Music has no gender?

[Richard Tarleton]

Given Pinker's rather breathtakingly ignorant and dismissive comments on music itself, I tend to regard his pronouncements on what is and isn't innate as highly suspicious, together with much else that comes under the heading of "evolutionary psychology" and the reactionary political agenda which motivates it (see particularly Steven Rose on that subject). The book to look at on the hypothetically common origin of music and language, and therefore on how and to what extent they're connected, is in my opinion Steven Mithen's The Singing Neanderthals.

A field in which you can't throw a stick without hitting a political agenda - thanks for the recommendation I'll look out Steven Mithen. Harari pretty good though. I'm no evolutionary biologist but very interested in anthropology.

Talking of political agendas the review was of Tom Wolfe's new book on language, which sounds like a pile of.....

[The_Student]

I think this began when we stopped being hunter-gatherers (leading entirely opportunistic lives) and became farmers requiring much more set hours, increasingly at the behest of others . With industrialisation, it just got worse. Suggested reading: Sapiens, by Yuval Noah Harari.

An analogous thought, prompted by a book review I read on Saturday - Stephen Pinker's The Language Instinct (excellent book) argues that language as an innate instinct - it's just that it's filled in different ways in different cultures. Could the same be true of music?

Thank you for your response. I feel there might be something in that. if you think about music styles such as Gamelan. the sound and feel is incredibly different. the way the western art listener responds to this is different to lets say...Mozart. Surely, music plays such a huge part in culture, the creation of an identity that it must impact on our behaviour and everyday life. consider the average pop/rock song-a mere 2-3 minutes of music, why not more? does this indicate a difference in attention span? the commercial "throw-away" society we now live in? going back to the repetition. traditional classical music revolves around 1 of 4 cadences, why not more?

though it is interesting, that, the more commercial, technology controlled life is, the more adventurous the music has become. It feels, there is a push, an urge to explore what it means to be human now, through music before all else fails (sounds dramatic I know-but the robots are already running a lot of industry)

[Richard Barrett]

The world is full of musics that work in different ways

I happened to be writing an introductory text this morning where (to cut a long story very short) I found myself thinking about how to describe some of these "different ways", starting from the point of view of a listener. Two modes of listening that came to mind were that you can choose to "follow" the music or to "inhabit" it (no doubt there are others, and shades of emphasis between all of them), with the thought that the music can encourage either of these modes (and/or others, etc.), by "working in different ways", so that "classical" music is often thought of as encouraging the former mode and "minimalist" music for example the latter, but crucially that it doesn't so to speak enforce one mode or another. If you understand something about serial composition and its syntactic possibilities, you might experience Le marteau sans maître or Gesang der Jünglinge as following "logical" courses, just as related to tension/relaxation concepts as tonal music but in a different way; if you don't have that knowledge you might experience these piece in terms of "states of mind" or whatever; most importantly though, for what I was writing about and maybe in the present context too, it is up to listeners (individually, or in a live situation collectively) to create their own experience somewhere in this field of possibilities, and the aforementioned "encouragement" to "follow" or "inhabit" can be a structural variable in the music, maybe somehow a new "means of expression" beyond the expressive categories inherited from earlier music.

[MrGongGong]

This might shed some light

http://www.upne.com/0819522562.html

as will this essential text

http://www.upne.com/9620010.html

[MrGongGong]

I happened to be writing an introductory text this morning where (to cut a long story very short) I found myself thinking about how to describe some of these "different ways", starting from the point of view of a listener. Two modes of listening that came to mind were that you can choose to "follow" the music or to "inhabit" it (no doubt there are others, and shades of emphasis between all of them), with the thought that the music can encourage either of these modes (and/or others, etc.), by "working in different ways", so that "classical" music is often thought of as encouraging the former mode and "minimalist" music for example the latter, but crucially that it doesn't so to speak enforce one mode or another. If you understand something about serial composition and its syntactic possibilities, you might experience Le marteau sans maître or Gesang der Jünglinge as following "logical" courses, just as related to tension/relaxation concepts as tonal music but in a different way; if you don't have that knowledge you might experience these piece in terms of "states of mind" or whatever; most importantly though, for what I was writing about and maybe in the present context too, it is up to listeners (individually, or in a live situation collectively) to create their own experience somewhere in this field of possibilities, and the aforementioned "encouragement" to "follow" or "inhabit" can be a structural variable in the music, maybe somehow a new "means of expression" beyond the expressive categories inherited from earlier music.

