Subject: Re: the sound of Musique Concrete is alive in the ancient icy mountains
From: Kevin Austin (kevin.austin@videotron.ca)
Date: Fri Jul 20 2007 - 11:04:58 EDT
Hmmm ... I've recorded many notes from a piano keyboard, and not once
have any two of them come up wave-for-wave the same as any other one,
even for a few cycles. That's billions of billions of billions of
billions of waves.
Music is process and identity, not object. I have seen this regularly
where, in a German example, I have heard 'variants' of Happy Wanderer
that all maintained the core identity of the tune without being
note-for-note the same as the one I know, even for a complete phrase.
It is to me, partly an issue of segmentation and boundary conditions
in perception and cognition. Two people may 'look alike', but it is
the rare lover who would mistake one for the other. But, a walk
though a crowded city will provide many people with 'categorical
overflow', where large numbers of people start to look alike, partly
because the characterizations are broad ... white, male, glasses,
short hair, balding, overweight.
For my father, all opera was the same. For me Levine and Boulez in
front of Mime's cave are not the same, even starting from the same
black dots on the page.
Regarding virginal variants, in Meistersinger one of the rules is
that "no more than four notes may come from another Master's song".
I remember listening to a radio program where the announcer seemed to
complain that a soundscape piece simply sounded like traffic in the
city. Maybe there are no 'cityscape fingerprints' for unique
identification of every single location in every city, but people in
recording get over this really quickly and focus on another level of
the sound.
I don't care whether plunderphonics is given credence or not. I
listen and if it is better than I can do I am impressed, if it better
than I can imagine, I stand in awe, if it is something that I can't
imagine imagining, it must be Stoc.... ooops, won't go there today.
Rainy rainy rainy. No two drops are identical, but all sounds heard
at the greatest possible distance is the same (David Sutherland,
1975).
Best
Kevin
At 12:19 AM -0400 7/20/07, Eliot Handelman wrote:
>Peter Castine wrote:
>>
>>Incidentally, I had once sketched a musicological seminar with the
>>title "Alles nur geklaut" on the broad theme of musical copying. My
>>notes include "Ars nova". Alas, I gave up that particular adjunct
>>contract to organize ICMC 2000, so the course materials never got
>>beyond sketch.
>>
>Hey Peter,
>
>I don't think that idea is defensible -- it's true that there are
>enormous commonalities in huge spectra of music, but it's also
>significant that in, say, the entire classical repertoire, there are
>no known inadvertent duplicates. Not once did composer x come up
>with a composition that turned out to be note-for-note the same as
>something else all the way through, even for short pieces. That's
>billions & billions of notes.
>
>I noticed that in the bach cello suites, there is a certain kind of
>figure that admits of a countable number of certain kinds of
>variation. (sorry, I haven't
>published this.) I noticed that Bach used all possible variations in
>different pieces, without once repeating a variant. It seemed that
>Bach must have remembered how he used the figure before. And it
>seems, similarly, that to compose classically is to be able to
>construct variants of shapes or figures that can be evaluated to be
>virginal. And so memory must have featured very significantly in
>what classical composition used to be. The burden ultimately becomes
>too great -- I remember a line about this in Mann's Faustus -- and
>the style changes so that artists are free to strike ahead without
>the need to look over their shoulders at every second note.
>
>I think it's very regrettable that plunderphonics is given credence
>today because it popularizes the implosion of memory and impedes the
>hard work of inventing a new style.
>
>-- eliot
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