Crrritic II – distance and dialogue

I’d been meaning for a while to write something about music criticism, and the increasing role of bloggers and online communities in its changing face.  Completely fortuitously, a bunch of stuff has popped up in the last couple of weeks: Firstly, a chatter post on NewMusicBox by Alexandra Gardner on the merits of newspaper reviews [...]

Computer games and Art

Film critic Roger Ebert has come out again, in response to a TED talk by game designer Kellee Santiago, with a declaration that computer games can never be art. At least, not in the lifetime of any gamer currently alive. This is the TED talk he was reponding to: Now, to give Ebert his due, [...]

The ‘Death’ of ‘Classical Music’

There’s a lot to say about the supposed ‘Death’ of ‘Classical Music’ (scare-quotes and scare-capitalisation added for additional scarification). Most of it’s been said by other people, but largely in response to other other-people who have said other things, about which they’re mostly wrong. I’m sure at some stage I’ll not be able to resist [...]

Book review: Sounding postmodernism

David Bennett’s Sounding postmodernism (published by the Australian Music Centre) is an attempt to look at Australian composition through the lens of a modern/postmodern dichotomy. Despite the understanding of these particular terms being highly contestable in a musical context (both are very highly politicised, and the claiming of these terms by particular aesthetic/ideological camps renders [...]

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