Time is the raw material of music, and as technology provided more of it, musicians exploited the extra minutes.
Taruskin opens your eyes to music you thought you knew - from Bach to Verdi, Cage to Reich - and above all forces you to engage with the material of music: its rhythms and pitches, its art and artifice, but much more importantly, its social, political, and expressive power.
His philosophy that students should explore music through a holistic process of self-discovery and acquaintance with all the arts was codified in a multiyear course called Literature and Materials of Music, which merged music history and theory into a comprehensive program of study.
But 50 years ago, all four did have something in common: a commitment to exploring the base materials of music with forensic, analytical detail.
After seeing parts of his film "The Clock," I've been fascinated by Marclay's work, some of which has been informed by the materials of music production and music release — vinyl records, cassettes, album covers, those kinds of things.
His music is not always concerned with those fissile social questions, and many of his pieces explore the fundamentals of a listening experience, getting to grips with the raw materials of music.
While the occasional theme quotation has perhaps introduced a famous musical classic to millions who would not otherwise haveheard it, the "workshop" program, showing how music and musicians go about their business, has broken down barriers of technique and exposed the raw materials of music in a way that has probably helped to foster a wider interest in the finished product.
Paul had grasp, above all of the materials of music, and knew intuitively that astonishing art that fails to entertain is mere avant-gardism.
But on Broadway, and in musical theater more generally, this has been a more-or-less ironclad division of labor: Composers are the tunesmiths who forge the raw material of the music — melody, harmony, rhythm — which arrangers and orchestrators then embellish into a full sound, much as costume designers clothe the actors.
When asked what Messiaen's main influence had been on composers, George Benjamin said, "I think the sheer... colour has been so influential,... rather than being a decorative element, [Messiaen showed that colour] could be a structural, a fundamental element,... the fundamental material of the music itself".
Phillip Bimstein uses street sounds as the raw material of his concert music, and Nico Muhly moves easily between the pop and classical worlds.
