🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <9106170116.AA23209@lilac.berkeley.edu> ISSSSM@NUSVM.BITNET (Stephen Smoliar) writes:
;In article <10816@idunno.Princeton.EDU> eliot@phoenix.Princeton.EDU (Eliot
;Handelman) writes:
;> Music is time-consuming, repetitious, formalistic,
;>non-visual, non-informative, linear, unimmediate, and uncomfortably
;>entrenched in a lutheran work-ethic that belies its own marginality.
;>Music is now nothing more than a metaphor of its own inadequacies. Music
;>is finished and how has to become something else altogether that is non-
;>formalistic, not time-consuming, not repetitious, an instrument of
;>information, non-linear, immediate, technological, and insurmountably
;>distanced from every claim to non-functionality, to every last
;>glimmer of legitimizing aesthetic.
;>
;What you are saying, Eliot, is that music has to undergo a transformation;  and
;when it emerges from that transformation, it will no longer be music!  I am not
;about to dismiss such a metamorphosis out of hand;  but before you start
;weaving a cocoon for music, I would like to take a look at some of those
;attributes you pinned on it.  I get the impression that you meant them to
;be pejorative, but I suspect that at least some of them deserve a bit of
;defending.

;Let us start with "time-consuming."  I'm not quite sure what you have in mind
;here.  Almost EVERYTHING is time-consuming.  After all, life is nothing but a
;continuous interval on some universal time scale during which we attribute some
;form of existence to that matter which is the body.  To a great extent the
;"business of living" is nothing more than the decisions we make to pass through
;that interval of time;  and I see no reason to hang any value judgment on any
;decisions to pass the time by engaging in music behavior.

Why the quotes around "business of living," except to acknowledge that
living is not a business? And that this thing life, so poorly 
characterized as a business, is made up of so few active decisions?
But this is already too reproachfully philosophical, whereas I'm merely
criticizing the agenda of music-research coordinated activity. I'm trying
to say why "music research" and "computer music" and "music and this and
that" don't count.

AS AN ART FORM, I restricted myself to that. I mean not your music
"behavior" (what kind of skinnerism is this?) but the importance that
"art" must assume in order to be art. 

I believe that music has done what it has had to do, that the 
consciousness of our age -- if one can speak of "our age" --  is 
no longer musical, can no longer be musical, and can no longer 
develop along musical lines. Why I think this is irrelevant for
now. Notice that I oppose A. Bloom, for whatever that's worth.

Musical thinking tends therefore not to be thinking, but rather
a sort of nostalgizing.

You see: I'm trying to come up with an answer to what seems to me the
most basic of all music-theoretical questions: "Why are all music
theorists so dumb?" I mean Laske, Balaban, the rest of them ---
can this be a coincidence? I assert that it cannot.

;Now I do not want to put words in your mouth, but perhaps it was not the
;CONSUMPTION of time which concerned you as much as some measure of the
;EFFICIENCY with which that time is consumed.  

No Steve, you're on the wrong track as far as I go. There is no music
which is efficient music, though of course we all know that story
(which I won't repeat here). The notion of form and structure -- 
expressed as crudely as possible, in other words, in Minsky's terms,
runs something like this: "Play A, and then PLAY A AGAIN SO THAT IT CAN
SINK IN." It is the notion of repetition AS pedagogy, as ear-training
in vivo, the grounding of a ground, of a tendency to respond, of a
piece of time to memorize.

I tell you this because I recently was at a concert of "Bad Brains"
and was appalled by the notion of "structure" the warmup bands
brought to bear on their playing. Someone told them that in music
everything is repeated 4 times AT LEAST. 

Webern wrote something like this: "whenever I write the 12th note
I can't overcome the feeling that, somehow, the piece has come to
an end." To some this will sound trivial and stupid, but to me
this bears the mark of true genius. Webern wanted to collapse time,
to refract it and beam it back. 

A colleague of mine, who wrote his dissertation on a piece of Webern's,
made a loop of the piece so that he could hear it over and
over until it sunk in. Webern didn't offer the structure of Bolero,
with the consequence that at the end of the piece, you still don't
know what the tune was. The structure of Bolero, thanks to modern
science, is easily imposed on Webern, but we must ask: what BETTER,
more interesting structures, has music devised? 

If I play Webern 2000 times, will I like it? Will I like Madonna?

Epistemically: "I like Webern." "try this music, you'll like it."
"what you are saying suggests that you will like this music." "Do
you like my music." "Do you like any music." "Do you like your own 
music." "I like that music."

But what better, more interesting, ways of knowing has music devised?

Music: "knowledge as liking." "Liking as habit, that is, as repetition."


Enough for today.


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