Cliff Crego's blog, whitebark—
Notes scratched into a stonepine snag, open to the light, clear air . . .
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February 2011
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02/15/11
MUSIC & THE CULTURE OF FRAGMENTATION
Filed under: General
Posted by: @ 7:11 pm

Without a doubt, we live in a culture of universal fragmentation.
Fragmentation is not diversity, not the rich weave of niches
and differences we see and experience in the natural world.
Fragmentation in this view is always bad; it is the loss of
wholeness, when networks and structures are broken
apart, and connectedness and meaning are thereby lost.
Here’s an image of fragmentation that is easy to remember:
If you take a fine violin and smash it to pieces, you do not
get a lot of smaller violins. You get a pile of wooden shards,
good for starting a fire perhaps, but not much else.

Many of my reader/viewers are surprised to find out that
I’m also a composer. This always amazes me, because Art
Music—that is, classical, utterly non-commercial, newly
composed pieces for highly trained, devoted and talented
ensembles of musicians playing for the most part on natural,
non-amplified, instruments in real acoustic spaces before real
live audiences (all of which nowadays needs to be said with
some emphasis)—is at the very core of what I do, and why
I do it.

Have a look at the score of an OCTET I’ve featured above.
Just browse the geometry of forms. And then look at the
winter landscape of very similar pure both simple and infinitly
complex geometrical patterns. For me, they are but different
outward expressions of one world.

| score at: http://picture-poems.com/photoweek/morning-geometry_1-17-09bw.html

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