RE: [LAU] Re: That must suck. For me it's about beauty--musicisjustone path

On Thu, 2007-04-05 at 12:24 -0400, Ivica Ico Bukvic wrote:
> > > If placed within the right context, yes. As a matter of fact a lot of
> > modern
> > > electronica/glitch music relies heavily upon various kinds of noises,
> > including
> > > white noise. Besides, subtractive synthesis + white noise = a lot of
> > cool aural
> > > material...
> >
> > Well, there is a Linux program that will read the entire contents of a
> > hard drive as though it were one big audio file. So I guess we have
> > no more need for musicians, because that would be a collection of sine
> > waves of various frequencies, and that's all it takes.
>
> Oh dear...
>
> There are sounds and then there is music. Commonly music within this context
> is a collage of such sounds assembled through human arbitration (direct or
> indirect). First you argue how certain sounds are not musical and that is
> this is a universal fact (which it isn't), now you argue that those sounds
> in and of themselves cannot be music (which again is not universal truth).
> Please note that two arguments are not synonymous, but rather separate
> issues altogether.
>
> That being said, I'd suggest looking into writings of John Cage which talks
> about the notion of "happening" and removal of human arbitration from the
> compositional process.

i know that elvis costello once said that talking about music was like
dancing about architecture, but i see this as a good opportunity to rant
about a similarity i see between music and architecture. in the middle
part of the 20th century, there was a great explosion in both fields of
people throwing aside old conventions about how (music|architecture)
should be done. it turns out, 20-50 years later, that almost all of the
architecture that was produced via these radical approaches is awful on
any level except viewing it as abstract art, and even then, they are
generally not among the great works of the 20th century. towards the end
of the 20th century, christopher alexander started working on his book
"a pattern language" which utterly contrasted with the radicalism of the
century by attempting to look across cultures and time for architectural
patterns that are repeated, used, loved, resilient and robust. rather
than try to reinvent architecture from the ground up, he attempted to
reach an understanding of what works, based on what people have done
over hundreds or even thousands of years. i think it is fair to say that
even in those countries in western europe that were once so gripped by
the bauhaus and other architectural radicalists, architecture has
returned to an attempt to fuse together the kinds of lessons that "a
pattern language" documents with new technologies. this is a wildly
different approach than the radicalists pursued, perhaps because it also
comes without any agenda of social change. the results, to my taste, are
all good: we get a wonderful fusion of the new and the old, with
reverence and respect for what has worked for a very long time and for a
lot of people, combined with excitement and energy drawn from new
materials, new techniques and so forth. there are almost no john cages
left in the architecture world anymore. gropius is out, gehry is in.

in music, i think this started to happen in a similar way when the
minimalists started to become visible. tired of endless dissonance and
unemotional music, the early works by these composers tried to link
together old ideas (rhythm, pattern, phase) with new sounds and
techniques. within a few years, they had staged a revolution against 12
tone, serialist, aleatoric and stochastic composition, and were busy
linking the old (perotin's early musical structures) with the new or
newly discovered (ghanese drumming). the good stuff for me in
contemporary composition isn't linked to a social agenda, nor is it
attempting to radicalize a process that humans have participated in and
refined for a very long time. rather, like alexander's work did for
architects, it is taking in the best historical practices ("wow, people
really do actually like melody, harmony and rhythm") and linking it with
new sound generation and control techniques, new notions of performance,
new notions of performance context and in some cases even a few new
ideas :)

don't anybody ask me for examples, because i'll embarass myself with 20
year old ones :) but check out the kinds of things that bang on a can,
piano circus, kronos, the balanescu quartet and others have been doing
for 10+ years, and you'll bump into the kind of stuff i mean.

which is a long winded way of saying that i am left totally unmoved by
almost every piece of "electro-acoustic music" i've ever heard at a
contemporary music festival :))

--p

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Received on Thu Apr 5 20:15:19 2007