From: maverick@cs.berkeley.edu (Vance Maverick)
Newsgroups: rec.music.classical
Subject: Re: minimalism
Date: 27 Jul 1992 17:32:07 GMT
Organization: CS Division, UC Berkeley
Distribution: world
NNTP-Posting-Host: ginkgo.cs.berkeley.edu

Brian Yoder writes:
> In article <Brunpr.KBz@news.cso.uiuc.edu> erwin@helsinki.ks.uiuc.edu (Edgar Erwin) writes:

> > Although I can think of many reasons why I enjoy listening to Glass,
> > Reich, Riley, etc, I don't feel the need to justify my tastes to you
> > or anyone else.

> Well, you don't HAVE TO justify these things, but you don't have to
> justify decorating your living room with the decaying bodies of dead
> neighborhood cats either

I think your comparison of music to living-room decoration is quite telling.

> > Although I've not yet had the pleasure of reading many of your posts,
> > I already have the impression that I would have about as much chance
> > of convincing you of the merits of minimalism as I would of convincing
> > Velikovsky that our moon was not burped out of Jupiter's great red
> > spot.
>
> Come on, I'm willing to accept rational arguments.  What I'm not
> willing to accept is ad hominem arguments and assertions that facts
> are based on inexplicable whims.

How about arguments by unsupported analogy?  The living-room business
above, for example, has force only if we believe music functions like
drapes and wallpaper, and that the "1812" Overture is somehow less
like a dead cat than "Music for 18 Instruments".  This is a matter of
opinion, to put it mildly.  (And curiously, you are picking on music
which is often, and disparagingly, compared to wallpaper.)

> The Lustigians insist that there is no particular features of music
> which give rise to your response to it.  In essence, he is saying that
> you have have this "aesthetic response" to any sound and that there
> are no particular qualities of any particular sound which in fact make
> it more musical or less musical.

Well, I can't speak for the Lustigeans (I think this is the proper
spelling :)), but you've left at least one major factor out of your
capsule summary: culture.  Within a music culture, for example that of
Vienna, 1780, or of San Francisco, 1967, there certainly are musical
and unmusical sounds; but across cultures, no set of sounds will
consistently qualify.  Once we are in the curious position of being
able to hear in both ways -- to listen to the "Prague" Symphony and to
"Ball and Chain" in ways that respect their sound-worlds -- why place
limits on what we can hear as musical?  Where's the loss in adding
another sound to our repertory?

> There is certainly some room for taste, I don't deny that.  My point is that
> what makes music music is something inherent in it, not some purely
> subjective interpretation.

Well, unless you have a heuristic for detecting this "something" which
is BETTER than the direct exercise of taste, then this is pretty
vacuous.  And yes, I know you feel music expresses "metaphysical value
judgments", but your technique for identifying these sounds
suspiciously like [stage whisper] taste.

> >[of Glass]
> >He's certainly no more of a fraud than Cage or Schoenberg, whom many  
> >people still, unfortunately, see that way.
> 
> In deed.  He is EXACTLY as much a fraud as Cage and Schoenberg.  They are 
> frauds too.

OK, we know that you think so.  But the arguments you've made so far
would work equally well with all the terms randomly switched, alla
Mad-Libs or yow.  "Real music has CLARINETS, because the purpose of
music is to SELL SOAP, and you can't SELL SOAP without CLARINETS.  So
music without CLARINETS is obviously a fraud!"

	Vance (sucked in at last)
Newsgroups: rec.music.classical