The Good Musician

John Cage composed music that regularly transgressed the boundaries of convention. A pupil of Schoenberg and Cowell, Cage came into his own during the 1960’s while teaching at the U of Illinois. He invented the prepared piano, a compositional technique to alter the sound of a single or several notes by using non-conventional items directly on either the strings or felt hammers, such as thumb tacks, or erasers placed between or among the piano strings.
For instance, you could assign an octave in the middle range the instructions: place thumb tacks on the hammers of the black keys from middle …read more

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I was browsing through some old music textbooks and came across a couple of cardboard name tags that read
ETSU
Summer Camper
1982
Evidently I took Renaissance and Baroque music that spring or fall. I worked for the music department’s Summer Camps while in graduate school, with a six-year old. This is not extraordinary on the surface, except that it reminded me of one of my favorite phenomenons–monumental changes in thinking, or paradigm shifts. This happens in music, too. Graduate studies in musicology examine the transition between the great eras–the Baroque, Romantic, et al. When did a new sound or rhythm appear in …read more

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