Etha Williams
Articles by Etha Williams:
Setting Words to Music: Rameau’s Nephew and the Way the Enlightenment Listened
in Issue 9 | Reconstruction (Oct 2011)« dancing about architecture » - « ask ten people the meaning of a Haydn symphony » - « melody is merely a succession of sounds. No doubt. » - melismata - harmony, at the time a hermeneutically empty vessel - Querelle des Bouffons - the final phenomenon imitated is silence itself - the manic appeal of the performance
Recurrences: Contemporary Music and the Question of Time
in Issue 4 | The Progress of Memory (May 2011)the medium of music is time - the concept of return - the gradual expansion—and then, decay—of tonality - mnemonic too-muchness - « competing trajectories as constituent contradictions » - the totalizing effect of the unisons - a dizzying array of dance - extremely strange sounds