X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.3 PL11]
Newsgroups: bit.listserv.emusic-l
Date:         Wed, 23 Dec 1992 10:08:44 PST
From:         metlay <metlay@NETCOM.COM>
Subject:      Even more about composition
Comments: To: EMUSIC-L@american.edu
              Taylor" at Dec 22, 92 3:35 pm

Greg Taylor jots:
>Or, is the question that the introduction of the technologies of recordings
>and synthesis have given rise to kinds of musical behaviours that do
>not easily map onto the tools and expectations of traditional western
>musical behaviour in some of the same ways that non-western musics do?
>Have we, in effect, created a culture in the midst of traditional musical
>culture which is as problematic as any non-western culture?

I would argue vehemently that we HAVE indeed done so, and that this is
the root of the problem in communication that has surfaced between "us"
and "them." Which is why I so strongly advocate openmindedness here--
if we refuse to accept any creative process as valid, we only harm ourselves.

>>Were any of the following notated before performance/recording:
>>Glenn Branca - Music for the first 128 intervals
>Yep. Graphs, in some cases. In others [the piece you mention], it
>uses a bar line/repeat system and some different symbols.

Ah, but this gets us off onto a tangent, in my opinion. Nonstandard notation
that must be interpreted by the player on the fly, or taught by the composer
so that its rules may be properly obeyed (oh, hell, I've drawn a blank--
help me someone--"Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima" by WHO?), is no
more a "legitimate" means of communication than a sequencer file, because
it can NOT communicate what needs to be communicated in a non-ambiguous
way to the player who finds the score in a book someday years later. I have
always considered the creation of nonstandard notation to be an art form
in and of itself, with merits that stand on their own, but not really so
much a means of communication.

>>I would hope that every composer works with whatever makes them
>>comfortable.  Obviously Mike, you're uncomfortable with the tools at hand.
>>Newton was uncomfortable with 'traditional' math for his laws of motion so
>>he 'invented' calculus to suit himself.  Get the picture?  Humans are tool-
>>makers.  And notation is just another tool IMHO, not a dogma.  Clearly its
>>time we rethought the toolbox.
>
>But you're assuming a total neutrality of the tool here, and that's not
>my experience. The tool of traditional notation is a "gentleman's
>agreement" over the period of some centuries about what is and is not
>important. It is moreover intimately connected to a collection of
>cultural behaviours which some of us may be quite "uncomfortable" with.
>By suggesting that the tool is neutral, you can rest safely within the
>bosom of a system which bequeathes its power and authority to you without
>even thinking about it.

Well stated and true, but perhaps not precisely the response to this
statement that was being looked for... I think that the suggestion
here was that in electronic music, EVERYONE should be able to choose
to rethink the toolbox, and if they choose to, then each person should
develop his OWN tools, to whatever degree he or she feels appropriate.
Some people use store-bought keyboards and play piano samples, but do
so into a sequencer rather than using pen and paper; others build their
own synthesizers from scratch.

>And how about the custodian who sneers at you every time you drop by to
>borrow that old, rusty skyhook that some wierdo left in the box after
>borrowing it?

God damn. You've got one of those guys in Madison, too? |->

>The question in its broadest form winds up being "What is history? And
>what real use is it to us when we have a technological method at our
>disposal which produces the objects [for we have in some cases come to
>define the business of making music solely in terms of the production of
>musical "objects", be they tape or scores or DATs or charts] without
>requiring us to be subject to the power and instrumentalities which
>result when any individual human activity becomes a cultural institution
>(piano tuners, theory teachers, industry directories, music schools,
>instrument rental places, MIDI standards, etc.......)?

And the only feasible answer I can see to this question is, "History is
the accumulated database you have to draw upon when you create anything,
and only YOU can decide what real use it has for you when you do."
The arguments of Graff et alii that you quoted are valid ones, but
one may note the existence and availability of the data without having
to sell one's soul to it, so to speak.

