music ethico-aesthetics

> "Asking people to listen to a piece of music takes
> some of their time,
> some of their life: the composer is stealing a
> little bit from the life
> of each listener.... This creates an enormous
> responsibility on the part
> of the composer.
>
> "This responsibility means that music can neither be
> purely experimental
> nor can it eliminate all elements of research. It
> should always provide
> interesting, and even new (daring though the word
> seems to us today)
> propositions, while remaining perceptible so that it
> can be received by
> the listener. This must be true even when the
> composer is looking for
> extreme novelty or complexity; somewhere there has
> to be a common ground
> where the composer and his audience can share an
> angle of approach.
>
> "This leads to a number of consequences. Composers
> should not be
> satisfied with music that is simply there to please.
> They should not
> allow the style of their music to be dictated by
> fashions, by easy
> acceptance of institutions,... or of the regular
> concert-going audience.
> These are not sufficient reasons for [making] music,
> for stealing from
> the life of another. Unfortunately, a number of
> trends are more and more
> prevalent in composition today which either ignore
> the problem of
> communication, or which - resting on the ambiguous
> notion of
> post-modernism and on pseudo-musicologic or
> pseudo-philosophic
> discourses - are in fact not much more than
> disguised academicism.
>
> "We are often told that the avant-garde is behind
> us, that we have
> achieved so much distance and perspective that only
> a 'post-modern'
> perspective is possible. However, in my daily life
> as a composer, this
> idea is disproved. I continue to search for new
> ideas and materials....
> [I]f we stick to the etymology of the term, by
> definition there will
> always be an avant-garde, or our [culture] is dead."
>
> Tristan Murail. (2000). "After-thoughts." _Spectral
> Music: Aesthetics
> and Music._ Contemporary Music Review 19(3): 5-9.
> (Quote is from pp.
> 5-6).

Murail is quite opinionated on WHY a
composer/musician has a responsibility, but offers _nada_ on the
WHAT of that responsibility he discusses. The WHAT can be
interesting possibility/ies...

---
Hanuman Zhang, musical mad scientist

"Welcome and explore and inquire into everything, new or old, that comes
your way, and then build your own music on whatever your inner life has been able
to take in and offer you back again." - Henry Cowell

"Music is by no means like the other arts, namely a copy of the Ideas, but a
copy of the will itself, the objectivity of which are the Ideas. For this
reason, the effect of music is so very much more powerful and penetrating than is
that of the other arts, for these others speak only of the shadow, but music
of the essence." - Schopenhauer, _The World as Will and Representation_

"His music, far from being in the background of my life, was in the
foreground. It was he as a musician who accomplished what I dreamed of, and
I followed as well as I could with the inferior power of words. The ear is
purer than the eye, which reads only relative meaning into words. Whereas
the distillation of experience into pure sound, a state of music, is
timeless and absolute." -Anais Nin on her brother Joaquin Nin-Culmell

"...improvisation is about change, about flux rather than stasis. ...
improvisation is about a constant change." - Steve Beresford

improvisation: "a process of liberation, a working around the assumptions
that define our civilization, and the results are open-ended." - John Berndt
Improvisation resists documentation - it celebrates the ephemeral, it
perversely reminds us every second that everything dies. Much of the "modern
Westernized world" isn't ready for this kind of news.

> >"Any sufficiently advanced music is indistinguishable from noise"

> >(after Arthur C. Clarke's aphorism that any sufficiently advanced

> >technology is indistinguisable from magic.)" - John Chalmers, in email
response
to the quote _The Difference between Music and Noise is all in your Head_

It seems that (possibly like plato) he expects composers to act in ethical ways.

I quite enjoy these type of things i must admit. There is the western perspective though that things are developed in
terms of evolutionary time. avant garde posrt modern etc. It seems the real development is an expansion
geographically, in etc. wider culturally. One could argue that much of the development in western art was just this
process. gregorian chant made of tunes from just about everywhere, including jewish chant. Dance suites constructed
out of dances from foriegn countries. debussy exposure to indonesian music. the rite of spring out of far
eastern/eastern russian folk music. Bartok. Yaqui /chinese music in Partch etc. minimalist to indian drones
progress or evolution are not the best terms to describe this process.

