From MAILER-DAEMON Tue Feb 1 14:40:14 2000 Date: 01 Feb 2000 14:40:14 -0500 From: Mail System Internal Data Subject: DON'T DELETE THIS MESSAGE -- FOLDER INTERNAL DATA X-IMAP: 0949434014 0000000000 Status: RO This text is part of the internal format of your mail folder, and is not a real message. It is created automatically by the mail system software. If deleted, important folder data will be lost, and it will be re-created with the data reset to initial values. From mcmahon@metalab.unc.edu Tue Feb 1 14:03:00 2000 -0500 Status: X-Status: X-Keywords: Received: from listserv.american.edu (listserv.american.edu [147.9.238.200]) by luna.oit.unc.edu (8.9.3/8.9.3) with ESMTP id OAA11375 for ; Tue, 1 Feb 2000 14:03:29 -0500 (EST) Received: from listserv (listserv.american.edu [147.9.238.200]) by listserv.american.edu (8.9.3/8.7) with ESMTP id OAA25344 for ; Tue, 1 Feb 2000 14:00:31 -0500 Message-Id: <200002011900.OAA25344@listserv.american.edu> Date: Tue, 1 Feb 2000 14:00:31 -0500 From: "L-Soft list server at LISTSERV.AMERICAN.EDU (1.8d)" Subject: File: "EMUSIC-L LOG0001A" To: mcmahon@METALAB.UNC.EDU Content-Type: text Content-Length: 132842 ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 31 Dec 1999 23:51:43 -0600 Reply-To: Electronic Music Discussion List Sender: Electronic Music Discussion List From: Timothy Kelly Subject: Re: Racter 2000 and EMUSIC-L MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Hi All, I was born mysteriously near a large body of water, when the moon was full, and reports of UFO's were running at an all time high. Rumors always surrounded my life, that I was really a alien, some top secret clone experiment, or a new genetic mutation. Some whispered it was really exposure to a new type of radiation given off by too many SID chips, and shortened out Moog patch cords. I do have the rare ability to pop a light bulb simply by touching it, which is why I perfer Ott-Lites, they seem to be pop proof. And can play any guitar chord known to modern man, thanks to jazz guitarist Ted Greenes help over the years. Others claim my appearances at AES shows, and NAMM shows, and NATS conventions were really arranged with the help of secret Russian Tesla holographic experiments. Or simply more rumors with the hidden purpose of delaying the enhanced version of MAX coming out for Windows 2000. So, if I am still on this plane, after Y2K, which is named after my twin sisters, Yolanda and Yancy Kelly, then am I real or it is simply beta testing of KellMail 2000? My new auto responder bot software, that can answer all your email, leaving you free to compose and listen to more emusic. Happy New Year KellMail 2000 MidiVox World's 1st Voice to Midi. Hum, Talk, Sing. Love is a Sound Healing CDs and Tapes. Teach Yourself Singing Home Study Course. Songs Just For You. Your Personal Songwriter. Sound Healing and Music Healing Resources. HealingMusic.Net Please Visit Soon. ========================================================================= Date: Sun, 3 Jan 0100 11:25:57 -0500 Reply-To: Electronic Music Discussion List Sender: Electronic Music Discussion List From: Joe McMahon Subject: Re: thonk In-Reply-To: from "harnden " at Dec 30, 99 10:20:53 pm Content-Type: text > "by antiorp"? i thought it made fun of antiorp... the control with an > antiorpish title (something like akadem!c = zuks) pops up with "yeah, > right... you thonk." or is that a bootleg feature? The artwork in the background has a certain antiorpish feel - if you've ever visited his site, he actually has a flair for these post-industrial Photoshop things. Will try some Thonk output vs. the Metasynth demo, at least, which is wandering around my hard drive somewhere. --- Joe M. ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 3 Jan 2000 13:41:38 -0500 Reply-To: nwberry@ix.netcom.com Sender: Electronic Music Discussion List From: Nate Berry Subject: Re: Groaner alert. In-Reply-To: <199912280009.TAA25345@shell.clark.net> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Reminds me of my early misunderstanding of a particular song... "there is a balm in Gilead" - of course, not knowing how a "bomb" could sooth anyone, it took me some years to understand the intent of the author, and it was udder cream ( bag balm ) that finally opened my eyes (so to speak) :) This almost ties in with the discussion of negative and positive music - clearly subject to interpretation. Nate BTW: that little "b" word probably got this email stored in some national security data warehouse somewhere... hope you all appreciate the risk I took posting this message to the list (does smiley face apply?) -----Original Message----- From: Electronic Music Discussion List [mailto:EMUSIC-L@LISTSERV.AMERICAN.EDU]On Behalf Of Joe McMahon Sent: Monday, December 27, 1999 7:09 PM To: EMUSIC-L@LISTSERV.AMERICAN.EDU Subject: Re: Groaner alert. > The Listowner inflicteth the wounds, and the Listowner salveth the wounds. > Blessed be the name of the Listowner. Amen. > The guy selling the house two down from mine is Bob Gilead. I cannot pass that house without thinking "Is there Bob in Gilead?" --- Joe M. ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 3 Jan 2000 14:38:58 -0500 Reply-To: Electronic Music Discussion List Sender: Electronic Music Discussion List From: mark simon Subject: Re: Millennial thoughts on music and progress. In-Reply-To: <88256851.0000E840.00@amm03.paloalto.avid.com> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"; format=flowed >The idea of progress in the quality of music (something like Messiaen > >Mozart > >Machaut) is of course absurd, so absurd that, except perhaps for the wacky >Futurist manifestoes we all know and love, I've never seen it seriously >proposed.Im not sure why Mark thinks such an idea has been an important >factor in the development of twentieth-century music, but I'm willing to >listen >if he wants to make a case. My statement about progress concerned "progress" as defined by technical compositional devices. Either you have not received training in an academic music department, or things have changed considerably since my student days. Hopefully, the latter. The history of 20th century music, as presented to me in college, was basically a list of "who did what first". Well, there was more to it than that, but the understanding was that the Great Composers were the ones that made some great technical innovation that changed the way music was made. Stravinsky introduced mixed meters and bitonality. Schoenberg introduced atonality and invented the 12-tone system. Messiaen devised his nonretrogradable rhythms and modes of limited transposition, and wrote Mode de Valeurs et d'Intensites, which led to the total serialism of Boulez and Stockhausen. Cage invented aleatorism, and led to scores with graphic notation by Earl Brown and Haubenstock-Ramati. Xenakis had his Stochastic music. Penderecki used new ways of playing on traditional instruments. These people were great because they did these things. Other composers were not so great because they didn't invent any new technique. I heard Penderecki himself declare that the piano was obsolete because there weren't any new ways of playing it left. Later I heard Karel Husa explain that it was a great pity that tonality was "used up", but that's just the way it is, "we have to find new sounds, because soon people may be making weekly trips to the moon", an interesting metaphor, considering theres' nothing up there. I eventually came to realize this was an exceedingly shallow way of looking at music. Now I love Stravinsky and Schoenberg, but the last thing I'm interested in when I listen to their music is "this is the first time a composer did such and such". I listen to these composers because they had something important to say, something deeply exciting and moving. Now composers have been writing deeply exciting and moving music for centuries, but every time someone does it again, the experience is always new and fresh. The invention of new compositional techniques may be an interesting byproduct, but it's not the point. This progress-oriented view of music also marginalizes a lot of important music. For instance Sibelius, or Shostakovich. You don't see a lot of space devoted to these composers in 20th century history books, even though their works are rather widely performed. (Perhaps this has changed). I remember playing the clarinet solo in Strauss' Duett-Concertino for clarinet and bassoon with string orchestra in a Cornell Symphony concert. One of my fellow composition grad students came up to me afterwards and said "That piece can't be any good. I mean, it was written in 1949. The style is way outdated". And I asked her "so it would be a good piece if it was written in 1899, but not 1949?" And she paused and said "well, you know.....". So, are we supposed to listen to music with a date book in hand, calculating compositional techniques used with date of composition? "Are we having fun yet?" Zippy the Pinhead's immortal line is funny because the nature of fun is spontaneous. If you have to ask if you're having fun, you can't really know what fun is. For music substitute "Am I being moved yet?" If you have to check a calendar to decide if you're being moved, you've missed the point. And yet if you buy into the idea of "progress" then you have to do just that. Staussian romanticism + 1949 = Bad piece. Even this past year I sat in on a composition seminar at the Cornell music dept. and heard grad students in all seriousness talk about serialism as the "main stream of 20th century music", and that Stravinsky was just a follower since he didn't come to the 12 tone system until the late 1950s. Give me a break! All that other music he wrote counts for nothing? And only a couple of weeks ago the New York Times printed another rant from Paul Griffiths complaining that "there have been no new technical developments in composition in the past 30 years" and accusing young post-modern composers of "nostalgiac longing for the past". Both statements are false, IMHO, but he believes this to be true. I think it was this article that prompted me to write about progress in the first place. All of this is a long and convoluted way of saying yes, the idea of progress has been an important factor in the development of 20th century music and it profoundly affects what music is performed and added to "the canon" and what isn't. >On the other hand, C20 certainly saw a lot of deliberate attempts to >create new >sonic resources. I think this is perfectly laudable. Just don't make it the only, or the ultimate yardstick for evaluating music. I enjoyed coming back and reading through all the variations on this thread. My favorite response was from Michael Rees >easuring progress implies a known goal. that is, unless one knows the goal >t is not possible to determine whether one is moving toward it. >id i miss something? progress is being measured, so the goal (and therefore >he end) for music must be determinate. surely, i must be travelling in the >rong circles, for the goal -- other than to sate my own conation -- remains >lusive. //////////////////////////////////////////////////////////// \\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\ Mark G. Simon mgs2@cornell.edu "Writing about music is *not* like dancing about architecture!! Not by a long shot!! Believe me, I've tried both." \\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\ ///////////////////////////////////////////////////////// ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 3 Jan 2000 15:47:39 -0500 Reply-To: Electronic Music Discussion List Sender: Electronic Music Discussion List From: "Michael R. Ridderbusch" Subject: Re: Millennial thoughts on music and progress. In-Reply-To: <4.2.0.58.20000103095547.00b3ec40@postoffice.mail.cornell.e du> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: multipart/alternative; types="text/plain,text/html"; boundary="=====================_10609222==_.ALT" --=====================_10609222==_.ALT Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" At 02:38 PM 1/3/00 -0500, Mark Simon wrote: >My statement about progress concerned "progress" as defined by technical >compositional devices. >Either you have not received training in an academic music department, or >things have changed considerably since my student days. Hopefully, the >latter. The history of 20th century music, as presented to me in college, >was basically a list of "who did what first". Well, there was more to it >than that, but the understanding was that the Great Composers were the ones >that made some great technical innovation that changed the way music was >made. Stravinsky introduced mixed meters and bitonality. Schoenberg (snip) >not so great because they didn't invent any new technique. I heard >Penderecki himself declare that the piano was obsolete because there >weren't any new ways of playing it left. To Penderecki: Oh, pleeeeeeeeez! Give me a break!! >Later I heard Karel Husa explain >that it was a great pity that tonality was "used up", He's got to be kidding! You heard these things! Perhaps I've been a little in the dark. OTOH, I recall how the pressure was on when I was in shcool to become one with the body of serialists. There must be a balancing point of view in musical academia. Schoenberg perhaps anticipated this attitude when he said "there is plenty of good music to written in C major". >but that's just the >way it is, "we have to find new sounds, because soon people may be making >weekly trips to the moon", an interesting metaphor, considering theres' >nothing up there. I guess the "logic" behind this comment is that we're living in "modern" times, and that we need to write music that reflects the change going on around us. Truth is, to be a modern composer, one simply needs to be living today, and writing music, without thinking about whether it's modern or not. Doesn't everyone know this? (snip) >Even this past year I sat in on a composition seminar at the Cornell music >dept. and heard grad students in all seriousness talk about serialism as >the "main stream of 20th century music", and that Stravinsky was just a >follower since he didn't come to the 12 tone system until the late 1950s. >Give me a break! All that other music he wrote counts for nothing? Hard to believe that this is the prevailing attitude today. Don't know. >And only >a couple of weeks ago the New York Times printed another rant from Paul >Griffiths complaining that "there have been no new technical developments >in composition in the past 30 years" and accusing young post-modern >composers of "nostalgiac longing for the past". Both statements are false, >IMHO, but he believes this to be true. I think it was this article that >prompted me to write about progress in the first place. I wonder what other voices are out there? ________________________________________ Michael R. Ridderbusch Assistant Curator West Virginia and Regional History Collection West Virginia University Libraries Colson Hall, PO Box 6464 Morgantown, WV 26506-6464 Phone 304 293-3536 Fax 304 293-3981 E-Mail mridder@wvu.edu ________________________________________ --=====================_10609222==_.ALT Content-Type: text/html; charset="us-ascii" At 02:38 PM 1/3/00 -0500, Mark Simon wrote:

>My statement about progress concerned "progress" as defined by technical
>compositional devices.
>Either you have not received training in an academic music department, or
>things have changed considerably since my student days. Hopefully, the
>latter. The history of 20th century music, as presented to me in college,
>was basically a list of "who did what first". Well, there was more to it
>than that, but the understanding was that the Great Composers were the ones
>that made some great technical innovation that changed the way music was
>made. Stravinsky introduced mixed meters and bitonality. Schoenberg

(snip)

>not so great because they didn't invent any new technique. I heard
>Penderecki himself declare that the piano was obsolete because there
>weren't any new ways of playing it left.

