Re: (idm) three things that piss me off

From Drusca
Sent Mon, Aug 23rd 1999, 06:58

Kevin Ryan wrote:

> (Actually art music was well liberated from melody already
> when he was born; it was a trend started by
> Wagner's non-repetition of phrases in "Tristan und
> Isolde" and completed by WWI-era primitivists,
> by composers of machine music, and rhetorically by
> the Italian futurists.)

How does non-repetition lead to liberation of melody ? As far as I know Wagner
wrote some very memorable melodies. And I think the Futurists (or any of these
people for that matter) wanted to expand the concept of melody not obliterate it.
Actually, if you listen to a lot of the music of the Futurists you find that it's
pretty tame stuff (check out the "Musica Futurista" comp on Cramps).

> Cage rebelled against the restrictions that
> weighed down neoclassical music (and against his
> teacher, Schoenberg, who told him he didn't have
> any sense of tonality).

Harmony, not tonality.
Schoenberg also said Cage was a conceptual genius though.

> BUT his aesthetic system
> ("all sound--intentional or not--is musical") is
> a pretty lame one, imo.

It's kind of funny to dismiss the theories of a highly, highly intelligent man
like Cage by simply calling them "lame". I think when someone like Cage says
something like that you kind of have to trust that he's onto something. Maybe we
don't really see what he means yet, but...
Everyone's entitled to their own opinion, but this man's influence on the Western
musical world is so great that it's almost unimaginable to think what things
would be like had he not existed. I don't know, I just think Cage was an absolute
fucking genius.

> IDM seems to be an outgrowth of Detroit techno
> and early European electro/new age.

Sure, but Rob & Sean don't seem to miss any opportunity to praise the work of
Parmegiani and Jenkinson mentions Cage and Ligeti a lot these days. And it's
known that Aphex has been listening to 20th century classical since his teenage
years.

> Trance, house, jungle, etc are supposed to be repetitive,

Says who ?

Andrei