Blog #2

This second blog will concern last week, the days of the 14th, 15th, and 16th. 

In my pre-project blog, I initially said that my project would be to analyze professional pianist's performances and critique them. I would take a keen listen to the way they played specific pieces, making note of the musical and technical choices they made. However, a couple hours into trying to expand this topic, I realized it was rather shallow and it would be difficult for me to find authentic interest in it. I switched my project to now revolve around the question of: what is sincere music? This is a question that has long challenged me, musically speaking, and is inspired by a set of lectures I watched earlier in the year from the great 20th-century composer and conductor, Leonard Bernstein.

What I found so interesting and powerful within those lectures wasn’t just the fact he used fancy, complex language to communicate his point, and it wasn’t even because of his unique presence within the music field. It was simply because he connected each of his ideas to real-life and personal experiences. To my knowledge, there was not one point in those lectures that was not somehow attached to either a historical figure or his own personal relationship with music. I intend my final product to be a lecture similar to his, though I would never try to mimic or compete with his profound musical brilliance and insights. 

Comments

  1. Dr. JonesJune 4, 2025 at 2:00 PM

    Good work, Myles. I am glad Bernstein is an inspiration. I like how your project is aligning with structuralist/poststructuralist thought from the 1950s and 60s- Bernstein's era!

    ReplyDelete

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