source file: mills2.txt Date: Tue, 3 Dec 1996 10:47:17 -0800 Subject: Why Do the Heathen Rage? From: gtaylor@heurikon.com (One Cointreau, on ice....) My goodness. I depart to spend the Thanksgiving holidays with my parents and return to a veritable geyser of gainsaying from Mr. McLaren; It would appear that a fair number of the rest of you have dealt in an interesting and straightforward way with the vituperative vortex/Philippic plume, so I'll merely mention that Brian has about as nuanced a grasp of the notions of sociolinguistics as he's brought to bear previously in the notion of Canonicity. There is, thankfully, *no* single fulminatory being who is free to use his/her copy of the lexicon as something with which to beat others; definitions of all sorts are constantly negotiated - meanings drift and change according to all sorts of contexts and even among members of the communities who would generally agree on a given meaning. Some of the ongoing and exceedlingly interesting discussions here on notions of terminology and strategies for naming and notation are, in fact, examples of that very thing in action. Most, if not all, of the sociolinguists with whom I am socially acquainted (they can be a fun lot. One of my wife's students is looking at the way that Dutch acquired the reflexive verb by looking at letters, diaries and municipal records in the City of Haarlem's population. As a side effect, Jen regales us with tales of the seige of Haarlem as recorded by the common folk in addition to the more "hard" research side of it) seem to view that kind of drift and fuzziness *not* as evidence of some dreadful inexactitude which must be cleansed to assure conceptual purity, but as the kind of sparks thrown off the great Catherine Wheel of social construction - be it art, or music, or new ways of telling fish stories. As the estimable Mr. Lyon has pointed out so succinctly, one of the reasons that John Cage remains a central figure in the musical and aesthetic practice of this century is that he provides some singular examples of the ways that one can puah and tease the "certainties" of definition to reveal new ways of thinking or working, or to reveal previously unrecognized modalities which situate themselves in what seems to be "common" practice. Indeed, one might suggest that some of us might hope to see ourselves as being engaged in a similar kind of work - and I, for one, remain convinced that the most productive way to engage in that dialogue involves the belief that the best aesthetic situation is one in which *no one* [not even me :-) ] has the last word. With every outburst of the sort I've seen from him recently, I grow more convinced that some part of the poverty of Brian's delusional edifice is that he seems only to understand music as some kind of zero-sum game; it's the only explanation I can come up with for his seeming desire to replace one sort of orthodoxy he despises with his own. To quote Pete Townsend, "Meet the new boss/same as the old boss." I think it's sad. And who on earth taught him to define "algorithmic composition" in the way that he does? Sure wasn't Bill Schottstaedt. It *sure* wasn't anyone I ever sat at the feet of.... With regards, Gregory Taylor _ I would go to her, lay it all out, unedited. The plot was a simple one, paraphrasable by the most ingenuous of nets. The life we lead is our only maybe. The tale we tell is the must that we make by living it. [Richard Powers, "Galatea 2.2"] Gregory Taylor/Heurikon Corporation/Madison, WI Received: from ns.ezh.nl [137.174.112.59] by vbv40.ezh.nl with SMTP-OpenVMS via TCP/IP; Tue, 3 Dec 1996 21:05 +0100 Received: by ns.ezh.nl; (5.65v3.2/1.3/10May95) id AA07353; Tue, 3 Dec 1996 21:07:26 +0100 Received: from eartha.mills.edu by ns (smtpxd); id XA09424 Received: from by eartha.mills.edu via SMTP (940816.SGI.8.6.9/930416.SGI) for id MAA07670; Tue, 3 Dec 1996 12:07:15 -0800 Date: Tue, 3 Dec 1996 12:07:15 -0800 Message-Id: Errors-To: madole@ella.mills.edu Reply-To: tuning@eartha.mills.edu Originator: tuning@eartha.mills.edu Sender: tuning@eartha.mills.edu