[Smt-talk] whether to laugh or cry?

[Dave Headlam]

Re:  Byrne's blunderingly burdensome but blindingly bountiful book, 
quoting Clive James in NYT:

"'How Music Works' is a roll of mental wallpaper, a textbook for a 
survey course you didn't mean to sign up for. It drifts between music 
history, sonic anthropology, mild biographical asides, broad pop theory 
and grandfatherly financial and artistic advice. It's all the things Mr. 
Byrne's twitchy and alienated music with Talking Heads 
<http://www.talking-heads.nl/> never was: genial, well-meaning, as 
forgettable as a real estate agent's handshake.

It ain't no party, this book. It definitely ain't no disco."


He's not foolin' around!

Dave Headlam


On 2/21/13 9:39 PM, Richard Cohn wrote:
> David Byrne's best-selling book "How Music Works", on the front-table 
> in many book-stores, has a quasi-learned discourse, with dutiful refs. 
> to Pythagoras etc., on "diachronic scales."
>
> My best guess:
> ^1 sounds in the 14th century;
> ^2 sounds in the 15th century
> .....the 20th century has the leading tone
> and here we are now on the tonic. Finally.
>
> Which makes them maximally even, as they should be.
>
> --Rick Cohn
> Yale University
> richard.cohn at yale.edu <mailto:richard.cohn at yale.edu>
>
>
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-- 
Dave Headlam
Professor of Music Theory
Eastman School of Music 585-274-1568
Joint Professor of Electrical and Computer
  Engineering    University of Rochester
david.headlam at rochester.edu
http://theory.esm.rochester.edu/dave_headlam

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