I'm starting to get this funny feeling.. like, I'm going to have to let go of the idea that the music has to be good. Any red lights going off in your head? Slippery slope, right?
What I never liked about Fluxus or Dada is that, the music, the PRODUCT, the TITS were just too weak. Cut up. Street level crap. When all I want is pure columbian.
Just hearing a little blurb that Fred Ho said (w/ Oteri on NewMusicBox) about the weight of the CLASSICAL CANON. THE CANON.
We've see how the product, the music, can be commodified to the nth degree. I mean, check this out: pressing a million different versions of Beeth 9 doesn't diminish the quality of the work, right? It only invites more opportunity for people to experience it, right? But let's be real here, has the public's involvment with music been comensurate to the proliferation of recordings? Don't ask me for a fucking Pew funded chart: it hasn't. I think it's actually easier to shuffle that piece away, thinking, "oh yeah, i've seen that everywhere a million times." Like the Carol King Tapestry record that I saw in every used record store I entered. (Anybody who's browsed vinyl knows what I mean) I never wanted to listen to it, it looked like musical wallpaper to me. (How ignorant of me! I don't know a thing about this lady!)
I have sort of always liked the idea of encountering a phenomenon (a piece of music) that is totally transcendant of it's surroudings. Like, just golden music, whipered down from God's doves into Greg's ears, and to hear it is like looking back up a fiberoptic shaft of light, straight into gods balls, to see the swirling gestation of future universes.
The idea that this phenomenon is distilled from the mundanities of daily life makes it so intoxicating.
But maybe it can be too distilled. Maybe what makes it so seductive is also a poison to our mindfulness of the present. A desperate attempt to fulfill a 19th century ideal of virtuosic genius. Someone once said that every man is trying to either live up to his father's expectations or make up for his father's mistakes.
Maybe this pursuit has devolved into a blinding fetish that sends us stumbling into the woods, trying to catch the horizon.
But, to cast aside the hard-earned, cultivated understanding of SOUND. Is it too precious, like the ego? Does it put us in danger of becoming rambling renegade monks?
It's scary to think about throwing that compass down a ravine.
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Do you have to give up the idea that music has to be good, or do you have to constantly redefine what good is? Can you allow the definition of good to be mutable instead of static, unchanging, and universal? Could good be different at different moments, depending on the situation?
ReplyDeleteI'm talking about giving up the idea that music has to be good - just the entire notion. Because my definition of good is too overloaded with unshakable notions, based on restrictive presumptions, whose limits I continue to discover. I think a "dynamic" sense of 'good' goes against the idea of a values as a being fixed. In other words, how can you ascribe a value to something if you constantly change your criteria for judgement. We're getting into deep space 9, here...
ReplyDeletePerhaps it's for selfish reasons, but I know that if I study a Ligeti score, no matter how difficult it is, and despite the fact that his punkass did not write solos for my instrument, I know I will walk away RICHER for the experience. I have based my musical aspirations around this idea, that living in a world of pieces that is musically rich will leave me, inevitably, musically richer. The idea is that great pieces are like everlasting gobstoppers.
Now I just question my piece-based worldview.
Ah, you've walked into my favorite new territory, that of musicking. Have you read Christopher Small yet? That'll seal the coffin on your piece-based worldview.
ReplyDeleteValues aren't fixed. Think of the things you valued, say, when you were 13. Nothing has changed since then? Your criteria for judgement has been the same all your life?
Thanks. Will check it out.
ReplyDeleteValues are perceived to be relatively fixed, I think. And they should have mass and exhibit inertia, to have any function. You can't measure everything by a yardstick, but the yardstick should stay the same length.