Musical Archetypes

I've decided to take this off-list discussion with Kraig Grady back to
the TD as it may be of interest to others also... It pertained to a
post forwarded by Kraig (TD 411.3), and a post that I made (TD 406.16)
in response to (or at least inspired by) one by Daniel Wolf (TD
406.10).

What mostly interests me here are two basic (though somewhat difficult
to express) ideas. The first is what Kraig is calling "the "natural"
organic language of music." I had recently used the example of Yasser,
who wrote of an evolving ("Raumkunst") art of space, in an attempt to
express what I believe is the same type of a fundamental pull (or to
quote the post Kraig forwarded: "organic tendency"). The other is the
(often circuitous) ways that music's development is effected -- "die
erhohung des vorgenfundenen daseins" -- by music's tools i.e.,
instruments and the curious lot that use them...

It seems to me that too literal an interpretation of the first idea
(which seems hard to deny) leads more or less (and in Yasser's case it
was definitely more!) to a deep suspicion (or distrust) of the
second... This was some of Kraig's off-list response:

"My main purpose in posting this is its relation of music to language.
The implications is that even though mathematics can be used to
explain this language and add to it. Not all mathematics is applicable
to the "natural" organic language of music. I realize that even those
that
might agree with the premise might on the other hand confine what this
language is. Fortunately we have enough cultures on the globe as
modals of different ways this language can develop . . . it seems that
no tuning and/or acoustical phenomena has a monopoly for creating a
musical language. It appears that the those instruments whether (for
instance) strings divided into ratios or flutes with equally spaced
wholes have had great influence on how scales have developed. It would
I feel would be a mistake on the other hand to think that any
instrument with its inherent formula would be as appealing or withstan
d any test in length of time."

As I'm typing this I'm listening to Huun-Huur-Tu's _OSKE CHERDE_, and
it's striking me how the pulse of the tune is so vividly saturated
with the rhythm (and decidedly human habit) of horse riding... I truly
believe that our ability to animate our experiences and our
inspirations is also the potential to change music... to change what
is musically possible... what is musically right... So I guess I'd
have to say that once the question is boiled down to a very simple
scheme ("chomsky's symbolic formulation of language and subsequent
mapping of diverse languages into a very simple scheme argues strongly
for an organic origin of language structure . . . the above arguments
merely suggest that there may be an organic tendency towards certain
scales and musics as there probably is for language structure"), I for
one am probably apt to be as interested in wrong answers as I am
right...

How any of this might be said to relate to intonation and tuning is (I
think) a very interesting topic for discussion.

Dan

-Ode to Lou Ferrigno...

HUUN-HUUR-TU are my five-year-old son Bryan's favorite band... he
calls them "the singing horsemen," and often lurches into his own
(language unknown) interpretations of their songs... last week his
mother and grandmother simultaneously forbade any
"errrrrrr-eeeeeeee's" when his fathers not around. He wanted to be
K-ool for Halloween but ended up settling on the Incredible Hulk -- he
recently unearthed all my old (late '60s early '70s) comics that I got
on my summers vacations to Hampton Beach... And while I personally
wanted to take him over to DC comics so we could kick Batman and
Superman's ass - we just ended up going out and getting a couple dozen
candy bars and lollypops... And thanks to the unspeakably omnipresent
influence of TV on peoples collective know-what-they-know (there was
an '80s TV show based on the comic), most everyone seemed to know who
he was supposed to be despite the fact that he was festooned in all of
a green sweatshirt and some not quite right green face paint. I guess
we'll probably wait until HUUN-HUUR-TU get themselves a TV show before
we try and wing a Kaigal-ool costume... Oh well, peace love and gamma
radiation.