>Parenthetically,
>one also posits a world large enough to hold all the arguments. That
>seems most convenient.

I'd say "necessary" rather than "convenient," myself. But that's just me.

>The scary part of this argument
>for traditional musicians is, I think, the notion that the advent of
>the technologies of recording/sequencing/synthesis have radically relocated
>some of the traditional culture "markers" used to judge "musical" output
>and, in effect, created another culture in the midst of the current one
>where [like jazz] the "rules" are either different or don't apply or are
>an explicitly anacronistic way of doing things [i.e. one only uses the
>notation to honor the old ways or to build up valuable cultural karma
>points to be traded in later]; in some way, it threatens the cultural
>hegemony of traditional musical practice.

No one likes having the legitimacy of what he or she has been taught
to be "true" challenged; we all desire, on some level, a spot of firm
ground upon which we can stand. It's the same in science, in my
experience, and I've had a number of arguments with fellow physicists
who have conveniently forgotten how Einstein was wrongly hounded for
his ideas, and then wrongly hounded Heisenberg in turn for HIS ideas.
The power of tradition transforms this fear of the broken borders into
a sort of righteous indignation; it's a common occurrence. That doesn't
make it proper, but it's common.

[bringing up Henry and Schaeffer vs. Stockhousen et al]

>Could we thus talk about
>why these two approaches are different *this* way without resorting to
>the suggestion that the "post-literate" musician isn't a slacker
>(note, of course, the subtle chauvinism of the word "post"; it implies
>that one necessarily becomes a musician by dealing with the notation
>*first*, as does our "history". Cute, but hopelessly ethnocentric.),

Being the fellow most recently branded "post-literate" here, I'd like this

>and also by avoid the "burn the elite" mode of backlash?

...while trying to avoid excesses of this sort on my part.

>Of course, one could point out that the roots of this split are merely
>rehashes of the arguments between Frech and German music itself: Ravel
>and Schoenberg going at it with diodes. It would seem to me that we can
>omit a fair amount of this and lose only the kind of authority that
>we get from citing "historical" sources and looking cool and smarter
>than poor Nancy with just her sequencer and her Kraftwerk albums. Besides,
>we can discuss the split in terms of how it interacts with the technology
>itself.

In the most recent interview that I've read (1986?), Henry and
Schaeffer stated simply that they considered synthesizer timbres to be
lacking in the sort of complexity that they desired, and that to rely
upon electronic tone generation was to enervate the music. By contrast,
the electronic folx (I'm most familiar with Luening and Ussachevsky)
were enamored of the trip as much as the goal, and had little difficulty
in looking forward to an eventual combination of sounds the French would
approve of with the control they helped father. I would dearly love to
know what they all thought of the Emulator....

At the time, very fine structure in musique concrete was hellishly difficult
because it was all done with a razor blade and splicing tape, inch by
agonizing inch. Complex timbre of the sort heard in the real world was
beyond the reach of the existing synthesis setups. The role of technology
here seems to me to be quite clear in drawing the demarcation; if you
used tape, you had great timbres but had difficulty with fine control
of timeflow, but if you had a synth, you had clocks everywhere to control
timeflow with precision but lacked in sound sources. What I find curious
is that there does not appear to be much of the sort of cross-over work
that one could extrapolate fro these technologies in existence; controlling
tape output with gates opened and closed by clocked voltages, for example.
Curious. Anyone else with some historical background to fill in the holes
here?

>. You can also completely ignore this whole
>morass of stuff, as well - another of Pluralism's blessed doctrines.

I ignore you at my peril, Greg.

--
mike metlay                | Today's "Context is everything" quote:
atomic city                |
p. o. box 81175            | "Mike, you are almost as intolerant and
pittsburgh pa 15217-0675   |  narrow-minded as *I* am. So what?"
metlay@netcom.com          |                       (s. higginbotham)
Comments: Gated by NETNEWS@AUVM.AMERICAN.EDU