source file: mills2.txt Date: Thu, 28 Nov 1996 22:36:51 -0800 Subject: McLaren - The Theorist as Irritant From: Eric Lyon Brian McLaren recently posted an attack on me to which I reluctantly respond. I'd prefer to pass over it in silence but as Nietzsche has said, silence can be interpreted as "ressentiment". Here's Brian: >"A speech has two parts. You must state you case, >and you must prove it. You cannot either state your >case and omit to prove it, or prove it without >having first stated it." This is clearly an alien >concept to Eric Lyon and Greg Taylor: but to the >rest of us, it's obvious. At this point Brian provides no evidence for his charge, but I have no doubt that it is forthcoming. Meanwhile he will let the implication resonate with Tuning readers that Gregory and I alone on this list are incapable of rational argument while Brian demonstrates his erudition on the subject of perfect fifths. Are we marginalized yet? >Instead, we would find ourselves flailing like bugs >stuck in yogurt, as Eric Lyon and Greg Taylor have >done repeatedly on this tuning forum. Without physical >and psychoacoustic experiment to back up our claims, >we would make foolish unproven statements which turn >out to be nonsense--as Eric Lyon and Greg Taylor have >done repeatedly on this tuning forum. Once again an assertion without evidence. But I like the yogurt metaphor, although personally I prefer granola to bugs in my yogurt and other software. >Fuzzy thinking and slipshod logic lead to a pervasive >abuse of words, a wanton violation of their recognized >meanings, a disdain and a contempt for precision >in the use of the English language. >To use a word so fundamental to the outlook of modern >western culture as "experimental" (in the way Cage >does) and willfully pervert its recognized meaning is >to grossly and culpably misuse the word "experimental." >This, both Cage and Lyon have done by claiming that >it means something other than its dictionary definition >as soon as we kidnap the poor word "experiment," jam >a hood over its head, stick a gun in its back, and >frog-march it into the realm of modern music. >Of course, if we want to make up the meaning of the >words we use, we are certainly free to do so. Great, something more solid than innuendo and gratuitous personal attack. My response is that often the commonly used dictionary definition of a word is different than how it is used in a special community - sometimes the meanings are contradictory but this doesn't cause a problem to people who understand the context and are committed to trying to understand each other. Most words have several dictionary definitions per dictionary, all requiring further experience in the real world in order to be understood. Example: the word "fifth" which Brian discusses in detail. If you tell the average person that the word "fifth" refers to the ratio 3:2, they might wonder why it isn't 1:5. They then need the additional context that the word is used here to measure a musical interval with respect to degrees of the diatonic scale, rather a volume of alcohol. If they are fairminded they won't automatically assume that you're an idiot and incapable of basic mathematics because you don't use the word "fifth" according to its commonly accepted general usage. But if they are Brian, they would accuse you of obfuscation. They would say "fifth has a commonly accepted meaning which you confuse by stealing it for mere use in music. If you want to accurately express the ratio of 2:3, you should call that interval a threetwoed or maybe a twothreed." Fortunately Brian does not write dictionaries. >Eric Lyon himself touches on this important problem >when he states "indeed the confusion of artistic and >scientific methodologies is one major reason that >many American university music departments have >become somewhat inhospitable for artists." >To put it bluntly, if you propose to use terms borrowed >from the sciences you had better use them properly >and with some understanding. Cage did not. >Eric Lyon does not. Most modern "music theorists" >do not. I generally do not use scientific terms to discuss music. When I use a term such as the much maligned "experimental", I use it within a specific 20th century compositional context. "Experimental music" is more a statement of intent than a description. My personal intent is to create music which takes me somewhere I haven't been before, using every technique at my disposal including techniques I may need to invent. If that doesn't sound much different than some earlier music such as Gesualdo, Montiverdi or Bach, that's fine because I consider that music "experimental" in its time. In my earlier post on experimental music, I made clear the distinction between experiment in science and experiment in art. I choose not to repeat it here. I admit that I often use terms with much influence from their personal significance to me, since I'm much more of an artist than a theorist, apparently converse to Brian's orientation. Nonetheless, Brian is also well known for defining terms at will to suit his own agenda. In recent post, Brian discussed "computer generated music", and chose to define it as the situation where a composer sets up a random system and accepts the output from the program, direct to DAT. This is a perfectly useless definition. I know many computer music composers and not a single one works this way. Bill Schottstaedt posted in reply, describing his methods which involve an interaction between computer automated processes and his own tastes and compositional judgment. In fact many computer music composers use similar methods, myself included. Brian's