Subject: Re: the origin of music?
From: Chris Koenigsberg ckk@ckk.com (ckk@ckk.com)
Date: Tue Jan 09 2001 - 13:56:11 EST
> Thought this article may spark some interesting commentary...
> Sonata for Humans, Birds and Humpback Whales
> http://www.nytimes.com/2001/01/09/science/09MUSI.html
>
> January 9, 2001
>
> By NATALIE ANGIER
Hey, I read that too and I thought for a moment about sending it, as a
link, to the list too.... Natalie Angier (the NY Times science
journalist author) is mega-cool by the way, and so is her husband.
By the way there was also another cool article in today's NY Times,
about Kathryn Payne & her elephant low-frequency long-distance sound
communication research, based in Africa, out of Cornell.
I guess the question for me is, (re the Angier article) how to explain
the way some of us (everybody on this list, for instance, plus everyone
who's a fan of the "avant-garde" etc. in various art forms) crave odd,
weird, inharmonic, noisy, etc. experiences in our music, in the midst of
all this apparently instinctual wired apparatus we have for seeking &
creating harmony & melody? Rather than say we're somehow unnatural or
something, it seems to me like there is fruitful ground for further
research on this topic.
It's what I've called "the puncture wound of the alien" for a few years
(hence the acrynomic name of my independent vanity record label "PWOA
Productions") -- to find the spot where the "alien" creeps in, or has
punctured its way in, i.e. the source of our fascination with weirdness
amidst all the peaceful stasis and harmony :-)
Like, my goal in this fantasy story would be being able to finally,
truly, for once and for all, win the argument and shut someone up, by
pointing to some real discovery, when they try and claim that 20th
century music is unnatural, that dodecaphonic or serial music goes
against nature etc. :-)
My fantasy story, still incomplete, would tell how some brave &
foolhardy researchers stumbled across the true secret, found that it was
really extra-galactic alien beings trying to communicate with us,
through these disruptions of harmony & melody :-) so that we can only
communicate back with them through the use of techniques like serialism,
microtonality, etc. :-) a bit of a twist on the usual "Contact", "The
Arrival", "Species" Hollywood story of harmonic decoding of an alien
message :-)
Chris Koenigsberg
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