Interesting thoughts Richard
I think there are parallels with the ways in which we regard landscapes
Do we (as in some formal styles of garden design) look at it from outside marvelling at it's symmetry and precision
or do we regard it as something to inhabit, a "place to be" rather than a story to be told or a shared journey (though when we played Composition 1960 #7 a few weeks ago it really did feel like a journey and a "place to be" at the same time)

[Richard Barrett]

Christopher Small is essential reading, to be sure.

I think there are parallels with the ways in which we regard landscapes
Do we (as in some formal styles of garden design) look at it from outside marvelling at it's symmetry and precision
or do we regard it as something to inhabit, a "place to be" rather than a story to be told or a shared journey

Concidentally, the aforementioned introductory text indeed makes reference to the idea of listening as akin to being in (moving around) a garden. Gardens can also of course have "symmetry and precision", or they can be encouraged to proliferate freely without intervention, neither of which possibility is fundamentally more "organised" (or, conversely, "chaotic") or indeed more or less beautiful than the other; and again the cultivated/"wild" axis could be something it spreads across rather than concentrating on one point or another.

On the one occasion when I played Composition 1960 #7 (a 20-minute realisation for two electric guitars with EBows) I completely lost track of when and where we were soon after the start. (I also got interested in making extremely slow microtonal changes in pitch, for which I was (rightly) berated by my colleague afterwards) Anyway I didn't really experience it as a journey! On the other hand it could never be experienced as what in classical music is often called an "argument"...

[Serial_Apologist]

Thank you for your response. I feel there might be something in that. if you think about music styles such as Gamelan. the sound and feel is incredibly different. the way the western art listener responds to this is different to lets say...Mozart. Surely, music plays such a huge part in culture, the creation of an identity that it must impact on our behaviour and everyday life. consider the average pop/rock song-a mere 2-3 minutes of music, why not more? does this indicate a difference in attention span? the commercial "throw-away" society we now live in? going back to the repetition. traditional classical music revolves around 1 of 4 cadences, why not more?

though it is interesting, that, the more commercial, technology controlled life is, the more adventurous the music has become. It feels, there is a push, an urge to explore what it means to be human now, through music before all else fails (sounds dramatic I know-but the robots are already running a lot of industry)

I've always thought of art and what it communicates is part of the artist giving something to the world to reinforce (or challenge) our common perceptions.

The latter will always be mediated - by what we are told to think and believe, and, in the end, by the nature and limitations of the languages through which the world is "explained". Some artists see it, I think, as their job in life to go along with the world as put across, through upbringing, education and the sheer business of needing to belong, and make compromises to that end, however "Faustian" be the pacts one makes along the way. Where do we get the criteria to judge? Philosophy? Religion? "Commonsense"? Or anthropology, evolutionary theory, linguistics and psychology, to name just a few "disciplines".

I remember being very impressed by comments the later, great Elliott Carter made on a 1980s broadcast on what has happened to the innovatory spirit in modern art and music, where he pointed out that during the 20th century, attempts had been made to draw back to some form of consensus following revolutionary "upsurges" which had produced Cubism, Abstraction, "The Rite of Spring" and "Erwartung", and then Integral Serialsm, Stochasm and Abstract Expressionism in the 1940s, followed by Pop Art, Conceptual Art and Minmalism in the 1960s (roughly). Having subscribed as a youngish man to one of these aesthetic consensually convergent movements in the 1930s and 1940s, a form of Neoclassical populism shared with composers such as Copland, Carter had reached the conclusion that life was much too complex and complicated to be dragooned into such optional expressive self-limitations, and that he wanted to be free once more to communicate what he felt to be a more authentic complex vision, which he did, starting really with the second string quartet.

Having persevered audidactically for a good many years with geting to grips with the music of the (for me) great 20th century Modernists, Carter's in the line I concur with, rather than those who wish to simplify. One asks oneself, whose interests are served by promulgating forms of communication devised to give us a common window onto reality that are really reductive forms, more appropriate maybe to some time in the far distant past when little changed for hundreds if not thousands of years, when not only justice but the whole future of the planet for future inhabitation are thrown in question by the rules and power relations by which we are regulated, while being persuaded that we are free to decide?

