Preciosity

Tuning Folk,

I recently inquired with a gentleman who offers an online music composition
course. I was wondering if I could enroll as a student using microtonal
resources. He declined, since his training is entirely 12 TET, however he
provided the following response. I would be interested in your reactions
and comments. Are we/you collectors of meaningless treasures?

Darren Burgess
SEJIS Gainesville FL

> I am interested in your question, because I am curious about your
intention.
> I wonder sometimes if the modern sensibility is a little too devoted to
the
> surface in art. It is not that I would want to disparage the surface. The
> greatest accomplishment of the 20th-century in music may prove in a larger
> perspective to be precisely its exploration of new kinds of musical
surface.
> Beginning with Debussy, but also Strauss and Schoenberg, the orchestra and
> the instruments in general became very malleable for the creation of
> previously unimagined worlds of sound. Electronic music has furthered this
> development admirably. However, our experience of this may be too much the
> result of, or at least conditioned by, the crisis of meaning or value or
> significance to which we are subject in our time. When art ceases to be
> ABOUT something, the art-lover becomes a kind of collector of little
> meaningless treasures. I call this "preciosity," as a description of the
> precious as an obsession. Are you seeking an obsession?

[Darren Burgess:]
> I wonder sometimes if the modern sensibility is a little too devoted
to the surface in art. It is not that I would want to disparage the
surface. The greatest accomplishment of the 20th-century in music may
prove in a larger perspective to be precisely its exploration of new
kinds of musical surface. Beginning with Debussy, but also Strauss and
Schoenberg, the orchestra and the instruments in general became very
malleable for the creation of previously unimagined worlds of sound.
Electronic music has furthered this development admirably. However,
our experience of this may be too much the result of, or at least
conditioned by, the crisis of meaning or value or significance to
which we are subject in our time. When art ceases to be ABOUT
something, the art-lover becomes a kind of collector of little
meaningless treasures. I call this "preciosity," as a description of
the precious as an obsession.

It's really striking how similar this particular line of reasoning is
to that of Joseph Yasser as stated in his _A THEORY OF EVOLVING
TONALITY_. All the more so as Yasser used the same 'argument' to push
the idea of "microtonal
resources" (I'm using Darren's phrase loosely here as Yasser had a
very specific intonational paradigm in mind that would not be called
"microtonal" in the broad sense that Darren is implying) as a nearly
deterministic necessity for the evolutionary sustenance of an "art of
space."

From my own personal perspective, this argument has never resonated
with me at all... but it sure would be interesting to know what he
(the gentleman who offers the online music composition course) would
think of "microtonal resources" from this Yasserian point of view,
which again is nearly identical to the one he offers right down to the
Debussy and Schoenberg comments...

Dan

>It's really striking how similar this particular line of reasoning is
>to that of Joseph Yasser as stated in his _A THEORY OF EVOLVING
>TONALITY_. All the more so as Yasser used the same 'argument' to push
>the idea of "microtonal resources"

Indeed, it also recalls Charles Ives's arguments (even to the invocation of
Debussy's name), and, of course, he saw nothing wrong with composing with
quarter-tones. It also wouldn't be too much of a stretch to compare it to
the Socialist Realists' vague definition of "formalism" -- pushing notes
around for the sake of theory or surface effect -- a category which
according to them included Schoenberg, Stravinsky, and, indeed, virtually
all modernists.

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