To Penderecki:  Oh, pleeeeeeeeez!  Give me a break!!

>Later I heard Karel Husa explain
>that it was a great pity that tonality was "used up",

He's got to be kidding!

You heard these things!  Perhaps I've been a little in the dark.
OTOH, I recall how the pressure was on when I was in shcool to become
one with the body of serialists.

There must be a balancing point of view in musical academia.

Schoenberg perhaps anticipated this attitude when he said
"there is plenty of good music to written in C major".

>but that's just the
>way it is, "we have to find new sounds, because soon people may be making
>weekly trips to the moon", an interesting metaphor, considering theres'
>nothing up there.

I guess the "logic" behind this comment is that
we're living in "modern" times, and that we need to write music that reflects
the change going on around us.  Truth is, to be a modern composer,
one simply needs to be living today, and writing music, without thinking
about whether it's modern or not.  Doesn't everyone know this?

(snip)

>Even this past year I sat in on a composition seminar at the Cornell music
>dept. and heard grad students in all seriousness talk about serialism as
>the "main stream of 20th century music", and that Stravinsky was just a
>follower since he didn't come to the 12 tone system until the late 1950s.
>Give me a break! All that other music he wrote counts for nothing?

Hard to believe that this is the prevailing attitude today.
Don't know.

>And only
>a couple of weeks ago the New York Times printed another rant from Paul
>Griffiths complaining that "there have been no new technical developments
>in composition in the past 30 years" and accusing young post-modern
>composers of "nostalgiac longing for the past". Both statements are false,
>IMHO, but he believes this to be true. I think it was this article that
>prompted me to write about progress in the first place.

I wonder what other voices are out there?


________________________________________
Michael R. Ridderbusch
Assistant Curator
West Virginia and Regional History Collection
West Virginia University Libraries
Colson Hall, PO Box 6464
Morgantown, WV  26506-6464
Phone   304 293-3536
Fax         304 293-3981
E-Mail    mridder@wvu.edu
________________________________________
--=====================_10609222==_.ALT-- ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 3 Jan 2000 16:36:13 -0600 Reply-To: Electronic Music Discussion List Sender: Electronic Music Discussion List From: Steve Chandler Subject: Re: Millennial thoughts on music and progress. In-Reply-To: <4150F18286D6D211A3430020482163600202EAA7@ECX> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: multipart/alternative; boundary="----=_NextPart_000_000E_01BF5607.99DE3660" This is a multi-part message in MIME format. ------=_NextPart_000_000E_01BF5607.99DE3660 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Hi all, I can't agree more with both Mark and Michael. If there's a positive trend it would be that many nonacademic (that is college trained but no longer affiliated with a school) composers seem to be turning to music as a means of expression again. There are plenty of such folk out there as the proliferation of web rings, clubs, lists and MP3 sites would attest. Most of this is fueled by the internet and computer recording technology, but it is a fact of life that the academic community would do well to pay attention to. We don't need new techniques, we need to find ways to make the techniques we have more expressive and more relevant to a wider audience (though not necessarily a popular audience). Paul Griffiths is welcome to express his views, but they are frankly irrellevant. The only negative thing in all this is that the easy availability of technology has made it possible for anyone with a few bucks and the desire to make music, thus there's a lot of mediocre music on the internet. The fantastic thing is that this same inexpensive technology has made it possible for talented composers to make excellent music readily available for free on the internet. The fact is this is progress and like all progress it has good and bad points to it. My only question is whether any of this excellent music will have an opportunity to join the mainstream? That part of history has yet to be made much less written about. In the meantime, keep composing and keep expressing. Cheers, Steve Chandler www.mp3.com/stevechandler ------=_NextPart_000_000E_01BF5607.99DE3660 Content-Type: text/html; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable
Hi=20 all,
 
I=20 can't agree more with both Mark and Michael. If there's a positive trend = it=20 would be that many nonacademic (that is college trained but no longer = affiliated=20 with a school) composers seem to be turning to music as a means of = expression=20 again. There are plenty of such folk out there as the proliferation of = web=20 rings, clubs, lists and MP3 sites would attest. Most of this is fueled = by the=20 internet and computer recording technology, but it is a fact of life = that the=20 academic community would do well to pay attention to. We don't need = new=20 techniques, we need to find ways to make the techniques we have more = expressive=20 and more relevant to a wider audience (though not necessarily a popular=20 audience).
 
Paul Griffiths is=20 welcome to express his views, but they are frankly irrellevant. The = only negative thing in all this is that the easy availability of = technology=20 has made it possible for anyone with a few bucks and the desire to make = music,=20 thus there's a lot of mediocre music on the internet. The fantastic = thing is=20 that this same inexpensive technology has made it possible for talented=20 composers to make excellent music readily available for free on the = internet.=20 The fact is this is progress and like all progress it has good and bad = points to=20 it.
 
My only question is whether any of this = excellent music=20 will have an opportunity to join the mainstream? That part of history = has yet to=20 be made much less written about.
 
In the meantime, keep composing and keep = expressing.=20
 
Cheers,
Steve Chandler
www.mp3.com/stevechandler
------=_NextPart_000_000E_01BF5607.99DE3660-- ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 4 Jan 2000 10:51:16 +1000 Reply-To: Electronic Music Discussion List Sender: Electronic Music Discussion List From: David Rodger Subject: Re: Millennial thoughts on music and progress. In-Reply-To: <4.2.0.58.20000103095547.00b3ec40@postoffice.mail.cornell.edu> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Mark Simon wrote: >Even this past year I sat in on a composition seminar at the Cornell music >dept. and heard grad students in all seriousness talk about serialism as >the "main stream of 20th century music", and that Stravinsky was just a >follower since he didn't come to the 12 tone system until the late 1950s. >Give me a break! All that other music he wrote counts for nothing? I wonder whether the apparent admiration of 12-tone music among certain groups (especially, but not exclusively, academics) is related to the value placed on egalitarian society. Just as all people are created equal and should be given equality of opportunity, all notes are created equal and should be used in a non-hierarchical manner! If this is so, I see a certain irony in the fact that 12-tone music is top of the tree in the "hierarchy of ideas"! As I recall, John Shepherd made a good argument that 12-tone music is actually an extension of tonal and harmonic hierarchy, rather than a measure for equalising the relationships between tones. Unfortunately, I can't find my copy of his book "Music as Social Process" (I think I lent it to someone and I can't remember who or when). Regards, David David Rodger --- Audio, Training & Research --- auricle@alphalink.com.au http://www.alphalink.com.au/~auricle http://www.alphalink.com.au/~adzohu "... with a three year old in the house, I treasure being able to listen to 4'33" when I can..." --Mike Metlay ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 3 Jan 2000 15:42:25 -0800 Reply-To: Electronic Music Discussion List Sender: Electronic Music Discussion List From: Robert Edgar Subject: Re: Millennial thoughts on music and progress. MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: multipart/alternative; boundary="----=_NextPart_000_013F_01BF5601.21F19620" This is a multi-part message in MIME format. ------=_NextPart_000_013F_01BF5601.21F19620 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable My only question is whether any of this excellent music will have an = opportunity to join the mainstream? That part of history has yet to be = made much less written about. With the dissolution of broadcasting into multicasting, that = mainstream is becoming a smaller and smaller percentage of the = whole--this is both reflective of and part of the cause of the = fragmenting of an avant garde. You need an accepted avant garde to mark = progress in an art form, and since the 1970s that target has been less = and less defined. Simply put, it didn't used to be this way: no = mainstream, no avant garde. Marketing itself has become much more focused, and so doesn't reflect = the dissolution--until you count the indie lables, mp3 sites etc. that = represent a more and more significant section of the audience that the = major labels previously would sell to. As the major labels lose market = share, they become more conservative--which is why it is that while we = have more diversity, the major labels offer less diversity. Academia is one way of existing as a splinter group.=20 ------=_NextPart_000_013F_01BF5601.21F19620 Content-Type: text/html; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable
My only question is whether any of this = excellent=20 music will have an opportunity to join the mainstream? That part of = history=20 has yet to be made much less written about.
 
With the dissolution of broadcasting into = multicasting, that=20 mainstream is becoming a smaller and smaller percentage of the = whole--this is=20 both reflective of and part of the cause of the fragmenting of an = avant garde.=20 You need an accepted avant garde to mark progress in an art form, and = since=20 the 1970s that target has been less and less defined. Simply put, it = didn't=20 used to be this way: no mainstream, no avant garde.
 
Marketing itself has become much more focused, and = so=20 doesn't reflect the dissolution--until you count the indie lables, mp3 = sites=20 etc. that represent a more and more significant section of the = audience that=20 the major labels previously would sell to. As the major labels lose = market=20 share, they become more conservative--which is why it is that while we = have=20 more diversity, the major labels offer less diversity.
 
