McLaren - The Theorist as Irritant

Brian McLaren recently posted an attack on me
to which I reluctantly respond. I'd prefer to
pass over it in silence but as Nietzsche has
said, silence can be interpreted as "ressentiment".

Here's Brian:

>"A speech has two parts. You must state you case,
>and you must prove it. You cannot either state your
>case and omit to prove it, or prove it without
>having first stated it." This is clearly an alien
>concept to Eric Lyon and Greg Taylor: but to the
>rest of us, it's obvious.

At this point Brian provides no evidence for his charge,
but I have no doubt that it is forthcoming. Meanwhile
he will let the implication resonate with Tuning readers that
Gregory and I alone on this list are incapable of rational
argument while Brian demonstrates his erudition on
the subject of perfect fifths. Are we marginalized yet?




>Instead, we would find ourselves flailing like bugs
>stuck in yogurt, as Eric Lyon and Greg Taylor have
>done repeatedly on this tuning forum. Without physical
>and psychoacoustic experiment to back up our claims,
>we would make foolish unproven statements which turn
>out to be nonsense--as Eric Lyon and Greg Taylor have
>done repeatedly on this tuning forum.

Once again an assertion without evidence. But I like the
yogurt metaphor, although personally I prefer granola to
bugs in my yogurt and other software.

>Fuzzy thinking and slipshod logic lead to a pervasive
>abuse of words, a wanton violation of their recognized
>meanings, a disdain and a contempt for precision
>in the use of the English language.
>To use a word so fundamental to the outlook of modern
>western culture as "experimental" (in the way Cage
>does) and willfully pervert its recognized meaning is
>to grossly and culpably misuse the word "experimental."
>This, both Cage and Lyon have done by claiming that
>it means something other than its dictionary definition
>as soon as we kidnap the poor word "experiment," jam
>a hood over its head, stick a gun in its back, and
>frog-march it into the realm of modern music.
>Of course, if we want to make up the meaning of the
>words we use, we are certainly free to do so.

Great, something more solid than innuendo and gratuitous
personal attack. My response is that often the commonly
used dictionary definition of a word is different than
how it is used in a special community - sometimes the meanings
are contradictory but this doesn't cause a problem to people
who understand the context and are committed to trying to
understand each other. Most words have several dictionary
definitions per dictionary, all requiring further experience
in the real world in order to be understood.

Example: the word "fifth" which Brian discusses in detail.
If you tell the average person that the word "fifth" refers to
the ratio 3:2, they might wonder why it isn't 1:5. They then
need the additional context that the word is used here to measure
a musical interval with respect to degrees of the diatonic scale, rather
a volume of alcohol. If they are fairminded they won't automatically
assume that you're an idiot and incapable of basic mathematics
because you don't use the word "fifth" according to its commonly
accepted general usage. But if they are Brian, they would accuse you
of obfuscation. They would say "fifth has a commonly accepted meaning
which you confuse by stealing it for mere use in music. If
you want to accurately express the ratio of 2:3, you should call
that interval a threetwoed or maybe a twothreed." Fortunately
Brian does not write dictionaries.


>Eric Lyon himself touches on this important problem
>when he states "indeed the confusion of artistic and
>scientific methodologies is one major reason that
>many American university music departments have
>become somewhat inhospitable for artists."
>To put it bluntly, if you propose to use terms borrowed
>from the sciences you had better use them properly
>and with some understanding. Cage did not.
>Eric Lyon does not. Most modern "music theorists"
>do not.

I generally do not use scientific terms to discuss music. When I
use a term such as the much maligned "experimental", I use it within
a specific 20th century compositional context. "Experimental music" is
more a statement of intent than a description. My personal intent is to
create music which takes me somewhere I haven't been before, using
every technique at my disposal including techniques I may need to invent.
If that doesn't sound much different than some earlier music such
as Gesualdo, Montiverdi or Bach, that's fine because I consider that
music "experimental" in its time. In my earlier post on experimental music, I
made clear the distinction between experiment in science and experiment in art.
I choose not to repeat it here. I admit that I often use terms with
much influence from their personal significance to me, since I'm much
more of an artist than a theorist, apparently converse to Brian's
orientation. Nonetheless, Brian is also well known for defining terms
at will to suit his own agenda.

