source file: mills2.txt Date: Mon, 6 Nov 1995 09:56:59 -0800 Subject: Cage and Boulez From: MORGAN ELLINGTON SMITH > Why do Western composers and critics and > music theorists so fanatically chart and > diagram and plot out and schematize modern > compositions? Harry Partch had a few things to say about this. He said that western art gradually turned from presentations of abstractions to explanations of abstractions, until the explanation began to "proxy" for the experience itself. This is found in musical scores that are impossible to play, as well as scores that verbally explain what to do. The art isn't found so much in the presentation as the idea. I think this is fine, but as long as the art is found in the idea, let's just keep it an idea and not bother with actually playing the pieces (then Boulez's music could still be popular!) Since you mentioned Nancarrow, note how he wrote pieces that are impossible to play, but used the player piano to realize those pieces. His music is meant to be HEARD. > At least *we* euro-dudes can ALWAYS > come up with bigger, better, more > impressive *charts* of our compositions > than any other musical culture on earth! > (A typically priapic male obsession. "Mine > is bigger than yours..." My compositional > diagram, that is. No wonder there are > so few famous women composers. Can anyone > imagine a *woman* wasting 6 months of her > life straight-edging a bunch of chicken-scratches > that explain something everyone can already > *hear*???) One of my many mottos about music is, If it doesn't SOUND interesting, it isn't. > So here's a helpful suggestion: when giving lectures or > concerts, microtonalists should project an overhead > transparency of the New York subway system and > throw in some gibberish about "pitch class > matrices" and "all-interval sets" and "maximally > symmetric stochastic distributions." > --mclaren Yeah, I think I was at that lecture. A Xenakis collaboration with Cage (or maybe it was Andy Warhol). Thanks for a very Entertaining and thoughtful posting. Morgan E. Smith ______________________________________________________________________ Smithme@hiramb.hiram.edu "I'm not an actor, but I play one on TV." Received: from eartha.mills.edu [144.91.3.20] by vbv40.ezh.nl with SMTP-OpenVMS via TCP/IP; Mon, 6 Nov 1995 20:28 +0100 Received: from by eartha.mills.edu via SMTP (940816.SGI.8.6.9/930416.SGI) for id KAA28016; Mon, 6 Nov 1995 10:28:44 -0800 Date: Mon, 6 Nov 1995 10:28:44 -0800 Message-Id: <9511061027.ZM2031@frollo> Errors-To: madole@ella.mills.edu Reply-To: tuning@eartha.mills.edu Originator: tuning@eartha.mills.edu Sender: tuning@eartha.mills.edu