reduction of computer music to an absurd strawman demonstrates yet again his lack of understanding of how a true composer actually works. You might as well reduce American action expressionist painting to a guy taking a can of paint and hurling it at the canvas. Or you could take white noise, narrow bandpass filtered at 440Hz and say no, it's not a 440Hz tone, it's just noise. In the real world of musical composition, the composer is the filter, but Brian just doesn't get it. >John Cage and his rivals at Darmstadt, >along with PIerre Boulez' group in Paris were, >by dictionary definition, charlatans one and all. >They spouted meaningless pseudo-scientific >drivel, and the intent of their "theories" appears >to have been to obfuscate and impress, rather than to >elucidate and specify. >This is the charge made against John Cage in my >topic 3 of TD 803, and the charge stands. Eric >Lyon has not refuted the charge, since clearly >he does not understand the dictionary definition >of "experimental" any better than John Cage >did. I actually didn't read that particular post. I do not live and breathe to defend John Cage. I find some of his ideas useful or provocative, and I find a small fraction of his music excellent and of its time. Cage's writings at their best are intended to stimulate the reader to independent thought, not tell him/her what to think. Brian next takes a series of Cage quotes out of context to ridicule him. I'll just grab a couple. >Cage writes: >"Does being musical make one automatically stupid and unable >to listen? Then don't you think one should put a stop to studying >music? Where are your thinking caps?" [Cage, John, "Silence," >page 49] >Let's see: >Studying music must...therefore "make one automatically stupid." >Right. Here the literalist reads this as an anti-intellectual statement. Instead, it seems to me that Cage is questioning whether studying music according to an orthodoxy is the best way to understand music. Brian will argue later that studying at a university has destroyed my capacity for rational thought, so therefore, Brian here agrees with his interpretation of Cage's statement: >Studying music must...therefore "make one automatically stupid." >"Musical habits include...the study of the >timbres, single and in combination of a limited >number of sound-producing mechanisms. In >mathematical terms these all concern discrete >steps." [Cage, John, "Silence," page 9] >Here Cage makes the ignorant blunder of >claiming that all sounds have spectra which >can be described in "discrete steps." Here as elsewhere, Brian demonstrates his lack of understanding of one of the basic tools of timbral analysis - the Fourier transform. All real world spectra are continuous if we consider the noise component. However, they may all be *described as* the summation of a bandlimited series of sine waves, each at a discrete harmonic frequency, through sampling, windowing and FFT analysis, sometimes providing information useful in understanding and manipulating timbre. Cage is right, Brian is wrong. Further, Cage is critical of the traditional use in music of sounds with harmonic as opposed to noise spectra. So you have to have a bit of context about Cage's involvement with percussion music and his program of widening the tonal palette of composers to include noise and ambient sounds. In that context, the shape of a harmonic spectrum is *relatively* discrete compared to that of a noise spectrum. Brian is correct to state that acoustic instruments have both noise and tone elements, but the prevailing music theory at the time of Cage's writing was still primarily concerned with relations among the tone component, e.g. Schenker, 12 tone theory. So Cage was challenging readers to go outside the orthodoxy and think about sound in different ways. Brian follows with a diatribe on university profs and music departments which I am really not qualified to respond to other than that his information seems at least 10 years out of date. Certainly Brian's claim about music professors being overpaid or underworked is history in the new order of American education funding. Perhaps someone on the list with current active involvement in an American university can share their perceptions, either as a student or professor. I'm sympathetic to some of Brian's views on the university, but feel that the articulation needs to be a bit more, shall we say, nuanced, in order to connect with reality. >Thus, it ill behooves me (not that it stops him for 50 milliseconds) > to criticize those like Eric Lyon >and Greg Taylor, since they are merely the symptoms >of the disease--namely, those "vast factories of junkthink" >called univerities. Like every artist, I am a symptom (but not just of the university) and accept the compliment. Whether I am a disease is not for me to judge but I have hopes. Finally Brian avers: >Cage's swindles and perversions of 12-TET >music theory are the disease; microtonality is the cure. Hallelujah! Eric Lyon eric@iamas.ac.jp http://www.iamas.ac.jp/~eric Received: from ns.ezh.nl [137.174.112.59] by vbv40.ezh.nl with SMTP-OpenVMS via TCP/IP; Fri, 29 Nov 1996 07:38 +0100 Received: by ns.ezh.nl; (5.65v3.2/1.3/10May95) id AA11549; Fri, 29 Nov 1996 07:40:36 +0100 Received: from eartha.mills.edu by ns (smtpxd); id XA11628 Received: from by eartha.mills.edu via SMTP (940816.SGI.8.6.9/930416.SGI) for id WAA10549; Thu, 28 Nov 1996 22:40:34 -0800 Date: Thu, 28 Nov 1996 22:40:34 -0800 Message-Id: <199611290638.AA07013@eceserv0.ece.wisc.edu> Errors-To: madole@ella.mills.edu Reply-To: tuning@eartha.mills.edu Originator: tuning@eartha.mills.edu Sender: tuning@eartha.mills.edu