the "canon" was: 53-note midi sequencing

->From: Zhang2323@aol.com
>
>
>In a message dated 10/13/99 10:16:58 AM, ppagano@bellsouth.net wrote:
>
><<i think that continuing to write music with arcane dots on paper plays
into
>the hands of the pedagogy and system that has repressed music for so long>>
>
>In this same vein, the so-call Classical Canon (Bach, Mozart, Beethoven,
etc.
>et al) is Eurocentric & male-dominated.
>Time to really open up the Canon... somehow.
>
>zHANg

Now wait a minute...nobody faults, say, the Chinese for having a "canon" of
great painting from their past, so why should Europeans be bashed for having
a musical canon which represents the best of what was composed in Europe
during those centuries?

Canons only exist in hindsight. It takes time for the wheat to be sifted
from the chaff, and even what future generations decide to value can change
over time. The so-called "classical cannon" is largely European with some
American offshoots at the very end. Overlapping it is the beginnings of the
"American Canon" the creation of bruthahs and sistahs in this country, with
some lesser contributions by palefaces. This then becomes a commercial
export and influences (or infects, depending on how you look at it) the rest
of the world, as in world-pop. The American canon consists of the
Ellingtons, Parkers, Hollidays, Hendrixs...etc.

The attempts at carrying on the European "classical canon", mostly found in
academic settings in America and Europe, are largely failures because they
are too self-consciously >trying< to gain admittance for themselves to the
"Canon". Thus they lose their authenticity in nostalgia and become overly
abstract. This is proved by the fact that, for the most part, nobody gives a
shit about it except the few participants.

Calling "dots on paper" a tyranny, or something similar, is perhaps
hyperbolic, and any limitations posed by it are only in the minds of those
who chose to be limited. The dots are a tool, nothing more, useful for
notating certain aspects of some kinds of music.

I have long felt that a recording of a musical performance is a "notation"
so far superior to any written notation that its not even funny. In many
respects, contemporary guitar traditions have the healthiest approach to
this. In both the flamenco and electric guitar traditions, it is the
recording and perhaps a tabulature which enables successful reproduction of
a piece of music. The tabulature is a summary of technical information to
aid in the manipulation of an instrument to produce a rough approximation of
a work. The many important details of execution are contained in the
recording. The more one is familiar with the style, the less need there is
for the tab, and the more one is able to get all one's information from the
recording. This is of course geared towards reproduction of the music; if
one is interested in analysis then perhaps a spectrogram is the superior
form of notation, as it is amenable to quantitative analysis.

The "dots on a page" approach was no doubt meant to be supplemented with
aural familiarity with the style in question at the time when the music was
composed. It is only because we have no recordings of Beethoven's music from
his time that it became necessary to fetishize the written score and elevate
it to a kind of sacred text from which the faithful hoped to extract the
"true" meaning and then render the "true" performance. The performance of
even older musics, say from the middle ages, becomes a kind of cryptological
exercise whose success at reproducing what the music may have sounded like
at the time will forever be unknown. (except for the possibility of
trans-temporal clairvoyant access, which I suspect is actually possible.
Imagine someday musicologists training in meditation so they can access
directly the akashic sonic traces of the past. EMAHO!)

You can't "open up the cannon", all you can do is make music you like. Its
up to future generations to decide if it has any value for them.

As far as it being eurocentic and male dominated, there is a funny/sad quote
(maybe Anthony Burgess?): "When the Zulus have a Tolstoy, I will read him."

dante

Dante Rosati gave a long post about midi/score/performance... and I happen
to disagree with some of it, mostly in terms of definitions and purposes for
various manifestations of music. So I'll give my take on what is a score...
He said...

> I have long felt that a recording of a musical performance is a
> "notation" so far superior to any written notation that its not
> even funny.

A recording has a different purpose than a score; it's not "superior" it's
"completely different".

