30 March 2005

Intent

Somehow in college, I picked up New Criticism [Wikipedia] (trust the Art, not the Artist) and have been stuck with it ever since. This came up in yesterday's floundering about in the minutiae of pop music. Yet at the same time, I sometimes slip into Historicism's [Wikipedia] environment-aware analysis. Reagarding the fade out in music: I think that the only effective way to understand it in terms of an artistic choice is to view it only in terms of musical arrangement and performance. At the same time, it's at least interesting to try to understand how it came to be an artistic choice above any number of other techniques that are not common. Those are two different questions each with their distinct value.

[ posted by sstrader on 30 March 2005 at 2:41:38 PM in Music ]