Tag / composition

by Sean Peuquet

Blurred Lines: Pharrell’s All Too Specific Style-Study

A jury found that Pharrell Williams’ and Robin Thicke’s “Blurred Lines” too closely resembles Marvin Gaye’s “Got to Give it Up” from 1977. Determining copyright infringement has always been more art than science; on some level it’s an exercise in pure metaphysics when we try to figure out what a subjective representation is. Relying on a notated score, or the script for how the music unfolds, makes sense because we can simply note-match (more of a science). But in the “Blurred Lines” case, when note-matching doesn’t reveal evidence of direct copy, a hack job, and the jury verdict nevertheless rules that Marvin Gaye was ripped off, we’re left scratching our heads. There is not only a legal context surrounding such a case, but an artistic and socio-cultural context as well. In the interest of unwrapping the significance of the verdict, a quick historical survey of modern aesthetics and the blurring of art and life might help us to establish such context.
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by Sean Peuquet

Mark Mothersbaugh Can’t Save All the Pipe Organs

I recently visited the Mark Mothersbaugh Myopia retrospective at the Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA) Denver, which is on exhibit until April this year. I also attended the artist’s 6-sided keyboard concert and exhibition talkback last month. But despite my cursory understanding of Mothersbaugh as a composer, pop star, and wide-ranging visual artist, I wasn’t quite prepared for the sheer deluge of material I encountered.

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by Sean Peuquet

Music for Every Moment

I was recently at dinner with a non-musician friend who volunteered a short and concise theory on the integration of music and everyday experience. He said “there’s a perfect piece of music for every moment.” It’s a wonderfully direct yet jarring statement, or at least it was for me. In fact, isn’t that little codicil (“for me”) precisely the issue? I am capable of doing what he says, of subjectively evaluating some auditory sensory input in terms of its fit in the moment for me. But wait a second… can such an evaluation be perfected for every moment?

Not dissimilar to Lewis Black’s famed stand-up bit about having overheard a stranger say, “if it was for my horse I wouldn’t have spent that year in college,” my friend’s theory both caught me by surprise and also bored into my ear, lodged itself deep in my brain, and refused to be ignored. A couple questions needed to be asked:

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by Sean Peuquet

Hearing Hearing

In his contribution to the first issue of Ear | Wave | Event, Peter Ablinger claims that there is an historical schism between visual and aural art practices along the axis of perception— of observing observation or subjective access. Quite simply, he asserts: “There has never been a Cézanne of music.” According to Ablinger, the history of music composition continues to further refine (if not continuously redefine) the processual activities of shaping sound into various configurations, be they tonal, atonal, or what-ever, while perpetually avoiding hearing. To hear (here reduced to a matter of mere passive reception) is itself simply assumed, and individualistic differences between that which sounds and that which is heard, while often acknowledged discursively, remain external to the imperatives of musical praxis; the circumscription of what is heard remains the focus, over that it is heard at all.

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