Recordings are great things, but they're not "scores". They have different
uses and purposes. A recording is to a musical score more like an audio
cassette is to a book. A recording is great in that it gives posterity a
"perfect" reproduction of a particular performer(s) doing an interpretation
of something. It might be "the definitive" performance -- such as an awesome
improvisation by Jimi Hendrix or Ravi Shankar; but it might also be just
another interpretation of something with an independent abstract
representation, like a Beethoven symphony. What do I mean? For instance, a
group of fifty people would be hard pressed to produce an opera like Madame
Butterfly given only a recording of it to work from. It's a vastly complex
piece of music lasting nearly three hours, and including a huge number of
parts for an array of players and singers. So in this case, a score is the
preferred representation for someone intending to reproduce the opera; it is
not the preferred representation for someone wishing to LISTEN to the opera
-- for that, either a live production or recording is preferred. A MIDI file
could be used to represent the work, certainly... but that's also different
from a score of the work.

For the most part, a MIDI file isn't a "score" -- it's a sort of "low
fidelity" recording medium that records, more or less accurately, a
particular set of gestures that can be used to play back an interpretation of
a piece of music, perhaps with adjusted instrumentation, etc. But a MIDI
file that's a "good performance" of some work isn't as good as a score at
providing the essence (or "skeleton") of that musical piece if one's purpose
is to produce another interpretation. The MIDI file contains a lot of
extraneous information while obscuring certain abstractions -- for instance,
precise details as to how a chord is rolled by a particular pianist at a
particular point in time; whereas a score would indicate the fact of a chord
to be rolled, and leave the precise mechanism up to a performer (or
recorder), who might vary it depending on mood and phase of the moon. To be
fair, if a MIDI file sticks to some precise regularized values for notes, it
could be used by a performer as a score, i.e., as the basis for producing a
variant interpretation -- in that case, it does become a "score". Typically,
however, a MIDI file captures a performance and not an abstraction of a
musical piece.

So what is a score? It doesn't have to be dots on paper, it could be a set
of numbers and rules for interpretation. The traditional western musical
score -- staves with notes in common musical notation -- is one method.
Tablature is another method just as useful and valid. A score could be a
long list of Chinese characters that are to be interpreted by a performer; it
could be a list of words or syllables with a conventional interpretation.
What matters is that a score is something that allows a an arbitrarily large
group of performers to produce an interpretation of an arbitrarily large
piece of music at a separate time and place from that at which it was
"composed". In the western "high culture" tradition, music is often thought
of as existing in the abstract, embodied in a written form called a score,
which is a set of instructions able to be interpreted by great or small
performers, forever and ever down through the ages (theoretically).

MIDI files and scores might merge at the edges, but I think the preferred
format might be different for particular purposes. It is wonderful that we
have recordings of Caruso -- we know precisely what he sounded like (modulo
the horribly primitive recording technology). It is also wonderful to have
the scores for large symphonic and operatic works, for which a recording is
an inadequate (or perhaps just "highly inefficient") guide to production.

Another recent thread has to do with microtonal notation. In my youth I
struggled with trying to invent new notations and then gave up because...
Classically trained western musicians aren't thrilled by trying to learn a
new notation for every composer or every piece, they're highly trained to
produce sounds by associating gestures (pushing keys, buttons, sliding bows,
vocalizing) with certain symbols on the page. They want to be able to refine
a set of gestures into an "art" and then be able to "read" the score,
producing sound and interpreting as they go. The point of a score -- at
least the scores I produce -- is to allow someone to reproduce the work in
that manner. Being trained to read/write western musical notation, I also
don't want to learn a new notation for every tuning. I want to be able to
look at a "b-flat" on the page, push the b-flat key on my keyboard, and
produce a sound of a specified duration. Therefore, I use regular musical
notation as if the music were 12tET and tune the instruments to whatever
pitches I want. The interval set can then be listed in a preface to the
score, e.g., for an n-tone equal tuning, it might simply say "written middle
C = 262Hz, each notated half step represents an interval of X cents". If
acoustical instruments with the requisite tunings existed, the score could
presumably be played by them; alternatively, the score can be played back
through a synthesizer, turned into a MIDI file, adjusted in real-time, handed
over to another performer, etc. I'll grant that the score doesn't make much
sense to someone trying to interpret it in 12tET, but it works for me...

Rick