Academia is one way of existing as a splinter = group.=20
------=_NextPart_000_013F_01BF5601.21F19620-- ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 3 Jan 2000 22:22:22 -0500 Reply-To: Electronic Music Discussion List Sender: Electronic Music Discussion List From: Steven Wartofsky Subject: Re: Millennial thoughts on music and progress. In-Reply-To: <4.2.0.58.20000103095547.00b3ec40@postoffice.mail.cornell.edu> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit >>the Great Composers were the ones >>that made some great technical innovation that changed the way music was >>made. Stravinsky introduced mixed meters and bitonality. Schoenberg >>introduced atonality and invented the 12-tone system. Messiaen devised his >>nonretrogradable rhythms and modes of limited transposition, and wrote Mode >>de Valeurs et d'Intensites, which led to the total serialism of Boulez and >>Stockhausen. Cage invented aleatorism, and led to scores with graphic >>notation by Earl Brown and Haubenstock-Ramati. Xenakis had his Stochastic >>music. Penderecki used new ways of playing on traditional instruments. >>These people were great because they did these things. Other composers were >>not so great because they didn't invent any new technique. I heard >>Penderecki himself declare that the piano was obsolete because there >>weren't any new ways of playing it left. Later I heard Karel Husa explain >>that it was a great pity that tonality was "used up", but that's just the >>way it is, "we have to find new sounds, because soon people may be making >>weekly trips to the moon", an interesting metaphor, considering theres' >>nothing up there. >>I eventually came to realize this was an exceedingly shallow way of looking >>at music. Now I love Stravinsky and Schoenberg, but the last thing I'm Doesn't it all have to do with _why_ you're listening to the music? And there are so many different good reasons to do so. The ones you describe above have to do with the historical, logical efforts at understanding the traditional forms of (mostly) Euro-American music and trying to _use_ that history to do something not yet done. From a conceptual point of view, all of the things you point to above are thus truly advances, there's no arguing that -- and they're not just acts of sterile "technique," either, unless you reduce the historical understanding of the forms of music as "merely technique." If so, then J.S. Bach is the most sterile of all, yes? The one significant lack in the above list of innovation, though, is any discussion or explanation as to what _other_ elements contributed to the importance of atonality, say, for Schoenberg, or graphic notation for Brown and H-R. Taken entirely out of context the way they're presented above, of course they have no meaning. Put in historical context, however, a particular dissonance might turn from abstraction into anguished, passionate statement, more moving than any hysterical posturing on a more literally dramatic stage (such as the internet ). Concerns with innovation and obsolescence are themselves part of a historical attitude and tradition, i.e. "modernism," that supposedly we have already post-ed and beyond-ed since 1968 or so.....? But outside the issue of that modernist impulse toward the new (dated as it is at this point), _any_ form can reach a state of exhaustion when used for long enough. It's hard to make a good, traditional Western in film; it's hard to do an interesting real-time strategy game in PC computer gaming; it's hard to rap in a way that doesn't sound totally derivative at this point, if you've been listening and/or rapping since 1979, as many have. To cite a few examples. And the question then is, how to get out of this abyss of repetition? Or does that repetition in itself help break out a new form? As with politics and science in the 40's/50's/60's, the urge back then in music was to somehow "force" new things into existence, to push for radical innovations. The results of such totalistic efforts were mixed, both destructive and (sometimes) ground-breaking, but in any event, they were quite fragile. A hot-house plant continues to need hot-house conditions to survive. But that doesn't make rolling in the grass a sufficient alternative technique, though it may provide short-term satisfaction. Steve ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 4 Jan 2000 14:16:01 -0500 Reply-To: Electronic Music Discussion List Sender: Electronic Music Discussion List From: mark simon Subject: Re: Millennial thoughts on music and progress. In-Reply-To: <001e01bf5662$ea22dbc0$7bb8183f@wartley> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"; format=flowed > > > >>I eventually came to realize this was an exceedingly shallow way of >looking > >>at music. Now I love Stravinsky and Schoenberg, but the last thing I'm > >Doesn't it all have to do with _why_ you're listening to the music? And >there are so many different good reasons to do so. The ones you describe >above have to do with the historical, logical efforts at understanding the >traditional forms of (mostly) Euro-American music and trying to _use_ that >history to do something not yet done. From a conceptual point of view, all >of the things you point to above are thus truly advances, there's no arguing >that -- and they're not just acts of sterile "technique," either, unless you >reduce the historical understanding of the forms of music as "merely >technique." If so, then J.S. Bach is the most sterile of all, yes? No arguing? As long as I'm here there will be arguing. I'm sorry, your reasoning utterly escapes me. Perhaps you omitted some steps in your train of thought that you assumed to be obvious. First of all, the word "advances" has value judgment written all over it. You'll have to show me that when you say "advances" you don't mean "better", which means you'll have to counteract all the experience I've had among the pointy-headed. You'll have to admit to me that accepting these "advances" you are not rejecting the validity of other practices. You'll have to show that what you advocate truly represents expanding the resources for music making today, rather than replacing one resource with another. And once you do that you'll have proven that you've taken my side of the argument :^) >The one significant lack in the above list of innovation, though, is any >discussion or explanation as to what _other_ elements contributed to the >importance of atonality, say, for Schoenberg, or graphic notation for Brown >and H-R. I'm sure Schoenberg felt atonality to be a necessity, though I'm not sure he regarded tonality as therefore obsolete, as the Darmstadt crowd did. For Brown and Haubenstock-Ramati and all the other post-1945 guys, their innovations seem to me to represent markers of identity in a closed social circle. The Darmstadt crowd brandished their total serialism the way that punks displayed their spiked hair, or todays kids flaunt their nose rings and tongue studs, or drive by with their rap blaring. The fact that it offends everybody not in the group only cements their identity with the group. What they think they're saying is "We're cool, you're not". Or as Boulez put it, "Anyone who has not seen the necessity of serialism is irrelevant." Of course we're all beyond that, right? Sometimes it doesn't seem so, as the Cornell grad students and Paul Griffiths demonstrate. > Taken entirely out of context the way they're presented above, of >course they have no meaning. Put in historical context, however, a >particular dissonance might turn from abstraction into anguished, passionate >statement, more moving than any hysterical posturing on a more literally >dramatic stage (such as the internet ). The early music people make this same kind of argument. Listening to music of another era often invites us to put ourselves in the frame of mind of a person from that era. I'm not sure what it has to do with the issue at hand. Ultimately, it's just us listening with our own expectations and prejudices. And by the way, music is always more moving and interesting than any internet discussion, we all know that. WE still do it. >Concerns with innovation and obsolescence are themselves part of a >historical attitude and tradition, i.e. "modernism," that supposedly we have >already post-ed and beyond-ed since 1968 or so.....? But outside the issue >of that modernist impulse toward the new (dated as it is at this point), >_any_ form can reach a state of exhaustion when used for long enough. And perhaps that point comes when musicians get so bogged down in their history that they self-consciously start trying to manipulate the outcome of history, rather than letting it takes its own course. >But that doesn't make rolling in the grass a sufficient alternative >technique, though it may provide short-term satisfaction. I can't imagine what you're talking about. //////////////////////////////////////////////////////////// \\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\ Mark G. Simon mgs2@cornell.edu "Writing about music is *not* like dancing about architecture!! Not by a long shot!! Believe me, I've tried both." \\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\ ///////////////////////////////////////////////////////// ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 4 Jan 2000 22:08:31 -0000 Reply-To: Electronic Music Discussion List Sender: Electronic Music Discussion List From: Nick Rothwell Subject: Re: Millennial thoughts on music and progress. In-Reply-To: <4.2.0.58.20000103095547.00b3ec40@postoffice.mail.cornell.edu> (message from mark simon on Mon, 3 Jan 2000 14:38:58 -0500) > Now I love Stravinsky and Schoenberg, but the last thing I'm > interested in when I listen to their music is "this is the first > time a composer did such and such". I listen to these composers > because they had something important to say, something deeply > exciting and moving. Here's a somewhat tangential thought for you: the only reason we've heard of Stravinsky and Schoenberg is that they did, or were perceived to have done, something new. The media loves things which are "new" over and above things which have artistic merit. Artists who are good will not become known unless they are also considered (and declared) new, innovative, contemporary, controversial, or whatever. I'm starting to do some stuff on the seminar circuit: demonstrations, short performances, stuff like that. The actual quality of my work is unimportant at this stage: more important is that I can come up with buzzwords which suggest some unique selling point or a non-trivial barrier to entry. Scanner became well-known not because of the quality of his music but because he performed music from scanned phone conversations. Phil Jeck became well-known not because of the quality of his music but because he performs using Dansette record players. -- Nick Rothwell Cassiel.com Limited nick@cassiel.com www.cassiel.com systems - composition - installation - performance ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 4 Jan 2000 18:15:30 -0500 Reply-To: Electronic Music Discussion List Sender: Electronic Music Discussion List From: Steven Wartofsky Subject: Re: Millennial thoughts on music and progress. In-Reply-To: <4.2.0.58.20000104091703.00b34ad0@postoffice.mail.cornell.edu> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Hi Mark, All points well taken. Sorry for the insufficiently persuasive reasoning. On the small (but important!) point of the connotations of "advances," I mean simply "acts which have not taken place before." I don't argue for either their superiority or inferiority out of context, that would be meaningless. But simply (I hope! ) from the point of view that many 20th-century musicians identified what they saw as one culmination point or another of a musical tradition, and then took that culmination point to a place where it had never been before, I am calling that an advance. There is no way that serialism could be argued as in some fashion "superior" musically to an expert (or even inexpert) performance of centuries-old traditional African music on a kora, for example -- that would be plain silly. A sterile, context-less embrace of a form purely for the sake of its professed distinction from other forms, and then a celebration of that form as superior because of that distinction, is, as you say, merely an act of clubbishness. Beyond that, I don't think there's ultimately any way to judge what (and from what perspective? long-term? short-term? formally? emotionally? theatrically? tonally? rhythmically?) would "expand" the resources for music-making today. I have to truly say that playing one, pure note on an instrument I am familiar with, repeatedly, over and over again, to the point where I start listening to it differently than I did after the first five minutes I stepped into the room, is an "expansion" of my musical resource at that moment, since I am hearing something (hearing meaning listening to with combination of physical organs and brain-interpretation of same) I hadn't heard before. And some days that just doesn't happen. Some days I don't want to hear that note repeatedly, or ever again. Or, to put it simply, different can certainly be different, but context defines what is better. And context is an amorphous, jelly-like, immeasurable sort of thing. OTOH a Samuel Johnson might say, no pain is better than pain, surfeit is better than starvation, and light and warmth are better than cold and dark. So not everything's relative. I think in general that our ears and brains, no matter what culture we're in, generally appreciate consonance more easily than dissonance and, like everything else, too much of one or the other palls rather quickly. To state the history of rock music for the past 15 years, for instance, right now we're well-enamored of saw-tooth wave sounds, whereas in the 80's we liked (DX-7) squares and sines better. I hear sines are making a comeback. But there was a point back in the '80's where just one more glassy, bell-like DX-7 ringy sound and you'd want to kill something. The point-of-identification point is another interesting one. We all rally around something or other every day, it makes us feel good. The worse we feel, the more exclusive, combative and, basically, _ugly_ the rallying point becomes. Rallying around ugliness ("everybody's wearing blue, I think I'll wear black today") _can_ become a form of protest under certain circumstances, just as affirmative culture (happy Shostakovitch film music as parody of Stalinism) can be. All depends on the context. Re: the early music thing. Yes, it's a construction. Yes, it's not a total time machine. No, that doesn't make it an exercise in futility. Yes, it may sound tinny, honky and out of tune; maybe our current prejudices are for too much phat and harmony, then. I love the context you put the Boulez line in, that was a real belly-laugh! Overly self-conscious music-making can also be a mistake, too -- I can't listen, myself, to Wynton Marsalis etc. for instance, as good as this generation of jazz musicians/historians is, simply because the music sounds "archival" rather than "authentic" to my ears. But that's because I'm hopelessly caught in inarticulated but definite ideas of what "authentic" and "archival" are. Authentic to me is Pharoah Sanders trying to blow an extra hole in his sax, damn the torpedoes, full steam ahead. You can't be archival while you're playing that way. So that's my take for now. Over to you! Steve -----Original Message----- From: Electronic Music Discussion List [mailto:EMUSIC-L@LISTSERV.AMERICAN.EDU]On Behalf Of mark simon Sent: Tuesday, January 04, 2000 2:16 PM To: EMUSIC-L@LISTSERV.AMERICAN.EDU Subject: Re: Millennial thoughts on music and progress. > > > >>I eventually came to realize this was an exceedingly shallow way of >looking > >>at music. Now I love Stravinsky and Schoenberg, but the last thing I'm > >Doesn't it all have to do with _why_ you're listening to the music? And >there are so many different good reasons to do so. The ones you describe >above have to do with the historical, logical efforts at understanding the >traditional forms of (mostly) Euro-American music and trying to _use_ that >history to do something not yet done. From a conceptual point of view, all >of the things you point to above are thus truly advances, there's no arguing >that -- and they're not just acts of sterile "technique," either, unless you >reduce the historical understanding of the forms of music as "merely >technique." If so, then J.S. Bach is the most sterile of all, yes? No arguing? As long as I'm here there will be arguing. I'm sorry, your reasoning utterly escapes me. Perhaps you omitted some steps in your train of thought that you assumed to be obvious. First of all, the word "advances" has value judgment written all over it. You'll have to show me that when you say "advances" you don't mean "better", which means you'll have to counteract all the experience I've had among the pointy-headed. You'll have to admit to me that accepting these "advances" you are not rejecting the validity of other practices. You'll have to show that what you advocate truly represents expanding the resources for music making today, rather than replacing one resource with another. And once you do that you'll have proven that you've taken my side of the argument :^) >The one significant lack in the above list of innovation, though, is any >discussion or explanation as to what _other_ elements contributed to the >importance of atonality, say, for Schoenberg, or graphic notation for Brown >and H-R. I'm sure Schoenberg felt atonality to be a necessity, though I'm not sure he regarded tonality as therefore obsolete, as the Darmstadt crowd did. For Brown and Haubenstock-Ramati and all the other post-1945 guys, their innovations seem to me to represent markers of identity in a closed social circle. The Darmstadt crowd brandished their total serialism the way that punks displayed their spiked hair, or todays kids flaunt their nose rings and tongue studs, or drive by with their rap blaring. The fact that it offends everybody not in the group only cements their identity with the group. What they think they're saying is "We're cool, you're not". Or as Boulez put it, "Anyone who has not seen the necessity of serialism is irrelevant." Of course we're all beyond that, right? Sometimes it doesn't seem so, as the Cornell grad students and Paul Griffiths demonstrate. > Taken entirely out of context the way they're presented above, of >course they have no meaning. Put in historical context, however, a >particular dissonance might turn from abstraction into anguished, passionate >statement, more moving than any hysterical posturing on a more literally >dramatic stage (such as the internet ). The early music people make this same kind of argument. Listening to music of another era often invites us to put ourselves in the frame of mind of a person from that era. I'm not sure what it has to do with the issue at hand. Ultimately, it's just us listening with our own expectations and prejudices. And by the way, music is always more moving and interesting than any internet discussion, we all know that. WE still do it. >Concerns with innovation and obsolescence are themselves part of a >historical attitude and tradition, i.e. "modernism," that supposedly we have >already post-ed and beyond-ed since 1968 or so.....? But outside the issue >of that modernist impulse toward the new (dated as it is at this point), >_any_ form can reach a state of exhaustion when used for long enough. And perhaps that point comes when musicians get so bogged down in their history that they self-consciously start trying to manipulate the outcome of history, rather than letting it takes its own course. >But that doesn't make rolling in the grass a sufficient alternative >technique, though it may provide short-term satisfaction. I can't imagine what you're talking about. //////////////////////////////////////////////////////////// \\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\ Mark G. Simon mgs2@cornell.edu "Writing about music is *not* like dancing about architecture!! Not by a long shot!! Believe me, I've tried both." \\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\ ///////////////////////////////////////////////////////// ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 5 Jan 2000 10:34:08 +1000 Reply-To: Electronic Music Discussion List Sender: Electronic Music Discussion List From: David Rodger Subject: Re: Millennial thoughts on music and progress. In-Reply-To: <001e01bf5662$ea22dbc0$7bb8183f@wartley> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Steve Wartofsky wrote: >Concerns with innovation and obsolescence are themselves part of a >historical attitude and tradition, i.e. "modernism," that supposedly we have >already post-ed and beyond-ed since 1968 or so.....? But outside the issue >of that modernist impulse toward the new (dated as it is at this point), >_any_ form can reach a state of exhaustion when used for long enough. It's >hard to make a good, traditional Western in film; it's hard to do an >interesting real-time strategy game in PC computer gaming; it's hard to rap >in a way that doesn't sound totally derivative at this point, if you've been >listening and/or rapping since 1979, as many have. To cite a few examples. >And the question then is, how to get out of this abyss of repetition? Or >does that repetition in itself help break out a new form? Is repetition the right term? Two pieces may share many stylistic features, even almost all of them, but it does not necessarily preclude the composition of ostensibly original works. Just look at Mandinka praise-singing! Then Mark Simon wrote: >First of all, the word "advances" has value judgment written all over it. >You'll have to show me that when you say "advances" you don't mean >"better", which means you'll have to counteract all the experience I've had >among the pointy-headed. You'll have to admit to me that accepting these >"advances" you are not rejecting the validity of other practices. You'll >have to show that what you advocate truly represents expanding the >resources for music making today, rather than replacing one resource with >another. And once you do that you'll have proven that you've taken my side >of the argument :^) To paraphrase Rothwell's Law: No musical style is rendered obsolete by the appearance of any new style. (Sorry , Nick!) Regards, David David Rodger: auricle@alphalink.com.au Audio Engineer, RLSS Trainer, Writing & Research http://www.alphalink.com.au/~auricle http://www.alphalink.com.au/~adzohu ======================================================================== Keep e-mail simple: just say NO to styled text, HTML, ms-tnef, .vcf, .url ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 4 Jan 2000 16:12:59 -0500 Reply-To: Electronic Music Discussion List Sender: Electronic Music Discussion List From: David Mooney Subject: Re: Groaner alert. Comments: To: nwberry@ix.netcom.com MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Nate Berry wrote: > > BTW: that little "b" word probably got this email stored in > some national security data warehouse somewhere... hope you > all appreciate the risk I took posting this message to the > list > (does smiley face apply?) > Nate--Nobody cares about bombs, but smiley faces have been banned by a Geneva Convention that went into effect 1/1/00. The net's too grown for that stuff any more. Their use will explode your computer. -- David Mooney dmooney@city-net.com http://www.city-net.com/~moko/ "Opaque melodies that would bug most people" (Frank Zappa) The Rhythmicon: http://www.city-net.com/~moko/rhome.html ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 4 Jan 2000 16:36:10 -0500 Reply-To: Electronic Music Discussion List Sender: Electronic Music Discussion List From: David Mooney Subject: Re: Millennial thoughts on music and progress. MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit "Michael R. Ridderbusch" wrote: > [..major snipping...] > > >And only > >a couple of weeks ago the New York Times printed another rant from > Paul > >Griffiths complaining that "there have been no new technical > developments > >in composition in the past 30 years" and accusing young post-modern > >composers of "nostalgiac longing for the past". Both statements are > false, > >IMHO, but he believes this to be true. I think it was this article > that > >prompted me to write about progress in the first place. > > I wonder what other voices are out there? Since I didn't come up via the academic track I see this kind of thing from the outside. Admittedly, the electronic music that grabbed me in the early 60s and started me down this road grabbed me precisely because is was so utterly different from the classical music my parents listened to and what I played in public school bands and orchestras. For many years I fell into the trap Mark points out of snobbishly dismissing anything that wasn't new and different. But secretly, sneaking around my own back, I listened to a lot of Sibelius liked it. Now I find myself in the very odd position of composing music that many see as obsolete--basically a digital version of old fashioned tape music (I don't have a clue about "electronica"), and on the side studying composers and compositions of the Russian avant garde. I just go where it takes me these days and don't worry a lot about what's innovative. But could I be doing this had not the iconoclasts and inovators come before me? It's very interesting to read Harry Partch in light of this--He really had it out for academic musical training, but for the opposite reason from that which Mark described. He felt academia was destroying creativity by forcing students to learn the false 12 tone tempered scale and the music of all those dead mostly German white guys. Has the pendulum swung to the other pole? I wonder if Penderecki saw that old Monkies episode where Liberace smashed a gold piano with a sledge hammer? -- David Mooney dmooney@city-net.com http://www.city-net.com/~moko/ "Opaque melodies that would bug most people" (Frank Zappa) The Rhythmicon: http://www.city-net.com/~moko/rhome.html ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 4 Jan 2000 16:50:13 -0500 Reply-To: Electronic Music Discussion List Sender: Electronic Music Discussion List From: David Mooney Subject: Re: Millennial thoughts on music and progress. MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit David Rodger wrote: > > As I recall, John Shepherd made a good argument that 12-tone music is actually > an extension of tonal and harmonic hierarchy, rather than a measure for > equalising the relationships between tones. Unfortunately, I can't find my > copy of his book "Music as Social Process" (I think I lent it to someone and > I can't remember who or when). > Harry Partch (again) expressed the idea the 12-tone music isn't much of an innovation because it is within the larger system of music that makes use of the equal tempered scale (you're playing the same tones)--that until this fundamental aspect of music is questioned, no matter what you do it's still within that system. -- David Mooney dmooney@city-net.com http://www.city-net.com/~moko/ "Opaque melodies that would bug most people" (Frank Zappa) The Rhythmicon: http://www.city-net.com/~moko/rhome.html ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 4 Jan 2000 22:48:40 -0700 Reply-To: Electronic Music Discussion List Sender: Electronic Music Discussion List From: Mike Metlay Subject: Re: Millennial thoughts on music and progress. In-Reply-To: <200001032051.PAA13520@listserv.american.edu> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Michael Ridderbusch wrote: > At 02:38 PM 1/3/00 -0500, Mark Simon wrote: > > >a couple of weeks ago the New York Times printed another rant from Paul > >Griffiths complaining that "there have been no new technical developments > >in composition in the past 30 years" and accusing young post-modern > >composers of "nostalgiac longing for the past". Both statements are false, > >IMHO, but he believes this to be true. > > I wonder what other voices are out there? .....ours? mike -- It's the future. Where are my robot and air car? (n. rothwell) ========================================================================== Mike Metlay * ATOMIC CITY * P.O. Box 17083 * Boulder, CO * 80308-0083 * USA + atomic@tesser.com * 800-924-ATOM * http://www.atomiccity.com + ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 4 Jan 2000 22:56:43 -0700 Reply-To: Electronic Music Discussion List Sender: Electronic Music Discussion List From: Mike Metlay Subject: Re: Millennial thoughts on music and progress. In-Reply-To: <001e01bf5662$ea22dbc0$7bb8183f@wartley> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" At 10:22 PM -0500 1/3/00, Steven Wartofsky wrote: >As with politics and science in the 40's/50's/60's, the urge back then in >music was to somehow "force" new things into existence, to push for radical >innovations. The results of such totalistic efforts were mixed, both >destructive and (sometimes) ground-breaking, but in any event, they were >quite fragile. A hot-house plant continues to need hot-house conditions to >survive. Was it Fernando Rodrigues who talked about the years and years wasted trying to create and then promote the square circle, when the plain old round ones seemed to work better for most of the peasants and livestock? The beauty of the intellectual process as applied to creative activity is that an appreciation of the results can be learned. Emphasis "can". Not "must" or "should" or even "are expected to". We can find beauty anywhere if we teach ourselves to define to our own satisfaction what is beautiful or not. This leads us directly back to the conversation/argument/flamefest recently concluded here, in which one person's definition of what can and should be learned appreciation differed radically from that of others. [Insert famous and horribly overtold story of Bob Weinstock booing the premiere of an emusic piece at the Oberlin Conservatory in the early 1980s here.] mike -- It's the future. Where are my robot and air car? (n. rothwell) ========================================================================== Mike Metlay * ATOMIC CITY * P.O. Box 17083 * Boulder, CO * 80308-0083 * USA + atomic@tesser.com * 800-924-ATOM * http://www.atomiccity.com + ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 4 Jan 2000 23:07:49 -0700 Reply-To: Electronic Music Discussion List Sender: Electronic Music Discussion List From: Mike Metlay Subject: Re: Millennial thoughts on music and progress. In-Reply-To: <20000104220831.6777.qmail@cassiel.com> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Nick Rothwell wrote: > >I'm starting to do some stuff on the seminar circuit: demonstrations, >short performances, stuff like that. The actual quality of my work is >unimportant at this stage: more important is that I can come up with >buzzwords which suggest some unique selling point or a non-trivial >barrier to entry. Scanner became well-known not because of the quality >of his music but because he performed music from scanned phone >conversations. Phil Jeck became well-known not because of the quality >of his music but because he performs using Dansette record players. Congratulations, you've taken the first step on the road to enlightenment. This will now put in in a position to be remembered in much the same way as, say, Oskar Sala. Which is by no means a bad thing compared to utter obscurity, especially if in the midst of all this you are still capable of creating music that you believe in and which engages some subset of your listeners effectively. Was LISTEN/MOVE a success or a failure? That depends on whether you were trying to attract dancers to work with you, or to show the world that your process could create music of stunning power. It was designed for the former and failed so badly that the failure was remarkable in itself; it ended up doing the latter and succeeding brilliantly, IMO. mike -- It's the future. Where are my robot and air car? (n. rothwell) ========================================================================== Mike Metlay * ATOMIC CITY * P.O. Box 17083 * Boulder, CO * 80308-0083 * USA + atomic@tesser.com * 800-924-ATOM * http://www.atomiccity.com + ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 5 Jan 0100 10:40:28 -0500 Reply-To: Electronic Music Discussion List Sender: Electronic Music Discussion List From: Joe McMahon Subject: Re: Millennial thoughts on music and progress. In-Reply-To: <20000104220831.6777.qmail@cassiel.com> from "Nick Rothwell " at Jan 4, 0 10:08:31 pm Content-Type: text > I'm starting to do some stuff on the seminar circuit: demonstrations, > short performances, stuff like that. The actual quality of my work is > unimportant at this stage: more important is that I can come up with > buzzwords which suggest some unique selling point or a non-trivial > barrier to entry. Scanner became well-known not because of the quality > of his music but because he performed music from scanned phone > conversations. Phil Jeck became well-known not because of the quality > of his music but because he performs using Dansette record players. However, I would argue that the quality of your music DOES matter in this case, because if it were really bad (I happen to know it isn't, but that's a digression), it wouldn't matter how you were producing it. I think there's a combinatorial effect; "this is music made by process X and it's interesting/beautiful/unusual". Humans are wired to look at new things with interest; I think this comes from when a new thing would be just as likely to eat you as not. --- Joe M. ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 5 Jan 2000 12:04:28 -0500 Reply-To: Electronic Music Discussion List Sender: Electronic Music Discussion List From: "Michael R. Ridderbusch" Subject: Re: Millennial thoughts on music and progress. In-Reply-To: <4.2.0.58.20000104091703.00b34ad0@postoffice.mail.cornell.e du> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: multipart/alternative; types="text/plain,text/html"; boundary="=====================_9545900==_.ALT" --=====================_9545900==_.ALT Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" At 02:16 PM 1/4/00 -0500, you wrote: (snip) >I'm sure Schoenberg felt atonality to be a necessity, though I'm not sure >he regarded tonality as therefore obsolete, as the Darmstadt crowd did. I always feel uncomfortable with the word "atonality", and consequently feel compelled to blather about it. And as usual, Schoenberg becomes the lightning rod for such discussion. If I remember correctly, Schoenberg disliked the term "atonality", and preferred something along the lines of "pantonality", which for me, describes the "tonal architecture" of this music more accurately, both in listening and analysis. What I mean is a fluctuating tonality that is highly modulatory and chromatic, that is by turns tangential to or obscuring of key, and that uses vertical and horizontal intervallic configurations that momentarily, or for longer spans of time, suggest tonal conventions. (I'm referring to both his highly chromatic pre-serial works, and the later serial ones.) This is of course a problematic view, given the variety of terrain his music presents, like the uncompromising dissonance of No. 3 of his Op. 11 Piano Pieces, or the later diatonic Suite for String Orchestra Martha Hyde, on the other hand, in her book "Schoenberg's Twelve Tone Harmony", makes an excellent case for Schoenberg developing a harmonic language that is a logical consequence of serial procedure, so he could be considered a revolutionary indeed. But this is what fascinates me about his legacy, this curious and beguiling ambiguity between "non-tonal" and and tonal harmony, the polarity opening up expressive possibilities by the new juxtapositions made possible by a widening of the chromatic palette. (Striking examples are String Quartet No. 2, or No. 2 of his Five Orchestral Pieces, Op. 16, or the Ode to Napoleon which uses triadic configurations in a serial context.) Perhaps what we should be considering here is a continuum, not polarity. This division into categories quite probably diminishes our capacity to see the architectural and expressive potentialities of a language that encompasses a tonal/chromatic spectrum. One of the strengths of tonality is how wide its envelope can open to chromaticism. (Examples include much of Wagner's Tristan und Isolde or Prelude to the Dritte Aufzug of Parsifal, the Adagio to Mahler's Tenth, Schoenberg's Kammersymphonie Op. 9 or First String Quartet, the big Russian composers of the last century, many moments in the works of Sibelius, works of Aaron Copland, Roger Sessions, etc.) Why can't a musical syntax organized by interval (the building block of much "non-tonal" music), rather than tone, open its envelope to features of the "old tonality" as well? (Berg is perhaps the clear model here, with works like the Lyric Suite or Violin Concerto.) There are certainly technical problems involved with such a rapprochement, but that's beyond the scope of my discussion, to be solved by the efforts of theorists and composers. (snip) >> Taken entirely out of context the way they're presented above, of >>course they have no meaning. Put in historical context, however, a >>particular dissonance might turn from abstraction into anguished, passionate >>statement, more moving than any hysterical posturing on a more literally >>dramatic stage (such as the internet ). > >The early music people make this same kind of argument. Listening to music >of another era often invites us to put ourselves in the frame of mind of a >person from that era. At the risk of being elliptical: A great work of music should be timeless. If a work survives *only* by the life support system of musicology, then it should die, mercifully--we shouldn't have to mollycoddle listeners too much with historical context. Of course music scholarship has an important role to play in bringing works to our attention. (Where would music be today without Bach scholarship?) (Question for the more serious on the list: how is a genre of music to survive if its only record is the very fragile one of sound recordings?) Dissonance isn't relative (in my opinion). >>Concerns with innovation and obsolescence are themselves part of a >>historical attitude and tradition, i.e. "modernism," that supposedly we have >>already post-ed and beyond-ed since 1968 or so.....? But outside the issue >>of that modernist impulse toward the new (dated as it is at this point), >>_any_ form can reach a state of exhaustion when used for long enough. But tonality is not exhausted, only the imagination of those who say it is. Michael Ridderbusch --=====================_9545900==_.ALT Content-Type: text/html; charset="us-ascii" At 02:16 PM 1/4/00 -0500, you wrote:

(snip)

>I'm sure Schoenberg felt atonality to be a necessity, though I'm not sure
>he regarded tonality as therefore obsolete, as the Darmstadt crowd did.

I always feel uncomfortable with the word "atonality", and consequently
feel compelled to blather about it.  And as usual, Schoenberg becomes
the lightning rod for such discussion.

If I remember correctly, Schoenberg disliked the term "atonality",
and preferred something along the lines of "pantonality", which for me,
describes the "tonal architecture" of this music more accurately, both in
listening and analysis.  What I mean is a fluctuating tonality that is highly
modulatory and chromatic, that is by turns tangential to or obscuring of key,
and that uses vertical and horizontal intervallic configurations that momentarily,
or for longer spans of time, suggest tonal conventions. (I'm referring to both
his highly chromatic pre-serial works, and the later serial ones.)  This is of
course a problematic view, given the variety of terrain his music presents,
like the uncompromising dissonance of No. 3 of his Op. 11 Piano Pieces,
or the later diatonic Suite for String Orchestra

Martha Hyde, on the other hand, in her book "Schoenberg's Twelve Tone
Harmony", makes an excellent case for Schoenberg developing a harmonic
language that is a logical consequence of serial procedure, so he could be
considered a revolutionary indeed.

But this is what fascinates me about his legacy, this curious and beguiling
ambiguity between "non-tonal" and and tonal harmony, the polarity opening
up expressive possibilities by the new juxtapositions made possible by
a widening of the chromatic palette.  (Striking examples are String Quartet
No. 2, or No. 2 of his Five Orchestral Pieces, Op. 16, or the Ode to Napoleon
which uses triadic configurations in a serial context.)

Perhaps what we should be considering here is a continuum, not polarity.
This division into categories quite probably diminishes our capacity to see
the architectural and expressive potentialities of a language that encompasses
a tonal/chromatic spectrum.  One of the strengths of tonality is how wide its
envelope can open to chromaticism.  (Examples include much of Wagner's
Tristan und Isolde or Prelude to the Dritte Aufzug of Parsifal, the Adagio to
Mahler's Tenth, Schoenberg's Kammersymphonie Op. 9 or First String
Quartet, the big Russian composers of the last century, many moments in the
works of Sibelius, works of Aaron Copland, Roger Sessions, etc.)

Why can't a musical syntax organized by interval (the building block of much
"non-tonal" music), rather than tone, open its envelope to features of the
"old tonality" as well? (Berg is perhaps the clear model here, with works like the
Lyric Suite or Violin Concerto.)

There are certainly technical problems involved with such a rapprochement,
but that's beyond the scope of my discussion, to be solved by the efforts of
theorists and composers.

(snip)

>>  Taken entirely out of context the way they're presented above, of
>>course they have no meaning. Put in historical context, however, a
>>particular dissonance might turn from abstraction into anguished, passionate
>>statement, more moving than any hysterical posturing on a more literally
>>dramatic stage (such as the internet <g>).
>
>The early music people make this same kind of argument. Listening to music
>of another era often invites us to put ourselves in the frame of mind of a
>person from that era.

At the risk of being elliptical:

A great work of music should be timeless.  If a work survives *only* by the life
support system of musicology, then it should die, mercifully--we shouldn't have
to mollycoddle listeners too much with historical context.  Of course music scholarship
has an important role to play in bringing works to our attention.  (Where would music
be today without Bach scholarship?)

(Question for the more serious on the list:  how is a genre of music to survive
if its only record is the very fragile one of sound recordings?)

Dissonance isn't relative (in my opinion).

>>Concerns with innovation and obsolescence are themselves part of a
>>historical attitude and tradition, i.e. "modernism," that supposedly we have
>>already post-ed and beyond-ed since 1968 or so.....? But outside the issue
>>of that modernist impulse toward the new (dated as it is at this point),
>>_any_ form can reach a state of exhaustion when used for long enough.

But tonality is not exhausted, only the imagination of those who say it is.

Michael Ridderbusch
--=====================_9545900==_.ALT-- ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 5 Jan 2000 10:02:46 -0800 Reply-To: Electronic Music Discussion List Sender: Electronic Music Discussion List From: Robert Edgar Subject: Re: Millennial thoughts on music and progress. MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: multipart/alternative; boundary="----=_NextPart_000_0017_01BF5764.03EEF000" This is a multi-part message in MIME format. ------=_NextPart_000_0017_01BF5764.03EEF000 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable >But this is what fascinates me about his legacy, this curious and = beguiling >ambiguity between "non-tonal" and and tonal harmony, the polarity = opening >up expressive possibilities by the new juxtapositions made possible = by >a widening of the chromatic palette. =20 I've always considered Schoenberg "tonal" because his composition = arranges elements of determinant tone (as opposed to white noise etc.). = Electronic musicians after Schoenberg abstracted the idea of serialism = to apply to sonic aspects other than the tonal. Is this a = misunderstanding on my part? If not, does it make sense to see = Schoenberg's main contribution to the second half of the 20th century's = music as a focus on an algorithmic approach to composition, as opposed = to a "12-tone" or even a serial approach? ------=_NextPart_000_0017_01BF5764.03EEF000 Content-Type: text/html; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable
>But this is what fascinates me about his = legacy, this=20 curious and beguiling
>ambiguity between "non-tonal" and and = tonal=20 harmony, the polarity opening
>up expressive possibilities by = the new=20 juxtapositions made possible by
>a widening of the chromatic=20 palette. 
 
I've always considered Schoenberg "tonal" because = his=20 composition arranges elements of determinant tone (as opposed to white = noise=20 etc.). Electronic musicians after Schoenberg abstracted the idea of = serialism=20 to apply to sonic aspects other than the tonal. Is this a = misunderstanding on=20 my part? If not, does it make sense to see Schoenberg's main = contribution to=20 the second half of the 20th century's music as a focus on an = algorithmic=20 approach to composition, as opposed to a "12-tone" or even a serial=20 approach?
------=_NextPart_000_0017_01BF5764.03EEF000-- ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 5 Jan 2000 14:42:29 -0500 Reply-To: Electronic Music Discussion List Sender: Electronic Music Discussion List From: "Michael R. Ridderbusch" Subject: Re: Millennial thoughts on music and progress. In-Reply-To: <387267CA.6762A68A@city-net.com> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: multipart/alternative; types="text/plain,text/html"; boundary="=====================_19028377==_.ALT" --=====================_19028377==_.ALT Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" >I wonder if Penderecki saw that old Monkies episode where Liberace >smashed a gold piano with a sledge hammer? cool --=====================_19028377==_.ALT Content-Type: text/html; charset="us-ascii" >I wonder if Penderecki saw that old Monkies episode where Liberace
>smashed a gold piano with a sledge hammer?

cool
--=====================_19028377==_.ALT-- ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 5 Jan 2000 15:05:49 -0500 Reply-To: Electronic Music Discussion List Sender: Electronic Music Discussion List From: "Michael R. Ridderbusch" Subject: Re: Millennial thoughts on music and progress. In-Reply-To: <001a01bf57a7$130df520$73020a0a@computer17> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: multipart/alternative; types="text/plain,text/html"; boundary="=====================_20428870==_.ALT" --=====================_20428870==_.ALT Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" At 10:02 AM 1/5/00 -0800, Robert Edgar wrote: > >> >> >But this is what fascinates me about his legacy, this curious and beguiling >> >ambiguity between "non-tonal" and and tonal harmony, the polarity opening >> >up expressive possibilities by the new juxtapositions made possible by >> >a widening of the chromatic palette. >> >> I've always considered Schoenberg "tonal" because his composition arranges >> elements of determinant tone (as opposed to white noise etc.). > "Tonal" refers to relations between tones (or pitch relations) that promote a sense of key. I would accept your description for a lot of Schoenberg's music, because I'm willing to define tonality in a more flexible way (see my earlier post), though many would not. > >> >> Electronic musicians after Schoenberg abstracted the idea of serialism to >> apply to sonic aspects other than the tonal. Is this a misunderstanding on >> my part? If not, does it make sense to see Schoenberg's main contribution to >> the second half of the 20th century's music as a focus on an algorithmic >> approach to composition, as opposed to a "12-tone" or even a serial >> approach? > I think this is an underestimation of his influence. I have read interview transcripts, for example, of composers who remark on how Schoenberg's early "atonal", pre-serial music was the most interesting and influential for them. --=====================_20428870==_.ALT Content-Type: text/html; charset="us-ascii" At 10:02 AM 1/5/00 -0800, Robert Edgar wrote:
>But this is what fascinates me about his legacy, this curious and beguiling
>ambiguity between "non-tonal" and and tonal harmony, the polarity opening
>up expressive possibilities by the new juxtapositions made possible by
>a widening of the chromatic palette. 
I've always considered Schoenberg "tonal" because his composition arranges elements of determinant tone (as opposed to white noise etc.).

