By art music I mean contemporary classical music. I could say that everything is wrong with it, but that’s probably too glib. Instead I’ll break it down into progressively deeper reasons.

1. The soundscape
Noise, texture, gesture over pitch, rhythm, harmony. You thought serialism was information poor. Well contemporary music is possibly worse.
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I’ve been rather ignorant of this discipline, and only saw categorization of historical style progressions as a taxonomic exercise. Over the years as I listened to classical music, I’ve gained at least one understanding of why there is a progression — something rooted in human expectation and its motivic innovation, I suppose (some fascinating papers on the subject of aesthetics here and here). But why this particular progression was never clear. Perhaps there was no rhyme or reason, I thought, just a coincidence.

So lately I’ve been considering whether there is some organization to better understand some milestones of (Western) art history, which get period labels like:

premodern, classicist, medieval, renaissance, baroque, rationalist, romantic, modern, and postmodern.
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The New York City subway, in analogy to New York City itself, is an old rat-infested hole prone to breakdown and teetering on the edge of operability. Its layout and signage are illogical but somehow comprehensible, its margin for error is just not there … yet, somehow it manages to run. Dirty, smelly, hot in summers, and generally contemptible, it is oddly alive and orderly. People not only put up with it, they adapt to it.

This is one of the nicer stations. Still looks like a 19th century dungeon, though; which of course, it is.

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I was on UK’s Daily Mail newspaper web site and suddenly this thing caught my eye. It was a flash ad promoting the newspaper, a veritable montage of “interesting things” that, through implication, the newspaper reported on. This is very common on local TV stations, which promote themselves this way. Innocuous enough, except I thought … wait a minute, isn’t this the infamous Kingdome implosion?

Sure enough, it was, and you can see it on Youtube.

Some local Seattle event is a bit far from the UK, and sure enough the Daily Mail never reported on this back in the day so far as I can tell. A bit of artistic liberty, surely, but perhaps there is more to it.
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