source file: mills2.txt Date: Wed, 14 Aug 1996 16:11:38 -0700 Subject: More decontextualized whingeing from you-know-who.... From: gtaylor@heurikon.com (One Cointreau, on ice....) >From between the great rocks Sulky and Crib-dis, Brian writes: >Without concern for how the music *sounds*, >no system of composition can long survive. Of course, I think that music has a pesky habit (like about everything else that people do) of being a socially constructed behavior. It seems to me that it ought to be rather simple to observe that there are more factors involved with the "survival" of a given cultural meme than a "concern" for "how the music sounds" or a lack of same. One might encourage cultural selection by tying a given sort of musical behavior to, say, a cultural ritual [the Mass, Woodstock, the Olympics] and take it from there. In my view, it's pretty obvious that how something sounds isn't either necessary *or* sufficient to guarantee its "survival" [a term which Brian, conveniently, fails to define] - after all, there's all kinds of wonderful music outside of 12TET out there that I find positively marvellous. Some of it seems to be having trouble quite apart from how it sounds. There might be more, I think. However bracing that opener may sound, I personally think it lacks a little nuance, and is carrying some stuff it didn't declare to the Douanier. The other bit that our northwestern correspondent seems to have forgotten to mention is the question of *whose* concern we mean [composers? listeners? the shadowy cabal of trilateral atonal serialists who bombard America's listeners with mind-scrambling rays?]. But I digress. >And the endeavour to keep a brain- >dead theory of composition from perishing, >on life support, years after its rationale >has gone, can only lead to brain death. >The latest outbreak of this symptomatic >condition bursts forth in Perspectives of >New Music, Vol. 39, Nos. 1 & 2, 1995, >pp. 554-558. Since our musical culture has not progressed sufficiently far that McLarenists can strangle all Cage fans (or anyone who happens to like what they like without regard for Brian's objective tastes) in their beds or deport them with impunity, there'll always be a pesky few folks whose work just *might* require a little context to make some sense in somewhat the same manner that some of our friends might need just a bit of explanation about why we don't follow convention and use the 12 equally tempered scale pitches that God gave us :-). The guy that Brian's recent PNM-flyby screed has barnacled onto is one of 'em. A really *clever* trainspotter might even recognize the name; James Boros is one of those folks whose work falls under the rubric of "postmodern fiction" along with folks like Kathy Acker. While I've certainly not got a shelf full of PNM here before me, I'm guessing that Boros' work is quoted in the context of it being a libretto for some piece of music. My best guess is that it's probably the stuff that David Holzman got his NEA recording grant for in 1994 . The entire text itself appeared in the September '94 issue of the periodical "Postmodern Culture" (Vol. 5 #1), just in case you want to look at the whole thing. Boros is one of those folks whose interest is in constructing texts which maintain the basic syntactic structure of common, everyday language (that is, the nouns and modifiers and dependent clauses and that stuff are all in the right place, which means that the stuff "parses") but are composed of individual lexical units which bounce off of each other and (James and his ilk hope) generate new associative strings in those who read 'em. I know this'll come as a bit surprise to you, but I find that my mileage varies considerably on this one, though it certainly has its place. The origin of this particular line of inquiry comes from ol Noam "Chopper" Chomsky himself; there's a wonderful sentence whose deep and surface structures are entirely at odds that I just can't recall at the moment. Anyway, I think that it ought to be clear why including or looking at structures which play form and content off against each other might be of interest as a general approach for folks who construct texts or musical pieces. We could pause and think of surrealism, dada, futurist performance, and so on. This particular discourse is certainly not one of my favorites, but the place where it's "embedded" in cultural practice certainly isn't all that hard to imagine (the sentence generator in Gulliver's Travels, anyone?). Actually, there *is* a positively *lovely* multimedia work based on this kind of thing done by Bill Seaman called "The Exquisite Mechanism of Shivers" which combines this rotating permutative string with some very quiet little video images and sound recordings that I quite like. You can find it on the "ARTintACT" CD-ROM publication from the ZKM/Zentrum fur Kunst und Medientechnologie in Karlsruhe (Cantz Verlag, 1994). I hope you have a chance to see it someday. If you'd like, you can take a look at the whole Boros text at: http://jefferson.village.virginia.edu/pmc/creative.all.html Come to think of it, doesn't Nick Didkovsky also generate his own text strings using the same algorithm he uses for generating music (which he then strings together to make larger structures)? >In the Alice In Wonderland world of so-called >"serious" modern music theory, *this* is what >passes for profound investigation into the >nature of contemporary music. >Meanwhile, when I write: >"if we've learned ANYTHING by reading the past >60 years of music history, we've learned that there >*isn't* any final stage of musical evolution. >There is no `ultimate style.' There is no >`Single correct way to compose.'" >.. When I write such a sentence, these are the >ravings of an unpleasant crank. It would seem to me that it's a bit disingenuous to suggest, as Brian does, that the whole of modern musical practice has a single goal or a single set of mean to reach said end. Of course, he's managed to do a rather pathetic job of deck-stacking by giving us an innocuous bit of Brian (in what seems to be his non-crank mode when deprived of *its* context) and rubbing it up against a bit of text whose embedding comes out of an entirely different discourse with no attempt to explain what things come from and why. Why not quote Philip Levine's "What Work Is" and then put up a bit of Brian in full crank mode and then claim that Brian's a lousy writer because his poetry stinks? (Actually, you ought to sit down and try to construct some texts that parse like Boros but which lead away from the parse. It's harder than you think - that's what so intrigued Noam about 'em.) (more sulkiness snipped....) >Yes, once we step behind the looking glass and >emerge into the world of modern music theory, >anything is possible. One needs no looking glass. Until such time as we're all forced to kowtow to the McLarenist Final Vocabulary, folks will keep on coming up with ways of thinking about and doing stuff that'll just burn your ass, Brian. Mine too, for that matter. The ability of persons to imagine a world not like our own is something one can always wager on. And, like it or not, those pesky value questions are a negotiation with people you don't like, which is one lovely reason that one might prefer folks who don't mix subjective judgements and normative language with such abandon as you're wont to do. >Anything, it would seem, but common sense, logic, >and sanity. And don't tell me - we're talking "common sense" and "logic" and "sanity" as exemplified by...it's right on the tip of my tongue.... Pluralistically your'n, Gregory _ 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; Thu, 15 Aug 1996 15:05 +0200 Received: by ns.ezh.nl; (5.65v3.2/1.3/10May95) id AA13744; Thu, 15 Aug 1996 15:05:39 +0200 Received: from eartha.mills.edu by ns (smtpxd); id XA13780 Received: from by eartha.mills.edu via SMTP (940816.SGI.8.6.9/930416.SGI) for id GAA04883; Thu, 15 Aug 1996 06:05:24 -0700 Date: Thu, 15 Aug 1996 06:05:24 -0700 Message-Id: <199608151303.JAA29353@cerberus2.Ensoniq.Com> Errors-To: madole@ella.mills.edu Reply-To: tuning@eartha.mills.edu Originator: tuning@eartha.mills.edu Sender: tuning@eartha.mills.edu