"Tonal" refers to relations between tones (or pitch relations) that promote a sense of key.
I would accept your description for a lot of Schoenberg's music, because I'm willing to define
tonality in a more flexible way (see my earlier post), though many would not.
Electronic musicians after Schoenberg abstracted the idea of serialism to apply to sonic aspects other than the tonal. Is this a misunderstanding on my part? If not, does it make sense to see Schoenberg's main contribution to the second half of the 20th century's music as a focus on an algorithmic approach to composition, as opposed to a "12-tone" or even a serial approach?

I think this is an underestimation of his influence.  I have read interview transcripts, for example, of composers who remark on how Schoenberg's early "atonal", pre-serial music was the most interesting and influential
for them.
--=====================_20428870==_.ALT-- ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 5 Jan 2000 14:28:40 -0800 Reply-To: Electronic Music Discussion List Sender: Electronic Music Discussion List From: Ric Carter Subject: Fw: MEETING ANNOUNCEMENT AND CALL FOR ABSTRACTS MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit ----- Original Message ----- From: "Elizabeth West Marvin" To: Sent: Wednesday, January 05, 2000 9:39 AM Subject: MEETING ANNOUNCEMENT AND CALL FOR ABSTRACTS Apologies if you have already received this message from another source... Betsy Marvin Eastman MEETING ANNOUNCEMENT AND CALL FOR ABSTRACTS THE BIOLOGICAL FOUNDATIONS OF MUSIC MAY 20-22, 2000 THE ROCKEFELLER UNIVERSITY NEW YORK, NY, USA A New York Academy of Sciences Conference Conference Chairs: Robert J. Zatorre, Montreal Neurological Institute, McGill University Isabelle Peretz, University of Montreal THEME Over the last decade, there has been an explosion in research activities on music perception and performance, and their correlates in the human brain. This sudden increase in scientific work on music has been motivated by the idea that music offers a unique opportunity to better understand brain organization. Like language, music is a complex, rule-governed activity that is specific to humans and that exists in all human societies. Similarly, music appears associated with specific brain architecture. Unlike most other high-level functions of the human brain, only a minority of individuals will become proficient musicians through explicit tutoring, although sensitivity to musical structure develops early in life without conscious effort in the large majority of the population. This particularity in the distribution of acquired skills confers to music a privileged role in the study of brain plasticity. The goal of the conference is to bring together leading scientists working in the area and who are using a wide range of different methodologies from the cognitive sciences and the neurosciences. The conference will favor integration across disciplines and methodologies, by grouping presentations under major themes that are central to the understanding of music as a human brain function. The format of the meeting will involve in-depth presentations from each invited speaker, round-table discussions, and a poster session. CONFERENCE TOPICS ? The Origins of Music ? The Neurons of Music ? The Musical Mind ? The Musical Brain ? Musical Expertise and Brain Plasticity ? Relation of Music to other Cognitive Domains ? Music and Emotion CONFIRMED SPEAKERS Eckart Altenmüller, Mireille Besson, Jamshed Bharucha, Ian Cross, Carolyn Drake, Tim Griffiths, Andrea Halpern, David Huron, Cathérine Liégeois-Chauvel, Christo Pantev, Lawrence Parsons, Alvaro Pascual-Leone, Isabelle Peretz, Séverine Samson, Glenn Schellenburg, Gottfried Schlaug, Mari Tervaniemi, Mark Tramo, Sandra Trehub, Robert Zatorre. CALL FOR ABSTRACTS A contributed poster session will form an integral part of the conference program and will provide an excellent opportunity for students and other investigators to present their work. Accepted abstracts will be published in a booklet to be distributed to all conference attendees. In addition, selected poster presenters will be invited to submit a short manuscript for publication in the conference proceedings. DEADLINE FOR ABSTRACT SUBMISSION IS MARCH 1, 2000. The entire abstract, including title, authors, and affiliations must be typed single spaced (10-pt font or larger) and contained within a rectangle measuring 6" across by 4" down (or 15 cm by 10 cm). The abstract must be submitted on plain paper and be camera-ready in order to be included in the abstracts booklet being distributed at the conference. In a separate cover letter, indicate the conference name, the co-author presenting the poster at the meeting, the presenter's complete mailing address, telephone/fax and e-mail. Send camera-ready abstract by mail to: Sherryl Usmani, Meetings coordinator, New York Academy of Sciences, 2 East 63 st., New York, NY 10021. Faxed submission will not be accepted. FOR PROGRAM AND REGISTRATION INFORMATION CONTACT: Science and Technology Meetings Department New York Academy of Sciences 2 East 63rd Street New York, NY 10021 USA T: 212.838.0230, ext 324 F: 212.838.5640 E: conference@nyas.org W: www.nyas.org ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 5 Jan 2000 20:42:23 -0500 Reply-To: Electronic Music Discussion List Sender: Electronic Music Discussion List From: David Mooney Subject: Re: Millennial thoughts on music and progress. MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit "Michael R. Ridderbusch" wrote: > > (Question for the more serious on the list: how is a genre of music > to survive > if its only record is the very fragile one of sound recordings?) > This question brings us back to the question of notation, the ephemeral nature of hardware and software, and the limited life span of the recording medium. Perhaps preservation efforts, such as EMF's new foundation/museum and commitment to keep emusic hardware at least in good working order, is one answer--but this begs the question of how any given composition might survive. For me, as a strictly part time composer (gotta keep that day job to feed the cats!) there is always competition for time--Do I create a new piece or take the time to thoroughly document the one I'm working on now so that it could be re-created in the future (if anyone would ever want to do so)? -- David Mooney dmooney@city-net.com http://www.city-net.com/~moko/ "Opaque melodies that would bug most people" (Frank Zappa) The Rhythmicon: http://www.city-net.com/~moko/rhome.html ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 6 Jan 2000 08:53:14 -0500 Reply-To: Electronic Music Discussion List Sender: Electronic Music Discussion List From: Robert Tucker Subject: Re: Millennial thoughts on music and progress. MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit > A great work of music should be timeless. If a work survives *only* by the > life support system of musicology, then it should die, mercifully--we shouldn't > have to mollycoddle listeners too much with historical context. Of course music > scholarship has an important role to play in bringing works to our attention. (Where > would music be today without Bach scholarship?) I doubt music would be any better or worse without Bach scholarship. Different? Yes, but better? Nah, probably not. Our attention would have just been devoted to other aspects of music. Regardless, do composers even know what counterpoint is these days? I don't hear it. > (Question for the more serious on the list: how is a genre of music to > survive if its only record is the very fragile one of sound recordings?) Maybe I'm missing what you're getting at, but with the importance you place on the "timelessness" of a great work, my question to you is: if a work survives *only* by the life support system of historic field recordings, why should it not die, mercifully? :) Of course, the revival of klezmer is an example of one genre that has survived only through the benefit of recordings. From what I know, klezmer is alive today only because a number of young clarinet turks raided their grandparents' records and learned Dave Taras solos note for note. There doesn't appear to be much of a direct lineage among the first performers and the new generation, except via recordings. All media are fragile to a certain extent, but I'd nominate sound recordings as probably the most musically important happening of the last 1000 years. More than anything else, it's changed our relationship to music, and will continue to do so. -- Best regards, Robert Tucker ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 6 Jan 2000 08:42:44 -0600 Reply-To: Electronic Music Discussion List Sender: Electronic Music Discussion List From: Steve Chandler Subject: Re: Millennial thoughts on music and progress. In-Reply-To: <4150F18286D6D211A3430020482163600202EAEE@ECX> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit (Where > would music be today without Bach scholarship?) Robert Tucker wrote: I doubt music would be any better or worse without Bach scholarship. Different? Yes, but better? Nah, probably not. Our attention would have just been devoted to other aspects of music. Regardless, do composers even know what counterpoint is these days? I don't hear it. Hi all, I've heard enough Baroque music to know that JSB was by far the most intellectual of the bunch. The depth and complexity of his music far exceeds any other composer of note of that time. As for counterpoint I love the stuff (that might be why I like Bach) and put large quantities of it in my music. Of course I'm just one guy and overall you're right there's precious little contrapuntal writing going on these days. It's really too bad. Just MHO. Cheers, Steve Chandler www.mp3.com/stevechandler ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 6 Jan 2000 22:30:19 -0000 Reply-To: Electronic Music Discussion List Sender: Electronic Music Discussion List From: Nick Rothwell Subject: Re: Millennial thoughts on music and progress. In-Reply-To: (message from Mike Metlay on Tue, 4 Jan 2000 23:07:49 -0700) > Was LISTEN/MOVE a success or a failure? That depends on whether you > were trying to attract dancers to work with you, or to show the > world that your process could create music of stunning power. It was > designed for the former and failed so badly that the failure was > remarkable in itself; it ended up doing the latter and succeeding > brilliantly, IMO. I think I disagree on both counts. Firstly, although the interest shown by dancers was approximately zero, the fact that 1000 copies went out for free, as a gesture, via a major dance agency got noticed by the folks at Dartington, which meant that I got noticed by the South Bank Centre, which meant that I met the Greenwich folks and indirectly came into contact with Shinkansen, Sonic Arts Network, LMC and so on. Oh, and the article in THE MIX. And the album is being used, and aired, here and there - just yesterday this got me a seminar/workshop slot and a foot in the door in another dance project proposal. In other words, it's just about been worth it, but it's been an extremely slow burn. On the other hand, I don't think LISTEN/MOVE has shown the world anything, since the world has never even heard of it. C&D sent back their advance copies because they didn't sell any. SAN hasn't sold any copies; to my knowledge, neither has SMD (although, since they offer web sales, I'm planning to push that quite hard). I'm not going to complain about the world being unfair or anything like that (although it is): it just shows that publicity and marketing are important, and they're also difficult for people who, like me, don't have a natural affinity or mindset for doing this stuff. The fact that L/M may be better than a lot of the stuff that goes out in THE WIRE's cover CD's is irrelevant - I don't have access to the skills and resources which would get it there. I'm itching to get started on the second album, but there's no point unless I can figure out some way to get it heard. I don't believe in private art. -- Nick Rothwell Cassiel.com Limited nick@cassiel.com www.cassiel.com systems - composition - installation - performance ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 6 Jan 2000 22:38:57 -0000 Reply-To: Electronic Music Discussion List Sender: Electronic Music Discussion List From: Nick Rothwell Subject: Re: Millennial thoughts on music and progress. In-Reply-To: <200001051540.KAA02142@shell.clark.net> (message from Joe McMahon on Tue, 5 Jan 0100 10:40:28 -0500) > I think there's a combinatorial effect; "this is music made by > process X and it's interesting/beautiful/unusual". Humans are wired > to look at new things with interest; I think this comes from when a > new thing would be just as likely to eat you as not. I'm more cynical than this, I think. We live in an age of media smog, which means that those who make the most noise (like, say, Howard Stern or Jerry Springer) get the attention. In a better-adjusted, more serene culture, these people would be rightly recognised as socially disfunctional. (Actually, I've only seen short clips of Springer's shows and don't know what Stern does, except by reputation - but I have heard of them...) Our age is one which (largely) offers an abundance of resources, except for one: mindshare. -- Nick Rothwell Cassiel.com Limited nick@cassiel.com www.cassiel.com systems - composition - installation - performance ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 6 Jan 2000 21:01:06 -0700 Reply-To: Electronic Music Discussion List Sender: Electronic Music Discussion List From: Mike Metlay Subject: Re: Millennial thoughts on music and progress. In-Reply-To: <200001051540.KAA02142@shell.clark.net> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Joe McMahon wrote: >I think there's a combinatorial effect; "this is music made by process X and >it's interesting/beautiful/unusual". Humans are wired to look at new things >with interest; I think this comes from when a new thing would be just as >likely to eat you as not. Good EM is just as likely to eat you as not. And your point? :) BTW, Nick, it strikes me as remarkable that you and I can look at the same release of the same record and see two different sides to it. Perhaps this is because I'm keying off the comments of those who have heard it, and you're keying off the relative number of people who have heard it compared to, say, the latest noise-slab from Scanner. mike -- It's the future. Where are my robot and air car? (n. rothwell) ========================================================================== Mike Metlay * ATOMIC CITY * P.O. Box 17083 * Boulder, CO * 80308-0083 * USA + atomic@tesser.com * 800-924-ATOM * http://www.atomiccity.com + ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 7 Jan 2000 05:50:39 -0500 Reply-To: Electronic Music Discussion List Sender: Electronic Music Discussion List From: Steven Wartofsky Subject: Re: Millennial thoughts on music and progress. In-Reply-To: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Yes, volunteerism is one of the founding joys of creative activity. Although even a Michelangelo can use a Pope Pointing a Finger every now and then. I guess, after all is said and done (will it ever be? I'm still waiting!), that my own concern is that I don't feel absolute relativism gets you any where, yet all standards can be questioned. So what is the right way? There is one, I still feel that. :) Best, Steve -----Original Message----- From: Electronic Music Discussion List [mailto:EMUSIC-L@LISTSERV.AMERICAN.EDU]On Behalf Of Mike Metlay Sent: Wednesday, January 05, 2000 12:57 AM To: EMUSIC-L@LISTSERV.AMERICAN.EDU Subject: Re: Millennial thoughts on music and progress. At 10:22 PM -0500 1/3/00, Steven Wartofsky wrote: >As with politics and science in the 40's/50's/60's, the urge back then in >music was to somehow "force" new things into existence, to push for radical >innovations. The results of such totalistic efforts were mixed, both >destructive and (sometimes) ground-breaking, but in any event, they were >quite fragile. A hot-house plant continues to need hot-house conditions to >survive. Was it Fernando Rodrigues who talked about the years and years wasted trying to create and then promote the square circle, when the plain old round ones seemed to work better for most of the peasants and livestock? The beauty of the intellectual process as applied to creative activity is that an appreciation of the results can be learned. Emphasis "can". Not "must" or "should" or even "are expected to". We can find beauty anywhere if we teach ourselves to define to our own satisfaction what is beautiful or not. This leads us directly back to the conversation/argument/flamefest recently concluded here, in which one person's definition of what can and should be learned appreciation differed radically from that of others. [Insert famous and horribly overtold story of Bob Weinstock booing the premiere of an emusic piece at the Oberlin Conservatory in the early 1980s here.] mike -- It's the future. Where are my robot and air car? (n. rothwell) ========================================================================== Mike Metlay * ATOMIC CITY * P.O. Box 17083 * Boulder, CO * 80308-0083 * USA + atomic@tesser.com * 800-924-ATOM * http://www.atomiccity.com + ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 7 Jan 2000 06:06:20 -0500 Reply-To: Electronic Music Discussion List Sender: Electronic Music Discussion List From: Steven Wartofsky Subject: Re: Millennial thoughts on music and progress. In-Reply-To: <200001051708.MAA1470692@listserv.american.edu> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: multipart/alternative; boundary="----=_NextPart_000_0028_01BF58D5.5104A340" This is a multi-part message in MIME format. ------=_NextPart_000_0028_01BF58D5.5104A340 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Great stuff! I never really understood "atonality" really, either. As long as a piece of music has _some_ sort of ground, at some level it is still "tonal," and I don't think, despite radical experiments in this direction, that you ever get away from that ground. I always thought that was one of the amusing (and probably intentional) pieces of news serialism brought to the show. Tonality: no matter how hard you look the other way, there it is. Chromaticism is probably a more productive concept anyways, once you figure that out. Regarding timeless, though: how timeless? the planet is billions of years old, life multi-millions, consciousness a handful of millions, us a thimbleful of millions, and music as we know it in its most developed forms, a few hundred at most. Jeez. And already it feels like we peaked 200 years ago and we've been declining ever since (my personal opinion). Timeless from a butterfly's perspective, perhaps. Nothing lasts, yet living purely for the moment has its drawbacks as well. The invention of recording in the past few milliseconds of historical time has already changed the relevance of "timelessness" as an evaluative factor in our inevitable urge to distinguish good from bad. I'd say, if a piece of music survives through musicology, for the musicologists involved, it's timeless, relatively speaking; for all others, it's, like, "huh?" And that's the way it's always been. Steve -----Original Message----- From: Electronic Music Discussion List [mailto:EMUSIC-L@LISTSERV.AMERICAN.EDU]On Behalf Of Michael R. Ridderbusch Sent: Wednesday, January 05, 2000 12:04 PM To: EMUSIC-L@LISTSERV.AMERICAN.EDU Subject: Re: Millennial thoughts on music and progress. At 02:16 PM 1/4/00 -0500, you wrote: (snip) >I'm sure Schoenberg felt atonality to be a necessity, though I'm not sure >he regarded tonality as therefore obsolete, as the Darmstadt crowd did. I always feel uncomfortable with the word "atonality", and consequently feel compelled to blather about it. And as usual, Schoenberg becomes the lightning rod for such discussion. If I remember correctly, Schoenberg disliked the term "atonality", and preferred something along the lines of "pantonality", which for me, describes the "tonal architecture" of this music more accurately, both in listening and analysis. What I mean is a fluctuating tonality that is highly modulatory and chromatic, that is by turns tangential to or obscuring of key, and that uses vertical and horizontal intervallic configurations that momentarily, or for longer spans of time, suggest tonal conventions. (I'm referring to both his highly chromatic pre-serial works, and the later serial ones.) This is of course a problematic view, given the variety of terrain his music presents, like the uncompromising dissonance of No. 3 of his Op. 11 Piano Pieces, or the later diatonic Suite for String Orchestra Martha Hyde, on the other hand, in her book "Schoenberg's Twelve Tone Harmony", makes an excellent case for Schoenberg developing a harmonic language that is a logical consequence of serial procedure, so he could be considered a revolutionary indeed. But this is what fascinates me about his legacy, this curious and beguiling ambiguity between "non-tonal" and and tonal harmony, the polarity opening up expressive possibilities by the new juxtapositions made possible by a widening of the chromatic palette. (Striking examples are String Quartet No. 2, or No. 2 of his Five Orchestral Pieces, Op. 16, or the Ode to Napoleon which uses triadic configurations in a serial context.) Perhaps what we should be considering here is a continuum, not polarity. This division into categories quite probably diminishes our capacity to see the architectural and expressive potentialities of a language that encompasses a tonal/chromatic spectrum. One of the strengths of tonality is how wide its envelope can open to chromaticism. (Examples include much of Wagner's Tristan und Isolde or Prelude to the Dritte Aufzug of Parsifal, the Adagio to Mahler's Tenth, Schoenberg's Kammersymphonie Op. 9 or First String Quartet, the big Russian composers of the last century, many moments in the works of Sibelius, works of Aaron Copland, Roger Sessions, etc.) Why can't a musical syntax organized by interval (the building block of much "non-tonal" music), rather than tone, open its envelope to features of the "old tonality" as well? (Berg is perhaps the clear model here, with works like the Lyric Suite or Violin Concerto.) There are certainly technical problems involved with such a rapprochement, but that's beyond the scope of my discussion, to be solved by the efforts of theorists and composers. (snip) >> Taken entirely out of context the way they're presented above, of >>course they have no meaning. Put in historical context, however, a >>particular dissonance might turn from abstraction into anguished, passionate >>statement, more moving than any hysterical posturing on a more literally >>dramatic stage (such as the internet ). > >The early music people make this same kind of argument. Listening to music >of another era often invites us to put ourselves in the frame of mind of a >person from that era. At the risk of being elliptical: A great work of music should be timeless. If a work survives *only* by the life support system of musicology, then it should die, mercifully--we shouldn't have to mollycoddle listeners too much with historical context. Of course music scholarship has an important role to play in bringing works to our attention. (Where would music be today without Bach scholarship?) (Question for the more serious on the list: how is a genre of music to survive if its only record is the very fragile one of sound recordings?) Dissonance isn't relative (in my opinion). >>Concerns with innovation and obsolescence are themselves part of a >>historical attitude and tradition, i.e. "modernism," that supposedly we have >>already post-ed and beyond-ed since 1968 or so.....? But outside the issue >>of that modernist impulse toward the new (dated as it is at this point), >>_any_ form can reach a state of exhaustion when used for long enough. But tonality is not exhausted, only the imagination of those who say it is. Michael Ridderbusch ------=_NextPart_000_0028_01BF58D5.5104A340 Content-Type: text/html; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable
Great=20 stuff!  I never really understood "atonality" really, either. = <g> As=20 long as a piece of music has _some_ sort of ground, at some level it is = still=20 "tonal," and I don't think, despite radical experiments in this = direction, that=20 you ever get away from that ground. I always thought that was one of the = amusing=20 (and probably intentional) pieces of news serialism brought to the show. = Tonality: no matter how hard you look the other way, there it is. = Chromaticism=20 is probably a more productive concept anyways, once you figure that=20 out.
 
