criticism
-
Resonant Thoughts: Merve Emre’s “Has Academia Ruined Literary Criticism?” (2023)
“Establishing a formal method of critical inquiry was in part an attempt to put literary studies on a par with the sciences, which were the chief models for the development of the professions in the university. Close reading branched out into many methods of reading—rhetorical reading for the deconstructionists, symptomatic reading for the Marxists, reparative Continue reading
-
Notes On David Salle’s “How To See”
“To take a work’s psychic temperature, look at its surface energy.” – David Salle, How To See, p. 15. David Salle’s How To See: Looking, Talking, and Thinking About Art is a superb collection of writings about understanding visual art in terms of its intrinsic affective qualities rather than in terms of what it may express about Continue reading
-
Musical Resonances In “City Of Gold”
“In a lot of ways I think food is starting to take the place in culture that rock and roll took 30 years ago, in that eating has become incredibly political. And just as the street has always dictated fashions on music and other things, it’s starting to happen that way in food.” – Jonathan Continue reading
-
How Would You Analyze William Basinski’s “Cascade”?
It’s a beautiful, maybe melancholy piece of music. But where does it begin and end? It’s as if this music has been going for a long long time. It has an oceanic quality. It’s all about repetition. The music is built from a tape loop of a piano phrase. We hear a subtle melodic movement within Continue reading
-
Notes on John Berger’s “Portraits”
“The given is a prison.” – John Berger, Portraits, p. 37. For a few years now I’ve been loving the writing of the English critic, novelist, and cultural historian John Berger. I came to him through the work of Geoff Dyer, who is a huge Berger fan himself and made me aware of Berger’s classic Continue reading
-
Brett’s Sound Picks: Kara-lis Coverdale’s “Ad_renaline”
“Music is an adjectival experience.” -Simon Frith (Performing Rites, p. 263) The mood of Canadian organist and composer Kara-Lis Coverdale’s “Ad_renaline” is optimistic, though tinged with mystery too. The music is made up of layers of organ (organ-ish?) sounds and voices. We hear three pulsing staccato chords of uneven counts repeating a two measure phrase, with Continue reading
-
Juxtapositions: Edward Hopper’s “Nighthawks” (1942) And DJ Richard’s “Nighthawk” (2015)
Edward Hopper’s most iconic painting depicts several people in a city diner late at night. As with much of Hopper’s work, the mood of the scene is desolate, empty. The people seem more like concepts than characters, their individual life stories forever hidden from our view. In the Hopperian world, time itself is frozen. Continue reading
-
On Olivier Messiaen’s Astonishing Chords
“It is…the denial of forward-moving time that is the generative and fundamental substance of Messiaen’s music: the matter of his verbal commentaries is no more than an explanation of the music…and conducted in terms other than those of the music.” – Paul Griffiths, Olivier Messiaen and the Music of Time (1985, p. 17) Continue reading
-
On Wit And Work: Adam Gopnik On Two Kinds Of Creativity
In his recent New Yorker essay on creativity in jazz and popular music (drawing on recent biographies of Duke Ellington and The Beatles as his case studies), Adam Gopnik makes a distinction between idea-based and action-based notions of creativity: “Originality comes in two kinds: originality of ideas, and originality of labor, and although it is Continue reading
-
Notes On Music Distillations
Hieronymus Brunschwig’s The Book of the Art of Distillation, circa 1500. (Source: Wikipedia) The music speaks for itself, yet I still feel a need to respond to it. One way to respond is to copy it–internalizing the parts of the music that resonate with me and use them in my own work somehow. Another more Continue reading
brettworks 
You must be logged in to post a comment.