With Strauss' Metamorphosen playing: a long, dense contrapuntal work, complex and final – one of his last.
Coward used to complain that critics called his work 'thin' – he would make fun of them, as though the adjective was meaningless; but of course in most of his work one can easily understand the criticism – the sentimentality of predictable emotions, worked out step by step without any huge surprises; and the long stretches based on only one or two ideas. It's sort of a problem in information theory: how much information, how many packages of 'real' data, are packed into each sentence? At least, that's a definition of artistic density for the computer age.
And so, low-density musics? – well, I suppose: minimalism that no longer has the excitement it did ten years ago (I played Geoff Smith's Fifteen Wild Decembers the other day, and was left wondering – why did I love this when it first came out? – not that it's bad; but now it seems, well, rather thin). Even some of the Darmstadt music I heard this semester while teaching it seemed relatively faint, almost the simple working-out of a concept – many events don't necessarily make for density.
On the other hand, high-density writing: like the short story I just read by M. John Harrison, 'Seven Guesses of the Heart' from his Things that Never Happen – I picked it out as the shortest story in the book, as something to read between doing other things; and was startled, brought up short, at the huge and complex feelings, meanings, sentences he put together. A short story with easily enough resonance for a novel: and most writers would have spun it out into one....
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