Regarding timeless, though: how timeless? the = planet is=20 billions of years old, life multi-millions, consciousness a handful of = millions,=20 us a thimbleful of millions, and music as we know it in its most = developed=20 forms, a few hundred at most. Jeez. And already it feels like we peaked = 200=20 years ago and we've been declining ever since (my personal opinion). = Timeless=20 from a butterfly's perspective, perhaps.
 
Nothing lasts, yet living purely for the = moment has its=20 drawbacks as well. The invention of recording in the past few = milliseconds=20 of historical time has already changed the relevance of "timelessness" = as an=20 evaluative factor in our inevitable urge to distinguish good from=20 bad.
 
I'd=20 say, if a piece of music survives through musicology, for the = musicologists=20 involved, it's timeless, relatively speaking; for all others, it's, = like, "huh?"=20 And that's the way it's always been.
 
Steve
 
-----Original Message-----
From: Electronic Music = Discussion=20 List [mailto:EMUSIC-L@LISTSERV.AMERICAN.EDU]On Behalf Of = Michael R.=20 Ridderbusch
Sent: Wednesday, January 05, 2000 12:04 = PM
To:=20 EMUSIC-L@LISTSERV.AMERICAN.EDU
Subject: Re: Millennial = thoughts on=20 music and progress.

At 02:16 PM = 1/4/00 -0500,=20 you wrote:

(snip)

>I'm sure Schoenberg felt atonality = to be a=20 necessity, though I'm not sure
>he regarded tonality as = therefore=20 obsolete, as the Darmstadt crowd did.

I always feel = uncomfortable with=20 the word "atonality", and consequently
feel compelled to blather = about=20 it.  And as usual, Schoenberg becomes
the lightning rod for = such=20 discussion.

If I remember correctly, Schoenberg disliked the = term=20 "atonality",
and preferred something along the lines of = "pantonality",=20 which for me,
describes the "tonal architecture" of this music more = accurately, both in
listening and analysis.  What I mean is a=20 fluctuating tonality that is highly
modulatory and chromatic, that = is by=20 turns tangential to or obscuring of key,
and that uses vertical and = horizontal intervallic configurations that momentarily,
or for = longer spans=20 of time, suggest tonal conventions. (I'm referring to both
his = highly=20 chromatic pre-serial works, and the later serial ones.)  This is=20 of
course a problematic view, given the variety of terrain his = music=20 presents,
like the uncompromising dissonance of No. 3 of his Op. 11 = Piano=20 Pieces,
or the later diatonic Suite for String = Orchestra

Martha=20 Hyde, on the other hand, in her book "Schoenberg's Twelve = Tone
Harmony",=20 makes an excellent case for Schoenberg developing a = harmonic
language that=20 is a logical consequence of serial procedure, so he could = be
considered a=20 revolutionary indeed.