In recent post, Brian discussed "computer generated music", and
chose to define it as the situation where a composer sets up a random
system and accepts the output from the program, direct to DAT. This
is a perfectly useless definition. I know many computer music
composers and not a single one works this way. Bill Schottstaedt
posted in reply, describing his methods which involve an interaction
between computer automated processes and his own tastes and
compositional judgment. In fact many computer music composers use
similar methods, myself included. Brian's reduction of computer music
to an absurd strawman demonstrates yet again his lack of understanding
of how a true composer actually works. You might as well reduce
American action expressionist painting to a guy taking a can of
paint and hurling it at the canvas. Or you could take white noise,
narrow bandpass filtered at 440Hz and say no, it's not a 440Hz tone, it's
just noise. In the real world of musical composition, the composer
is the filter, but Brian just doesn't get it.

>John Cage and his rivals at Darmstadt,
>along with PIerre Boulez' group in Paris were,
>by dictionary definition, charlatans one and all.
>They spouted meaningless pseudo-scientific
>drivel, and the intent of their "theories" appears
>to have been to obfuscate and impress, rather than to
>elucidate and specify.
>This is the charge made against John Cage in my
>topic 3 of TD 803, and the charge stands. Eric
>Lyon has not refuted the charge, since clearly
>he does not understand the dictionary definition
>of "experimental" any better than John Cage
>did.

I actually didn't read that particular post. I do not
live and breathe to defend John Cage. I find some of
his ideas useful or provocative, and I find a small
fraction of his music excellent and of its time. Cage's
writings at their best are intended to stimulate the
reader to independent thought, not tell him/her what to
think. Brian next takes a series of Cage quotes out of
context to ridicule him. I'll just grab a couple.

>Cage writes:
>"Does being musical make one automatically stupid and unable
>to listen? Then don't you think one should put a stop to studying
>music? Where are your thinking caps?" [Cage, John, "Silence,"
>page 49]
>Let's see:
>Studying music must...therefore "make one automatically stupid."
>Right.

Here the literalist reads this as an anti-intellectual
statement. Instead, it seems to me that Cage is questioning
whether studying music according to an orthodoxy is the best
way to understand music. Brian will argue later that studying
at a university has destroyed my capacity for rational thought, so
therefore, Brian here agrees with his interpretation of Cage's statement:

>Studying music must...therefore "make one automatically stupid."


>"Musical habits include...the study of the
>timbres, single and in combination of a limited
>number of sound-producing mechanisms. In
>mathematical terms these all concern discrete
>steps." [Cage, John, "Silence," page 9]
>Here Cage makes the ignorant blunder of
>claiming that all sounds have spectra which
>can be described in "discrete steps."

Here as elsewhere, Brian demonstrates his lack of understanding
of one of the basic tools of timbral analysis - the Fourier transform.
All real world spectra are continuous if we consider the noise
component. However, they may all be *described as* the summation of
a bandlimited series of sine waves, each at a discrete harmonic frequency,
through sampling, windowing and FFT analysis, sometimes providing
information useful in understanding and manipulating timbre.
Cage is right, Brian is wrong. Further, Cage is critical of the
traditional use in music of sounds with harmonic as opposed to
noise spectra. So you have to have a bit of context about Cage's
involvement with percussion music and his program of widening the
tonal palette of composers to include noise and ambient sounds.
In that context, the shape of a harmonic spectrum is *relatively*
discrete compared to that of a noise spectrum. Brian is correct to
state that acoustic instruments have both noise and tone elements,
but the prevailing music theory at the time of Cage's writing was
still primarily concerned with relations among the tone component,
e.g. Schenker, 12 tone theory. So Cage was challenging readers to
go outside the orthodoxy and think about sound in different ways.

Brian follows with a diatribe on university profs and music
departments which I am really not qualified to respond to
other than that his information seems at least 10 years out
of date. Certainly Brian's claim about music professors being overpaid
or underworked is history in the new order of American
education funding. Perhaps someone on the list with current active
involvement in an American university can share their perceptions, either
as a student or professor. I'm sympathetic to some of Brian's
views on the university, but feel that the articulation needs
to be a bit more, shall we say, nuanced, in order to connect
with reality.


>Thus, it ill behooves me

(not that it stops him for 50 milliseconds)

> to criticize those like Eric Lyon
>and Greg Taylor, since they are merely the symptoms
>of the disease--namely, those "vast factories of junkthink"
>called univerities.

Like every artist, I am a symptom (but not just of the university)
and accept the compliment. Whether I am a disease is not for me to
judge but I have hopes.

Finally Brian avers:

>Cage's swindles and perversions of 12-TET
>music theory are the disease; microtonality is the cure.

Hallelujah!

Eric Lyon
eric@iamas.ac.jp
http://www.iamas.ac.jp/~eric


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