[Serial_Apologist]

Interesting thoughts Richard
I think there are parallels with the ways in which we regard landscapes
Do we (as in some formal styles of garden design) look at it from outside marvelling at it's symmetry and precision
or do we regard it as something to inhabit, a "place to be" rather than a story to be told or a shared journey (though when we played Composition 1960 #7 a few weeks ago it really did feel like a journey and a "place to be" at the same time)

There is something in what Keith Tippett (and others) say when they talk about removing the listener from chronological time.

My thoughts FWIW are that there are forms of music - pre-composed and otherwise - in which what we have come, through acquired knowledge resulting in the impossibility of "disinvention" (the cat being out of the bag), to "read" into signs and conventions psychologically-induced states of stasis or momentum which allow us, respectively, to linger and "make the most of" what some mystics describe as the Now moment, or follow someone else's narrative agenda to a happy dominant-into-tonic sense of "closure". Boulez described Debussy's music as sounding like sophisticated improvisations, perhaps because it evolves its own forms as it goes along, while taking oblique cogniseance of the formal conventions of his time; Keith's improvisations are interesting in this aspect insofar as he does much the same - like Debussy's music, the first time one hears it, one wonders where this particular journey is going to take us, and there are places where the landscape changes on a sixpence - like Debussy's in "Iberia" - others where one ineluctably enters lingering states one is happy to remain with until other needs, for food etc, rise from within to the conscious fore.

Some people ask - what is the point of meditation? to which the answer is that expending a lot of mental and physical energy on buying unsustainable stuff is wasteful of precious resources; but for the forner to become a norm society would have to change drastically from how it now is run.

[ahinton]

I remember being very impressed by comments the later, great Elliott Carter made on a 1980s broadcast on what has happened to the innovatory spirit in modern art and music, where he pointed out that during the 20th century, attempts had been made to draw back to some form of consensus following revolutionary "upsurges" which had produced Cubism, Abstraction, "The Rite of Spring" and "Erwartung", and then Integral Serialsm, Stochasm and Abstract Expressionism in the 1940s, followed by Pop Art, Conceptual Art and Minmalism in the 1960s (roughly). Having subscribed as a youngish man to one of these aesthetic consensually convergent movements in the 1930s and 1940s, a form of Neoclassical populism shared with composers such as Copland, Carter had reached the conclusion that life was much too complex and complicated to be dragooned into such optional expressive self-limitations, and that he wanted to be free once more to communicate what he felt to be a more authentic complex vision, which he did, starting really with the second string quartet.

Having persevered audidactically for a good many years with geting to grips with the music of the (for me) great 20th century Modernists, Carter's in the line I concur with, rather than those who wish to simplify. One asks oneself, whose interests are served by promulgating forms of communication devised to give us a common window onto reality that are really reductive forms, more appropriate maybe to some time in the far distant past when little changed for hundreds if not thousands of years, when not only justice but the whole future of the planet for future inhabitation are thrown in question by the rules and power relations by which we are regulated, while being persuaded that we are free to decide?

Interesting that you should mention Carter (my estimation of whom is as yours). Boulez, Stockhausen and Xenakis (for example) came to their respective "modernist" (hate the term, but never mind!) stances in their 20s and early 30s, relatively early on in their careers, whereas Carter was in some ways an even later/slower developer than Tippett (Michael, I mean, not Keith whom you mention in your next post!). It seems that he was actually quote prolific in the 1920s although what's become of most of his pre-Pocohontas work I do not know; it includes an apparently quite ambitious piano sonata completed in 1924, more than two decades earlier than the fine one that we know - and even that's not his earliest documented work. By the time he came to compose the Second String Quartet that you mention (the one that we know as such, that is - he'd written other quartets well before what we know as his First), he was already in his 50s and had been composing for not far short of 40 years.

I would be curious indeed to get some perspective of some of his very early music (if only that were possible) because that dated from before he was even acquainted with Copland, yet he knew Varèse and Ives during the first decade of his creative career and had heard Le Sacre among other things, to say nothing of having sat next to George Gerswhin at the US première of Wozzeck, so he would have been exposed to rather more than merely "these aesthetic consensually convergent movements in the 1930s and 1940s, a form of Neoclassical populism shared with composers such as Copland". Carter's lengthy trajectory seems itself to have been quite a complex thing! (and what he'd have thought when he started out had he been able to predict that he'd still be composing some 90 years later I simply cannot imagine)...

