From: paul@cgh.cgh.com (Paul Homchick)
Newsgroups: rec.music.classical
Subject: Re: liner notes
Keywords: best worst liner notes
Date: 2 Jan 93 01:59:53 GMT
Distribution: rec
Organization: Chimitt Gilman Homchick, Inc.

The best liner notes I have seen were included in the Telefunken Das
Alte Werk LP set of Bach's Cantatas.  My one volume of the collection
(BWV 99, 100, 101 and 102) included a book with two essays:
"Introduction" and "The significance of the Chorale Settings in the
sacred vocal compositions of Bach" as well as the words to each of the
Cantatas.  In additions, there was _another_ book containing the SCORE
for the four cantatas.  Predictably, the CD issues of these recording
do not include the same level of documentation.

The worst liner notes I can remember came from a CD of the piano music
of Scelsi:
================================================================
"Giacinto Scelsi's piano suites No. 9 'TTAI', written in 1953 and No.
10 'KA', in 1954, were conceived in the heyday of the international
serial revolution in musical composition. At the time, the key issue
was the emancipation and the constructivistic grasp of all of the
parameters of musical sound -- namely: 'notes'.  The purpose was to
regulate the relationship between notes and, thereby, to lead the
listener into as yet uncharted regions of musical experience.  This
revolution (as we sensed intuitively then, and must now recognize in
retrospect) heralded the highpoint of western music."

"The question as to what if anything was now left for a composer to do
was answered by Scelsi in that he had already done it long ago.  He
recognized early on the musical direction, so rich in perspectives,
that constituted the only way out of the doomed cycle of a paranoid
western musical tradition; this tradition had quite literally
succumbed to a folly of mis-associations, and had merely superceded
itself in each of its great musical upheavals.  His solution: the
realization that the historical development of the 'note' could take
place, not only in its relation to other notes, thus _outside_
itself, but also _within_ itself."

"Scelsi's displacement of the act of composition -- its positional
transfer, that is, in relation to the material -- from the outside to
the inside was the very first instance of a composer taking a
technical 'insider'-stance; paradoxically, this precisely was
misconstrued for a long time as the work of a technical 'outsider'.
The result was then furthermore misunderstood as a marginal
achievement, instead of being recognized as eccentric or exorbitant.
False sociological interpretations of aesthetic or other intellectual
phenomena are -- like all falsities in society -- virtually inevitable
consequences of the false society itself.  If music and history have
the one quality in common: that they both happen in time, it appears,
nevertheless, despite the largely technologically conditioned
acceleration of the historical process, that the temporal requirement
of history is still consideralby greater than that of music.  Thus
Scelsi's allegedly 'peripheral' outsider-stance may well prove to be
the true central point of modern musical composition."
================================================================

This clap-trap is the kind of writing that gives intellectuals a bad
reputation.  Besides which, some people (most?) might quibble with
equating "the heyday of the international serial revolution in musical
composition" with "the highpoint of western music."
-- 
Paul Homchick                    :UUCP     {rutgers | uunet} !cbmvax!cgh!paul
Chimitt Gilman Homchick, Inc.    :Internet                       paul@cgh.com
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