From Philip Sherburne Sent Sat, Feb 6th 1999, 18:47
From Philip Sherburne Sent Sat, Feb 6th 1999, 18:47
> It's my > personal belief that electronic music, namely "IDM" as we call it, is going to > be the next form of classical music. What's the next step? What aphex started > but did not finish.. This really isn't possible--it ignores the historical & social context of each genre (and of course classical music isn't really a genre per se... rather a tradition encompassing numerous genres--including 20th century avant garde musics that began the first experimentation w/ electronic instruments, tape loops, primitive sampling, etc...). not to put this too reductively (but it is only 10:35 in the morning and i'm only on my first cup of coffee), classical music belongs to "high" culture (and i don't mean the rastas). which is fundamentally an issue of class. check out michael chanan's excellent book "musica practica" for a brief history of western classical music. totally a materialist project--he relates the mutation of musical forms to socio-economic phenomena. for instance, the emergence of the piano as THE instrument of the 19th century has everything to do with its position as the centerpiece of the bourgeois parlor. IDM, on the other hand, while drawing on bits & pieces of "high" culture, is heavily rooted in the "low"--hip hop, rock music, dub. among other things, the formal/narrative complexity intrinsic to most classical music is missing in IDM (and ambient, and tr/hip hop, and electro...), which is fundamentally based upon repetition. the 20th century, of course, is all about the merging of high & low cultures; the democratization of both. making traditionalist classical music a more problematic beast than ever. in terms of electronic experimentation, sean cooper's Audio Code piece in the current issue of Urban Sounds (sorry for the plug, but I know he's done good work in this area) touches on the divergence between academic electronic composers and more populist, post-techno artists. hope that this page-spray makes some sense. phil p.s. i just got a cd from nonesuch that does some weird classical/IDM crossover: Michael Gordon, "Weather." For the most part, it sounds like a fairly traditional late-20th century "new music" string piece--melodic, movement-based, quite palatable... but then, halfway through, programmed beats--almost drum'n'bass--come in! very bizarre. p.s.s. can anyone explain why my PC insists on crashing when i try to play a CD in my CD-Rom? very disconcerting. maybe it objects to the classical? np: steve reich, tehhellim