From Kevin Ryan Sent Mon, Aug 23rd 1999, 01:25
From Kevin Ryan Sent Mon, Aug 23rd 1999, 01:25
Drusca <xxxxxx@xxxxx.xxx> writes: >>I guess you're not a subscriber to the (post-)Futurist/Cagean views of >>what is >>considered to be of "musical" value. I'm certainly NOT a subscriber to Cage's view! (I *am*, however, a subscriber to this list, as of about 30 minutes ago, so I don't know where this thread has been. Nice to meet you.) Cage couldn't have had a simpler view: He believed *all* sound has musical value. Cage didn't just liberate music from melody. (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.) Cage, aesthetically and politically an anarchist, liberated music from intentionality, scores, musicians, and the orchestra itself. He 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). I think Cage was probably the most important experimentalist ever. BUT his aesthetic system ("all sound--intentional or not--is musical") is a pretty lame one, imo. To be sure, all sounds can be considered artistically. But I think "music" has to be reserved for something separate from the buzzing noise of the computer terminal I sit in front of. If noise is music, then everything is music (everything is intrinsically noisy), and music, as an art form, loses its virtue. I think there's something fundamentally different in the way a Bruckner symphony or an Autechre track affects my mind than the sound of my breathing (a sound I hear every moment of my life) or other nonintentional noises that Cage would class as music. The word "music" loses all its meaning in the Cagean aesthetic. >>One thing that tape/electronic music has demonstrated is that you can >>create a >>piece through non-melodic motivic development (i.e. Pierre Henry,etc., >>etc.). I >>always assume that people have come to terms with this concept and I find it >>puzzling when people on this list start arguing about melodic content, etc.. IDM seems to be an outgrowth of Detroit techno and early European electro/new age. As such, I think it's going through the exact same growing pains classical music went through early this century--deemphasizing melody, using machines as instruments, using real-world noise as a template for ambient music, etc. I agree with the above. Everyone who's not into electronic music, for example, seems to think that it's way too repetitive. (E.g., years ago I worked at RadioShack and was playing jungle and I had two customers tell me that the cd player was skipping--it wasn't, of course.) THAT'S THE WHOLE POINT! Trance, house, jungle, etc are supposed to be repetitive, and noise is supposed to be noisy. It's a whole different way of looking at music than the folk idiom which requires simple repeated melodic phrases. And it's great. kevin mr.