But back to your proposal of WHAT. It seems all human beings have the same responsibility to the whole. a bad
piece of music is no better or worse than a bad chair, both bring all of it down.

czhang23@... wrote:

>
>
> Murail is quite opinionated on WHY a
> composer/musician has a responsibility, but offers _nada_ on the
> WHAT of that responsibility he discusses. The WHAT can be
> interesting possibility/ies...
>
>

-- -Kraig Grady
North American Embassy of Anaphoria Island
http://www.anaphoria.com
The Wandering Medicine Show
KXLU 88.9 FM WED 8-9PM PST

In a message dated 2003:08:25 09:58:00 PM, kraiggrady@... writes:

>It seems that (possibly like plato) he expects composers to act in ethical
>ways.
>
>I quite enjoy these type of things i must admit. There is the western
perspective
>though that things are developed in
>terms of evolutionary time. avant garde posrt modern etc. It seems the
>real development is an expansion
>geographically, in etc. wider culturally. One could argue that much of
>the development in western art was just this
>process. gregorian chant made of tunes from just about everywhere, including
>jewish chant. Dance suites constructed
>out of dances from foriegn countries. debussy exposure to indonesian music.
>the rite of spring out of far
>eastern/eastern russian folk music. Bartok. Yaqui /chinese music in Partch
>etc. minimalist to indian drones
>progress or evolution are not the best terms to describe this process.
>
> But back to your proposal of WHAT. It seems all human beings have the
>same responsibility to the whole. a bad
>piece of music is no better or worse than a bad chair, both bring all of
>it down.

"Is a chair finely made tragic or comic? Is the

portrait of Mona Lisa good if I desire to see

it? Is the bust of Sir Philip Crampton lyrical,

epical or dramatic? If a man hacking in fury

at a block of wood make there an image of a cow,

is that image a work of art? If not, why not?" --"Stephen Dedalus", James
Joyce

---
Hanuman Zhang, musical mad scientist (no, I don't wanna take over the world,
just the sound spectrum...)

"What strange risk of hearing can bring sound to music - a hearing whose
obligation awakens a sensibility so new that it is forever a unique, new-born,
anti-death surprise, created now and now and now. .. a hearing whose moment
in time is always daybreak." - Lucia Dlugoszewski

"The wonderousness of the human mind is too great to be transferred into
music only by 7 or 12 elements of tone steps in one octave." - shakuhachi master
Masayuki Koga

"There's a rabbinical tradition that the music in heaven will be microtonal"
-annotative interpretation of Schottenstein Tehillim, 92:4, the verse being:
"Upon a ten-stringed * instrument and upon lyre, with singing accompanied by
harp." [* utilizing new tones]

NADA BRAHMA - Sanskrit, "sound [is the] Godhead"

"God utters me like a word containing a partial thought of himself." -Thomas
Merton

LILA - Sanskrit, "divine play/sport/whimsy" - "the universe is what happens
when God wants to play" - "joyous exercise of spontaneity involved in the art
of creation"

do work' of art have a life of their own?

czhang23@... wrote:

>
>
> "Is a chair finely made tragic or comic? Is the
>
> portrait of Mona Lisa good if I desire to see
>
> it? Is the bust of Sir Philip Crampton lyrical,
>
> epical or dramatic? If a man hacking in fury
>
> at a block of wood make there an image of a cow,
>
> is that image a work of art? If not, why not?" --"Stephen Dedalus", James
> Joyce
>

-- -Kraig Grady
North American Embassy of Anaphoria Island
http://www.anaphoria.com
The Wandering Medicine Show
KXLU 88.9 FM WED 8-9PM PST

In a message dated 2003:08:27 08:43:49 AM, kraiggrady@... writes:

>czhang23@... wrote:
>>
>> "Is a chair finely made tragic or comic? Is the
>> portrait of Mona Lisa good if I desire to see
>> it? Is the bust of Sir Philip Crampton lyrical,
>> epical or dramatic? If a man hacking in fury
>> at a block of wood make there an image of a cow,
>> is that image a work of art? If not, why not?" --"Stephen Dedalus", James
>> Joyce
>>
>
>do work' of art have a life of their own?

