or is it still, in a way, an imperfect art, an experiment - like most music, except, perhaps some works by Mozart.

I find it difficult to relate to Contrapunctus 2, for example. Then again, it may be my own problem.

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