processed_sound

I’ve mentioned Jacques Attali’s book Noise before, and his prediction of a period of musical development he called “composition.” Although an economist, Attali offers some wonderfully poetic descriptions of composition:

We are all condemned to silence - unless we create our own relation with the world and try to tie other people into the meaning we thus create. That is what composing is. Doing solely for the sake of doing, without trying artificially to recreate the old codes in order to reinsert communication into them.

[...]

Composition thus leads to a staggering conception of history, a history that is open, unstable, in which labor no longer advances accumulation….Time no longer flows in a linear fashion; sometimes it crystallizes in stable codes in which everyone’s composition is compatible, sometimes in multifaceted time in which rhythms, styles, and codes diverge, interdependencies become more burdensome, and rules dissolve.

Special thanks to Timothy D. Taylor, and his book Strange Sounds, for returning me to these thoughts.

No, not naval battles.

Literary battles. And by extension, culture wars.

Rachel Donadio, writing for the New York Times, has paid a nostalgic visit to the literary canon wars of the late-1980s (circa). The big defining moment was Allen Bloom’s book The Closing of the American Mind. While a Ph.D. student I was very much involved coming up with an intellectual and critical response to what was such a bald argument that non-white, or non-European, equaled non-good.

Now as I look back, the problem seems a little different. Sure, there is still more than a little racial hostility to Bloom, but I now am convinced that Bloom wouldn’t have liked anything new, regardless of where it came from. Although at some point all of the books, all of the great philosophical thought that he trumpeted so loudly were new books, new thought, the canon to Bloom was a history museum. Changing anything would have required less attention to something old, and Bloom didn’t seem to be able to let anything go.

Around the middle of the article, Michael Berube (author of What’s Liberal About the Liberal Arts?) says that the changes to the literary canon have been particularly beneficial to American literature, and which he notes has been easy to change because it has never been that stable. I especially like his quote that “[o]nly the Department of Surly Curmudgeons still disputes that we’re dealing with a usefully expanded field.” [emphasis added]

What does this have to do with music? Long before Bloom started ranting, musical practice in the U.S. has been mired in an exceedingly canonic, museum-like existence. The great works of Stravinsky, Bartok, Schoenberg, are over half a century old (in some cases, much more), yet there performance is still something of a news-worthy oddity. And although we’re firmly in the 21st century, 1945 still seems to be the cut-off for a “new” work. [ok, so I'm not talking about New York City, or a few other prominent exceptions...]

I think the Berube quote is quite useful as the basis of a question: why can’t music institutions see the usefulness in an expanded field of music?

And related or not, it is interesting to me that literature and music are similar in how little affect technology has had in their creative processes, given how profound technologically-influenced change has been in the rest of the arts and culture in general.

BSU’s first Electronic Music (EM) concert is Wednesday, Sept. 19, at 8 pm in Sursa Hall. I’ve got a new work for bassoon and Max/MSP on the program. Faculty member Mike Pounds also has a piece on, along with some current and former student works.

Stop by if you’re in the area.

Yes, everyone has playlists. How about a good, old-fashioned book list?

Yesterday I gave a talk to our local composition seminar, I offered to post some information about my reading list of music- and culture-related books. Here are three to start with:

• Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific RevolutionsNot a music book, but an important work that upsets the popular-myth notion that the history of scientific development is a history of linear development. He puts forth that change usually comes about as a revolutionary idea, completely breaking the mold of previously held theories. What follows is a period where other scientists accept the new idea, gathering around it and establishing it as a relatively stable truth. At some later point, other revolutionary ideas upset the new stability.
• Marshall McLuhan, Understanding MediaAgain, not a music book, but how can one live in a media-saturated world and not take any time to examine media theory at all? McLuhan is one of the early developers of Media Theory, and attained something related to pop icon status. He coined the phrases “the medium is the message,” and “global village.”
• Leonard B. Meyer, Music, the Arts, and IdeasMeyer’s book, originally published in 1967, can be seen as one of the early important works of postmodern aesthetics applied to music. The book is Meyer’s attempt to find pattern and rationale for the fragmented condition of 20th-century music.
• Jacques Attali, Noise: The Political Economy of MusicAttali is an economist and political figure, and his approach to music and sound takes a radically different turn than the traditional music scholar. Starting with the fundamental definition that noise is anything that is unwanted in sound (or information), Attali describes five periods of musical history: listening, sacrificing, representing, repeating, and composing. Translated into English in 1985, Attali puts forth the last period, composing, as a prediction of a new period that combats the repetitiveness of technical reproduction and consumer society. Composing involves individuals grabbing hold of available noise, and transforming it into their own valued sound world. In a significant way, Attali predicts the significance of digital sampling and remix culture, YouTube videos, and similar practices.It should be noted that the foreword by Frederic Jameson is great. The afterword by Susan McClary, however, completely misses the point, confusing organization of sound with a particular music composition style.