Yepyep. The more people a piece of art or creativity "haunts" and/or
inspires the more "life" it embodies - the power it has. This is esp'ly true if
the Cosmos is an aspect of the Godhead and that the Cosmos Itself is evolving to
ever-greater Consciousness(es).
Okay I am a panentheistic sort:

panentheism (pan-en-theos means "all-in-God" - that is, the universe is
contained within God or the Godhead _and_ that God or the Godhead also transcends
the universe) -
Belief in all gods & all gods being merely finite aspects of the infinite
Godhead (thus all statements & views of the Godhead are - in a sense - both
true AND false, that the multi-personal-itied, multi-versal Godhead is many
things to many people); belief that the Godhead exists in everything AND
transcends everything, that the Godhead is both totally immanent AND totally
transcendent - both world-inclusive AND world-transcending.
The Godhead is "dipolar" - encompassing such contraries as absoluteness &
relativity, one & many, being & non-being, necessity & contingency, eternity
& temporality, destruction & creation, positive & negative, male & female,
divine & profane, impersonal & personal, etc. ad infinitum googolplex plus plus
... the Godhead is _perfect being_, not unchanging, but capable of being
excelled by nothing other than the GodheadSelf: change, not permanence, is the
fundamental nature of both the Godhead and reality. In another words, both
changeless and changing perfection.
“Panentheists believe in a Godhead that is present in everything but also
extends beyond the universe. In other words, the Godhead is greater than the
universe. Unlike pantheism, however, it does not say that the universe is
identical to God; it maintains that there is more to God than just the universe.
Panentheism says that all is _in_ God, somewhat as if God were the ocean and we
were fish. If one considers what is in God's body to be part of God, then we
can say that God is all there is and then some. The universe is God's body,
but God's awareness or personality is greater than the sum of all the parts of
the universe. All the parts have some degree of freedom in co-creating with
God.... [To put it simply, both God and the cosmos are interdependent “entities”
of creativity.]

"...divine chaos ...rumors of chaos have been known to enhance the mature
religious vision.... for the godhead manifests no more of its reality than
the limited grammar of each person's imagination and conceptual system can
handle. A second advantage is suggested by William James in _Varieties of Religious
Experience_. James affirms the possibilty of many gods, mostly because he
takes seriously his multiverse theory of personal monads, each one of us
experiencing a unique religious revelation. An orderly monistic and monotheistic
system, he fears, might succumb to a craving for logical coherence, and trim away
some of the mystery, rich indeterminancy, and tragic ambiguity in a complete
numinous experience. For some temperaments, the ambivalent gentleness and
savagery of fate can be imagined effectively in a godhead split into personified
attributes, sometimes at war, sometimes in shifting alliance." [[God as Multiple
Personality ;) :P ]] ~ Vernon Ruland, _Eight Sacred Horizons: The Religious
Imagination East and West_

---
Hanuman Zhang (aka "Z")
WOG (Wiley Oriental Gentleman ;)
Avatar of Sun WuKong, a.k.a _Ma-Lau_ ("Monkey")
a.k.a. "TricksterGod of the Glorious Anti-Imperialist Chinese Boxers";
¡¡¡ TricksterShapeShifterIncarnate !!! >^..^< ';' ;P~~~

=> om hung hanumatay rudratmakai hung phat <=
mantra to Hanuman the Hindu Monkey TricksterGod

>Finally a religious statement I can agree with:
>
>the Zoroastrian teaching that it is a sin for a person to be boring.

"Life is all a great joke, but only the brave ever get the point."
- Kenneth Rexroth

googolgigglabyte
goegolgiechelbijt - of - met een vette megagrijns
GoogolGekicherByte
googolrisibyte ===> el byte de la risita de googol
googolrisadinhabyte ===> o byte de risadinha de googol
googolspassoctet
guugoIllolbijt
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inarevuta yhiyhayhake nawyo
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ggsngngsbd [gugulaNexebidi]

<= thee prIs ov X.iztenz iz aetern'l warfaer 'N' kreativ playf'llnizz... =>