I haven’t seen Bång’s piece, but speaking more generally this – “disconcertingly undermined by one or two factual errors and a myriad spelling mistakes” – is becoming a major irritation in new music. If you’re going to project text to an audience you absolutely *must* get it proofread by a third party. Ideally professionally, but at the very least a native speaker. I’ve seen far too many howlers recently, and it’s a massive distraction.
Thanks for this Tim, i’m relieved i’m not the only one who finds this annoying. To elaborate a little about the Bång piece, it wasn’t helped by the fact that the ensemble was required to type out the text manually in real-time. Challenging enough for a native English speaker but on this occasion i don’t think that applied to any members of the Curious Chamber Players. Most egregious was the first appearance of the actual title of the piece, rendered as “Kuszu”!
In terms of factual errors, that’s more debatable i guess. A reference was made to humanity’s culpability in the extinction of a certain percentage of the planet’s animal population, both the nature and the extent of which have been questioned by many prominent experts in that field, and later Bång made a comparison between plants and humans, referring to our “five senses”, when of course it’s widely understood we have many more than that. Indeed, some of the senses she ascribed specifically to plants (such as temperature) we share with them.
So all in all these issues just made an already woeful piece all the more excruciating to sit through.
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I haven’t seen Bång’s piece, but speaking more generally this – “disconcertingly undermined by one or two factual errors and a myriad spelling mistakes” – is becoming a major irritation in new music. If you’re going to project text to an audience you absolutely *must* get it proofread by a third party. Ideally professionally, but at the very least a native speaker. I’ve seen far too many howlers recently, and it’s a massive distraction.
Thanks for this Tim, i’m relieved i’m not the only one who finds this annoying. To elaborate a little about the Bång piece, it wasn’t helped by the fact that the ensemble was required to type out the text manually in real-time. Challenging enough for a native English speaker but on this occasion i don’t think that applied to any members of the Curious Chamber Players. Most egregious was the first appearance of the actual title of the piece, rendered as “Kuszu”!
In terms of factual errors, that’s more debatable i guess. A reference was made to humanity’s culpability in the extinction of a certain percentage of the planet’s animal population, both the nature and the extent of which have been questioned by many prominent experts in that field, and later Bång made a comparison between plants and humans, referring to our “five senses”, when of course it’s widely understood we have many more than that. Indeed, some of the senses she ascribed specifically to plants (such as temperature) we share with them.
So all in all these issues just made an already woeful piece all the more excruciating to sit through.