Ok, so this has nothing to do with music, but I have nowhere else to put this….

My kids have interests in electronics, robotics, and other scientific geeky stuff. (I wonder where they get that from?) So past purchases have put me on the Edmund Scientifics mailing list. This appeared in my inbox this morning.

Is your 9 to 5 getting you down? Ever find yourself bored and frustrated on the job? Take control of the airspace in and around your cubicle….Use your PC to aim and launch the three foam missiles to secure your borders and defend your homecube. The missile is controlled left to right, and fired using your computer controls.

That goes on my Christmas list right now!

Today would have been John Cage’s 95th birthday. To help celebrate the life of a musical icon, WYNC has put together radio and web programming that offers a fittingly personal and playful view of his life.

The festival runs for 24 hours and 33 minutes (24:33, for those who enjoy puns).

While many symphony musicians and hard-core classical music lovers alike compare the symphonic “pops” concert to a tooth-pulling experience, and many symphony board members think that they will (somehow) be the savior of classical music, it is refreshing to come across proof that a pops concert can be fun, exciting, musically interesting, and of high musical quality.

Exhibit A: Gustavo Dudamel and the Simón Bolívar Youth Orchestra performing the Bernstein “Mambo” at the BBC Proms (”Promenade Concerts” for the un-English).

Yes, it’s a youth orchestra and they sound fantastic (every bit as good as my  Baltimore Symphony version on CD).

Yes, the (large) hall is completely packed. (check when the camera pans around)

And it does appear that everyone is having fun…

Not that I’m calling out any orchestra in particular for their less-than-acceptable pops efforts.

(OK, I am, but I can’t link to them because I don’t need the headache.)

The other think that you notice is that things look good for the Los Angeles Philharmonic.

A linguist has found three “cures” for the problem of stumbling speech (um’s, er’s, pauses, etc.):

1. Drinking (alcohol)
2. Use short sentences
3. Have someone threaten you with electric shock if you make a mistake.

Really, I’m not making this up. (the “cures” are in the last paragraph.)

It’s interesting that psychologists and linguists have such different views on why these verbal tics and stumbles happen. Psychologists can’t agree on whether it’s a power play (filling silent space so that no one interrupts you), or an invitation for someone else to speak. Linguists are a little less judgmental, seeing it as a result of the brain constantly switching back and forth between planning for speech and executing speech. (In other words, it’s a biological occurrence.)

Fill in the blank. Dead. Dying. Just fine. Who cares?
A new round of the age-old discussion about the current health, and future of classical music.

Matthew Guerrieri  has a well-done entry that relates classical music to non-functional demand curves. “Huh?” you say? It relates sociology to economics, and talks about things like the “bandwagon effect,” and the “snob effect.” He also points out that it is misleading to think of “classical music” as a single thing - that to better understand what’s going on you have to understand that classical music is really an umbrella term for many individual things.

Alex Wellsung writes about modes of listening, and touches on the importance of technology in creating a product (popular music) that is ideal for manufacturing and cultural consumption in a “bandwagon”-type of global market. I love his labeling of classical music as “slow food.” (the opposite of McDonalds…)

As always, Alex Ross picks up on the debate, and offers a few insightful additions.

Does digital sound get overlooked in the field of digital media studies? Dilan Mahendran thinks so (and so do I). Writing for the Spotlight on Digital Media Learning blog, Mahendran questions whether the dominant realm of the image devalues the cultural significance of music. Given that so many people listen to so much music, how does the realm of music escape our focus so often?

I felt compelled to comment on the blog. It’s a question that affects me personally, and many of us that try to work in “interdisciplinary”  fields of digital media, naively assuming that we enter as (close to) equals with our colleagues working in the visual domain. Of course plenty of years at BSU has disabused me of that notion. It’s just interesting to see someone taking up the topic in a higher profile setting. The Spotlight on DML blog is sponsored the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, they of the “genius” grants.