source file: mills2.txt Date: Sun, 5 Nov 1995 14:30:11 -0800 From: "John H. Chalmers" From: mclaren Subject: academia, jibes, hurt feelings, the search for truth --- With his usual insight and common sense, Bill Alves offered some tart rejoinders to my posts on psychoacoustics. As to the question of who is or is not ignorant, it is sufficient to observe: "Hic ego barbarus sum quia non intelligor illis." But Alves' point about my "bigoted statements about academics" is right on the money. Your Humble E-Mail Correspondents pleads guilty... with an explanation. To paraphrase Richard Preston, "Music is a lesser activity than religion in the sense that we've agreed not to kill each other but to discuss things." To the extent that any of my statements about academia or people with PhDs has hindered the discussion on this forum, or poisoned it with unnecessary bad feeling, I certainly apologize. For making bigoted statements about no-talent academics who try to maintain a brain-dead status quo, however, I do NOT apologize. I *AM* bigoted against such people. I intend to *continue* my bigotry against such people, and wherever possible to deeper and broaden the scope of my bigotry against these no-talents. I make no apologies whatsoever for this kind of bigotry. On the contrary: I *celebrate* this kind of bigotry. Indeed, in an apotheosis of political incorrectness, I *glory* in my bigotry against people with big reps and no competence, big degrees and no talent, big grants and no imagination. I exult in my capacity to distinguish twixt crap and the beaux arts. If this is bigotry, *great.* Sounds like a PLAN! Lemme at 'em! Come get some, !@#%#+#@%$ers! It's hard to say whether the no-talent duffers are in the majority or the minority in music departments. Many folks with PhDs in music use a kind of protective coloration: they keep a low profile, don't make waves, and quietly go about their radical xenharmonic explorations while giving an outward appearance of conformity to the Perversions of New Music ideal. (Namely, that the very model of the modern composer is one who talks and talks and talks and talks, and hardly every produces any music...and then only dribs and drabs of warmed-over Webern and kludged-up Cage. Above all, ya gotta have a theory! Theeee-ory! Theeee-ory! Git yer red-hot theee-ory! Ice cold muuu-sic, red hot theeee-ory! Can't enjoy the music without a theee-ory!) Many of the academics who subscribe to this forum are extraordinarily talented polymaths. For example, Larry Polansky fills me with awe: this guy not only writes original & groundbreaking articles, he's not only a terrific teacher & thesis adviser (by all accounts), he's not only a fine amateur ethnomusicologist, but he's also a world-class computer programmer *AND* a startlingly talented composer. Is there *anything* this guy can't do? Is he in next year's olympics? Has he climbed Mount Kilamanjaro yet? Will he be the first xenharmonist in space? William Schottstaedt is another example. A top-notch programmer, able to design entire object-oriented music languages in a single bound, debug cranky antique computer systems faster than a speeding bullet, but then he ducks into a phone booth and becomes...a world-class composer. Amazing. David Cope is not only a fine composer, by all accounts a splendid teacher, an excellent writer (the "New Directions In Music" books are classics of their kind in each of their various editions), but he's also a world-class AI music programmer whose LISP syntactic models of composition have broken genuinely new ground in the field. Astounding. Johnny Reinhard is not only one of the world's great scholars of microtonality, a bibliomane with the most impressive library of microtonal scores on the planet, an administrative wizard who single-handedly forced the New York concert scene to bow to microtonality, AND a living link between thousands of xenharmonic composers, researchers and performers...but Johnny is *also* the reincarnation of Jimi Hendrix as a bassoon player. Virtuoso par excellence. And speaking of universally talented people... William Alves himself is an extremely impressive guy. Not only a first-rate JI composer, but a scholar of tuning history, a crack computer programmer, a DSP wizard, *and* a fine teacher (by all reports). Another polymath. To continue in this vein would embarrass *a great many* PhDs who subscribe to this forum... Suffice it to say that this tuning forum represents an extraordinary confluence of exceptionally talented academics. It's fashionable to claim that "the day of the Renaissance man (woman? person?) is past." Whoever believes this hasn't logged onto the tuning forum. Having said all that, permit me to add not my own words, but those of Norbert Weiner: "What sometimes enrages me and always disappoints and grieves me is the preference of great schools of learning for the derivative as opposed to the original, for the conventional and thin which can be duplicated in many copies rather than the new and powerful, and for arid correctness and limitation of scope and method rather than for universal newness and beauty, wherever it may be seen." [Weiner, Norbert, "The Human Use of Human Beings," 2nd edition., 1954, pg. 135] --mclaren Received: from eartha.mills.edu [144.91.3.20] by vbv40.ezh.nl with SMTP-OpenVMS via TCP/IP; Mon, 6 Nov 1995 00:48 +0100 Received: from by eartha.mills.edu via SMTP (940816.SGI.8.6.9/930416.SGI) for id OAA10844; Sun, 5 Nov 1995 14:48:24 -0800 Date: Sun, 5 Nov 1995 14:48:24 -0800 Message-Id: <199511052247.RAA08615@freenet3.carleton.ca> Errors-To: madole@ella.mills.edu Reply-To: tuning@eartha.mills.edu Originator: tuning@eartha.mills.edu Sender: tuning@eartha.mills.edu