From: S0SKAG01@ulkyvm.louisville.edu
Subject: Deadicology
Reply-To: S0SKAG01@ulkyvm.louisville.edu
Organization: The Internet
Date: Sun, 16 Aug 1992 16:11:18 GMT

I'd like to see an analysis of how Attics manages to get back home.
I tried to work it up once for our recorder consort and got hopelessly
lost at the end of the bridge during the key change. By the way, there
is a definite coorelation between some songs (Mountains of the Moon,
China Doll, China Cat Sunflower, Rosemary, come to mind) and music
from the renaissance. They are terrific with lutes and viols.
      Someone mentioned listening to two songs simultaneously on different
earphone channels a while back. During the 1400s, church music was written
in a style called polyphony in which as many as seven melodic lines would
be flowing at once - each to its own text! Check out Dufay, Obrecht, and
Palestrina for original psychedelic music. To someone familiar with this
early music stuff, the Dead seem very accessible and warmly familiar. I believe
Curt compared the texture to a Bach fugue, but to me, it always harkens
back to those cats.
      One other observation...one of the things that seems definitively
Grateful Dead is that many times the beat and/or the melody is not stated
directly. By that I mean that one 'senses' the beat, but the actual musical
moments are happening 'around' the beat. Similarly, the notes are frequently
sensed but the   actual notes that are played are 'around' them, not on
them. This is the looseness that has been described. One of the aspects
of this music that has interested me for20 years is that it takes effort on the
 listener's part to become familiar with the basic song (let's call it the
'text') through the studio recordings or through a great many live performanc-
es. Then the listener can begin to appreciate the improvisations because the
basic text operates as a 'given'.
    This is similar to the way jazz artists have worked when they play
'standards'. Because the audience presumably knows the standard song, the
jazz musician can 'open it up' and explore connotations that are often
surprising. The Dead, in their work, do the same thing, but they've created
their own set of standards - the canon of some 100 or so songs that they
keep in the repertoiry.
     Listeners to this kind of music are in a really different space when
compared to listeners of pop music. Instead of wanting a replication of a radio
hit, what is longed for is an unexpected revelation based on a song that is a
mere platform. The music is free to hint at the original while actually
exploring all the space around it.
    Some time back, I posted an article to a group called Derrida which
discusses deconstruction. There had been some discussion on that list about the
Grateful Dead as a musical example of deconstruction at work. (Derrida is
the philosopher who first promoted the concept of deconstruction as a
critical theory). I won't burden an overly long post with all of the technical
stuff, but suffice it to say that this aspect of 'openess around a felt
center' has very much to do with the looseness of meaning, the 'play'
that informs much post-modern thought.

Steve
Louisville

Newsgroups: rec.music.gdead