But this is what fascinates me about his = legacy,=20 this curious and beguiling
ambiguity between "non-tonal" and and = tonal=20 harmony, the polarity opening
up expressive possibilities by the = new=20 juxtapositions made possible by
a widening of the chromatic = palette. =20 (Striking examples are String Quartet
No. 2, or No. 2 of his Five=20 Orchestral Pieces, Op. 16, or the Ode to Napoleon
which uses = triadic=20 configurations in a serial context.)

Perhaps what we should be=20 considering here is a continuum, not polarity.
This division into=20 categories quite probably diminishes our capacity to see
the = architectural=20 and expressive potentialities of a language that encompasses
a=20 tonal/chromatic spectrum.  One of the strengths of tonality is = how wide=20 its
envelope can open to chromaticism.  (Examples include much = of=20 Wagner's
Tristan und Isolde or Prelude to the Dritte Aufzug of = Parsifal,=20 the Adagio to
Mahler's Tenth, Schoenberg's Kammersymphonie Op. 9 or = First=20 String
Quartet, the big Russian composers of the last century, many = moments=20 in the
works of Sibelius, works of Aaron Copland, Roger Sessions,=20 etc.)

Why can't a musical syntax organized by interval (the = building=20 block of much
"non-tonal" music), rather than tone, open its = envelope to=20 features of the
"old tonality" as well? (Berg is perhaps the clear = model=20 here, with works like the
Lyric Suite or Violin = Concerto.)

There are=20 certainly technical problems involved with such a = rapprochement,
but that's=20 beyond the scope of my discussion, to be solved by the efforts = of
theorists=20 and composers.

(snip)

>>  Taken entirely out = of=20 context the way they're presented above, of
>>course they = have no=20 meaning. Put in historical context, however, a
>>particular=20 dissonance might turn from abstraction into anguished,=20 passionate
>>statement, more moving than any hysterical = posturing on=20 a more literally
>>dramatic stage (such as the internet=20 <g>).
>
>The early music people make = this same=20 kind of argument. Listening to music
>of another era often = invites us to=20 put ourselves in the frame of mind of a
>person from that = era.

At=20 the risk of being elliptical:

A great work of music should be=20 timeless.  If a work survives *only* by the life
support = system of=20 musicology, then it should die, mercifully--we shouldn't have
to=20 mollycoddle listeners too much with historical context.  Of = course music=20 scholarship
has an important role to play in bringing works to our=20 attention.  (Where would music
be today without Bach=20 scholarship?)

(Question for the more serious on the list:  = how is=20 a genre of music to survive
if its only record is the very fragile = one of=20 sound recordings?)

Dissonance isn't relative (in my=20 opinion).

>>Concerns with innovation and obsolescence are = themselves part of a
>>historical attitude and tradition, = i.e.=20 "modernism," that supposedly we have
>>already post-ed and = beyond-ed=20 since 1968 or so.....? But outside the issue
>>of that = modernist=20 impulse toward the new (dated as it is at this = point),
>>_any_ form=20 can reach a state of exhaustion when used for long enough.

But = tonality=20 is not exhausted, only the imagination of those who say it = is.

Michael=20 Ridderbusch
------=_NextPart_000_0028_01BF58D5.5104A340-- ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 7 Jan 2000 06:12:28 -0500 Reply-To: Electronic Music Discussion List Sender: Electronic Music Discussion List From: Steven Wartofsky Subject: Re: Millennial thoughts on music and progress. In-Reply-To: <38749E4A.EE40CB33@arches.uga.edu> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit No matter what the physical means to try to make some music survive, ultimately all music survives or dies in its echoes in the living traditions of performance and innovation that hark back to it. So, for instance, as you indicate, at the moment counterpoint is almost dead, with a few left around to realize that that could be one of the greatest losses to musical tradition ever. And lo and behold -- surprise! Perhaps in a month, or a year, or a decade, all of a sudden there will be a rediscovery and we'll hear nothing _but_ innovations in counterpoint for the next hundred years. Even in pop country music, now that would be interesting. Steve -----Original Message----- From: Electronic Music Discussion List [mailto:EMUSIC-L@LISTSERV.AMERICAN.EDU]On Behalf Of Robert Tucker Sent: Thursday, January 06, 2000 8:53 AM To: EMUSIC-L@LISTSERV.AMERICAN.EDU Subject: Re: Millennial thoughts on music and progress. > A great work of music should be timeless. If a work survives *only* by the > life support system of musicology, then it should die, mercifully--we shouldn't > have to mollycoddle listeners too much with historical context. Of course music > scholarship has an important role to play in bringing works to our attention. (Where > would music be today without Bach scholarship?) I doubt music would be any better or worse without Bach scholarship. Different? Yes, but better? Nah, probably not. Our attention would have just been devoted to other aspects of music. Regardless, do composers even know what counterpoint is these days? I don't hear it. > (Question for the more serious on the list: how is a genre of music to > survive if its only record is the very fragile one of sound recordings?) Maybe I'm missing what you're getting at, but with the importance you place on the "timelessness" of a great work, my question to you is: if a work survives *only* by the life support system of historic field recordings, why should it not die, mercifully? :) Of course, the revival of klezmer is an example of one genre that has survived only through the benefit of recordings. From what I know, klezmer is alive today only because a number of young clarinet turks raided their grandparents' records and learned Dave Taras solos note for note. There doesn't appear to be much of a direct lineage among the first performers and the new generation, except via recordings. All media are fragile to a certain extent, but I'd nominate sound recordings as probably the most musically important happening of the last 1000 years. More than anything else, it's changed our relationship to music, and will continue to do so. -- Best regards, Robert Tucker ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 7 Jan 2000 06:19:44 -0500 Reply-To: Electronic Music Discussion List Sender: Electronic Music Discussion List From: Steven Wartofsky Subject: Re: Millennial thoughts on music and progress. In-Reply-To: <20000106223857.8541.qmail@cassiel.com> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit How can you feel this way, in the age of internet and mp3 (yuck, I know)? Sure, Stern and Springer get spotlight and money but do you really want that kind of attention, anyways? Their medium is about to disappear anyways. There's massive MP3 dreck yet all sorts of new music communities are forming out there, serious, joking, neighborhood associations, teams of five enjoying each other one in Indonesia two in Finland one in Brazil and the last one over in Madagascar (they play together nightly). Who is your audience? How do you get to them? Obviously not the way you're proceeding at the moment. Yet they're out there and you must find them. Don't worry about what shows up nightly on TV or daily on MSNBC, there are billions of insects buzzing around, too, yet you're not concerned that you're not getting their attention (or are you?), are you? Steve -----Original Message----- From: Electronic Music Discussion List [mailto:EMUSIC-L@LISTSERV.AMERICAN.EDU]On Behalf Of Nick Rothwell Sent: Thursday, January 06, 2000 5:39 PM To: EMUSIC-L@LISTSERV.AMERICAN.EDU Subject: Re: Millennial thoughts on music and progress. > I think there's a combinatorial effect; "this is music made by > process X and it's interesting/beautiful/unusual". Humans are wired > to look at new things with interest; I think this comes from when a > new thing would be just as likely to eat you as not. I'm more cynical than this, I think. We live in an age of media smog, which means that those who make the most noise (like, say, Howard Stern or Jerry Springer) get the attention. In a better-adjusted, more serene culture, these people would be rightly recognised as socially disfunctional. (Actually, I've only seen short clips of Springer's shows and don't know what Stern does, except by reputation - but I have heard of them...) Our age is one which (largely) offers an abundance of resources, except for one: mindshare. -- Nick Rothwell Cassiel.com Limited nick@cassiel.com www.cassiel.com systems - composition - installation - performance ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 7 Jan 2000 05:40:33 -0800 Reply-To: Electronic Music Discussion List Sender: Electronic Music Discussion List From: Gene Schwartz Subject: Re: Millennial thoughts on music and progress. In-Reply-To: <002701bf58ff$39daab40$8d4a0f3f@wartley> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" > Great stuff! I never really understood "atonality" really, either. > As long as a piece of music has >_some_ sort of ground, at some level >it is still "tonal," and I don't think, despite radical experiments in >this >direction, that you ever get away from that ground. this makes no sense to me. can you define 'ground'? "I began to add a few things up and realized there was no way I could come from a little town in Iowa, be eating 2,000 people a year, and nobody said anything about it" ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 7 Jan 2000 11:55:09 -0600 Reply-To: Electronic Music Discussion List Sender: Electronic Music Discussion List From: "Edwards, Bruce D" Subject: Re: L/M MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; CHARSET=US-ASCII >from Mike M.: >Was LISTEN/MOVE a success or a failure? That depends on >whether you were trying to attract dancers to work with >you, or to show the world that your process could create >music of stunning power. It was designed for the former >and failed so badly that the failure was remarkable in >itself; it ended up doing the latter and succeeding >brilliantly, IMO. >mike without recapping tedious arguments concerning technologies' impact not merely on the perception of what is art . . . (assuming that anyone is in agreement with Brernans' observation that "modernism" effectively labels the time when individuals first (with emphasis on "first") became both objects and subjects of technological advance) . . . but more significantly by an artist's acceptance of the "unique" gesture by which art was defined . . . it occurs to me that the folks at Cdmuze might be post-modernist facilitators of "high-art" by raising the effort to experience the atomic city catalog to just short of Herculean (and no, Mike the 9/19/99 effort to acquire Shatterday Ballistic Bandwidth was no more successful than the first three attempts) . . . but I was able, a year and a half ago?, to get a copy of LISTEN/MOVE . . . I am amazed at the number of times while sitting at the Kawai K5000 (R) playing (in recess from adult focus) . . . literally merely twirling knobs that I have stumbled across sounds reminiscent of Listen/Move . . . I almost always, with no particular intention of ever using them in a composition, print those patches to floppy (vaguely meaning to go back and dissect them for relationships among invoked components . . . to date I never have) . . . while I operate under the assumption that there is little correspondence between the way Nick and I might process music I not only enjoy L/M but find that in quiet, subtle ways it is influencing how I hear . . . not because I find it to be particularly avant neuvue [sic] . . . but because I hear an internal dialog made accessible to a broader audience . . . and its execution is precise enough to raise the tolerance of what is acceptable in other such dialogs (including my own) . . . from listening to Nick discuss how he works and reading some of his comments about the project I may be overreaching evidence to read an ironic distance in Nick towards the project . . . based on the tension between the intent, which only the artist can know and its articulation which only an audience can perceive (a conscious tension necessary to distinguish sentiment from emotion and which, rather than politics, lays at the center of my propaganda vs. art discourse . . . right or wrong I do not see L/M as propaganda, sentimental or otherwise). And while, to continue to eat, it certainly helps if one becomes involved with equity accumulating projects I think it would be sad if L/M were seen as anything other than a success (not masterpiece or penultimate achievement but a successful dialog between artist and audience) regards --------------------------------------- Edwards, Bruce D Vanderbilt University Email: bruce.d.edwards@Vanderbilt.Edu ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 7 Jan 2000 17:32:42 -0500 Reply-To: Electronic Music Discussion List Sender: Electronic Music Discussion List From: Steven Wartofsky Subject: Re: Millennial thoughts on music and progress. In-Reply-To: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sorry -- "ground" is a misuse here, since it does have a specific meaning in musical jargon -- sloppiness on my part. Nothing complicated, just something like a defining "key" or "rhythm" or even single note, around which expectation is built for a return. Steve -----Original Message----- From: Electronic Music Discussion List [mailto:EMUSIC-L@LISTSERV.AMERICAN.EDU]On Behalf Of Gene Schwartz Sent: Friday, January 07, 2000 8:41 AM To: EMUSIC-L@LISTSERV.AMERICAN.EDU Subject: Re: Millennial thoughts on music and progress. > Great stuff! I never really understood "atonality" really, either. > As long as a piece of music has >_some_ sort of ground, at some level >it is still "tonal," and I don't think, despite radical experiments in >this >direction, that you ever get away from that ground. this makes no sense to me. can you define 'ground'? "I began to add a few things up and realized there was no way I could come from a little town in Iowa, be eating 2,000 people a year, and nobody said anything about it"