More decontextualized whingeing from you-know-who....

>From between the great rocks Sulky and Crib-dis,
Brian writes:

>Without concern for how the music *sounds*,
>no system of composition can long survive.

Of course, I think that music has a pesky habit (like
about everything else that people do) of being a socially
constructed behavior. It seems to me that it ought to
be rather simple to observe that there are more
factors involved with the "survival" of a given
cultural meme than a "concern" for "how the
music sounds" or a lack of same. One might encourage
cultural selection by tying a given sort of musical
behavior to, say, a cultural ritual [the Mass,
Woodstock, the Olympics] and take it from there.
In my view, it's pretty obvious that how something
sounds isn't either necessary *or* sufficient to
guarantee its "survival" [a term which Brian,
conveniently, fails to define] - after all, there's
all kinds of wonderful music outside of 12TET out
there that I find positively marvellous. Some of it
seems to be having trouble quite apart from how it
sounds. There might be more, I think. However
bracing that opener may sound, I personally think
it lacks a little nuance, and is carrying some stuff
it didn't declare to the Douanier.

The other bit that our northwestern correspondent
seems to have forgotten to mention is the question
of *whose* concern we mean [composers? listeners?
the shadowy cabal of trilateral atonal serialists who
bombard America's listeners with mind-scrambling
rays?]. But I digress.

>And the endeavour to keep a brain-
>dead theory of composition from perishing,
>on life support, years after its rationale
>has gone, can only lead to brain death.
>The latest outbreak of this symptomatic
>condition bursts forth in Perspectives of
>New Music, Vol. 39, Nos. 1 & 2, 1995,
>pp. 554-558.

Since our musical culture has not progressed
sufficiently far that McLarenists can strangle
all Cage fans (or anyone who happens to like what
they like without regard for Brian's objective
tastes) in their beds or deport them with impunity,
there'll always be a pesky few folks whose work
just *might* require a little context to make some
sense in somewhat the same manner that some of
our friends might need just a bit of explanation about
why we don't follow convention and use the 12 equally
tempered scale pitches that God gave us :-). The guy
that Brian's recent PNM-flyby screed has barnacled
onto is one of 'em.

A really *clever* trainspotter might even recognize the name;
James Boros is one of those folks whose work falls under the rubric
of "postmodern fiction" along with folks like Kathy Acker. While I've
certainly not got a shelf full of PNM here before me, I'm guessing that
Boros' work is quoted in the context of it being a libretto for some
piece of music. My best guess is that it's probably the stuff that David
Holzman got his NEA recording grant for in 1994 .

The entire text itself appeared in the September '94 issue of the
periodical "Postmodern Culture" (Vol. 5 #1), just in case you
want to look at the whole thing. Boros is one of those folks whose
interest is in constructing texts which maintain the basic syntactic
structure of common, everyday language (that is, the nouns and
modifiers and dependent clauses and that stuff are all in the right
place, which means that the stuff "parses") but are composed of
individual lexical units which bounce off of each other and (James
and his ilk hope) generate new associative strings in those who
read 'em. I know this'll come as a bit surprise to you, but I find
that my mileage varies considerably on this one, though it certainly
has its place. The origin of this particular line of inquiry comes from
ol Noam "Chopper" Chomsky himself; there's a wonderful sentence
whose deep and surface structures are entirely at odds that I just
can't recall at the moment. Anyway, I think that it ought to be
clear why including or looking at structures which play form and
content off against each other might be of interest as a general
approach for folks who construct texts or musical pieces. We could
pause and think of surrealism, dada, futurist performance, and so
on. This particular discourse is certainly not one of my favorites,
but the place where it's "embedded" in cultural practice certainly
isn't all that hard to imagine (the sentence generator in Gulliver's
Travels, anyone?).

Actually, there *is* a positively *lovely* multimedia work based
on this kind of thing done by Bill Seaman called "The Exquisite
Mechanism of Shivers" which combines this rotating permutative
string with some very quiet little video images and sound recordings
that I quite like. You can find it on the "ARTintACT" CD-ROM publication
from the ZKM/Zentrum fur Kunst und Medientechnologie in Karlsruhe
(Cantz Verlag, 1994). I hope you have a chance to see it someday.

If you'd like, you can take a look at the whole Boros text at:

http://jefferson.village.virginia.edu/pmc/creative.all.html

Come to think of it, doesn't Nick Didkovsky also generate his own
text strings using the same algorithm he uses for generating music
(which he then strings together to make larger structures)?

>In the Alice In Wonderland world of so-called
>"serious" modern music theory, *this* is what
>passes for profound investigation into the
>nature of contemporary music.
>Meanwhile, when I write:
>"if we've learned ANYTHING by reading the past
>60 years of music history, we've learned that there
>*isn't* any final stage of musical evolution.
>There is no `ultimate style.' There is no
>`Single correct way to compose.'"
>.. When I write such a sentence, these are the
>ravings of an unpleasant crank.

It would seem to me that it's a bit disingenuous to suggest,
as Brian does, that the whole of modern musical practice has
a single goal or a single set of mean to reach said end. Of course,
he's managed to do a rather pathetic job of deck-stacking by
giving us an innocuous bit of Brian (in what seems to be his
non-crank mode when deprived of *its* context) and rubbing
it up against a bit of text whose embedding comes out of an
entirely different discourse with no attempt to explain what
things come from and why. Why not quote Philip Levine's
"What Work Is" and then put up a bit of Brian in full crank
mode and then claim that Brian's a lousy writer because his
poetry stinks?

(Actually, you ought to sit down and try to construct some
texts that parse like Boros but which lead away from the
parse. It's harder than you think - that's what so intrigued
Noam about 'em.)

(more sulkiness snipped....)

>Yes, once we step behind the looking glass and
>emerge into the world of modern music theory,
>anything is possible.

One needs no looking glass. Until such time as we're
all forced to kowtow to the McLarenist Final Vocabulary,
folks will keep on coming up with ways of thinking about
and doing stuff that'll just burn your ass, Brian. Mine too,
for that matter. The ability of persons to imagine a world
not like our own is something one can always wager on. And,
like it or not, those pesky value questions are a negotiation
with people you don't like, which is one lovely reason that
one might prefer folks who don't mix subjective judgements
and normative language with such abandon as you're wont
to do.

>Anything, it would seem, but common sense, logic,
>and sanity.

And don't tell me - we're talking "common sense" and
"logic" and "sanity" as exemplified by...it's right on the
tip of my tongue....

Pluralistically your'n,
Gregory


_
I would go to her, lay it all out, unedited. The plot was a simple one,
paraphrasable by the most ingenuous of nets. The life we lead is our only
maybe. The tale we tell is the must that we make by living it. [Richard
Powers, "Galatea 2.2"] Gregory Taylor/Heurikon Corporation/Madison, WI



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