[The_Student]

I've always thought of art and what it communicates is part of the artist giving something to the world to reinforce (or challenge) our common perceptions.

The latter will always be mediated - by what we are told to think and believe, and, in the end, by the nature and limitations of the languages through which the world is "explained". Some artists see it, I think, as their job in life to go along with the world as put across, through upbringing, education and the sheer business of needing to belong, and make compromises to that end, however "Faustian" be the pacts one makes along the way. Where do we get the criteria to judge? Philosophy? Religion? "Commonsense"? Or anthropology, evolutionary theory, linguistics and psychology, to name just a few "disciplines".

I remember being very impressed by comments the later, great Elliott Carter made on a 1980s broadcast on what has happened to the innovatory spirit in modern art and music, where he pointed out that during the 20th century, attempts had been made to draw back to some form of consensus following revolutionary "upsurges" which had produced Cubism, Abstraction, "The Rite of Spring" and "Erwartung", and then Integral Serialsm, Stochasm and Abstract Expressionism in the 1940s, followed by Pop Art, Conceptual Art and Minmalism in the 1960s (roughly). Having subscribed as a youngish man to one of these aesthetic consensually convergent movements in the 1930s and 1940s, a form of Neoclassical populism shared with composers such as Copland, Carter had reached the conclusion that life was much too complex and complicated to be dragooned into such optional expressive self-limitations, and that he wanted to be free once more to communicate what he felt to be a more authentic complex vision, which he did, starting really with the second string quartet.

Having persevered audidactically for a good many years with geting to grips with the music of the (for me) great 20th century Modernists, Carter's in the line I concur with, rather than those who wish to simplify. One asks oneself, whose interests are served by promulgating forms of communication devised to give us a common window onto reality that are really reductive forms, more appropriate maybe to some time in the far distant past when little changed for hundreds if not thousands of years, when not only justice but the whole future of the planet for future inhabitation are thrown in question by the rules and power relations by which we are regulated, while being persuaded that we are free to decide?

Really nicely put! Thank you! Yes I agree with you. Looking through the last century of music- it does look like a passionate chaotic counter reaction to the late romantic- early 20th century. This sudden break from tonality, plunging into another set of procedures, I feel, added to what can be portrayed through music and added such new dimensions but in the end, the composer must be free to decide what tools they need in order to bring an idea across. It is not only the listener but also the composer who needs the feeling of empowerment.

The arts are such subjective fields. It is amazing to analyse and study it, but they are arts. Some of the last ways a human can truly express themselves as individuals (looking at work uniforms, rules and policies everyone had to abide by, everyone drives the same huge car, goes on holiday to the same places etc etc) what does it mean to be now?

[Serial_Apologist]

Really nicely put! Thank you! Yes I agree with you. Looking through the last century of music- it does look like a passionate chaotic counter reaction to the late romantic- early 20th century. This sudden break from tonality, plunging into another set of procedures, I feel, added to what can be portrayed through music and added such new dimensions but in the end, the composer must be free to decide what tools they need in order to bring an idea across. It is not only the listener but also the composer who needs the feeling of empowerment.

The arts are such subjective fields. It is amazing to analyse and study it, but they are arts. Some of the last ways a human can truly express themselves as individuals (looking at work uniforms, rules and policies everyone had to abide by, everyone drives the same huge car, goes on holiday to the same places etc etc) what does it mean to be now?

But, given that you agreed, in what does this empowerment consist? In denial - in locking stable doors after the horses (the means of expanded expression that shine a light on our common human experience in this given time) have bolted?

(BTW I'm not "getting at" composers of today who use tonality, any more than writing off what good pop music has issued in the wake of "Yesterday", but instancing a case for looking at a world of music that has become increasingly divided between genres, and in ways which for structural reasons are complex and difficult to disintangle, involving as they do marketing, career building or basically making a living in music when the chances of changing the social and political contexts in which music takes place seem more and more to be out of the creative artist's hands and thus his or her thinking processes. By saying which, I do not mean that composers and artists of radical mien always or even necessarily concerned themselves with social and political change, but that the implications of communicating states of mind or being troubling to those ultimately controlling the dissemination of knowledge (in its broadest meaning) eventually twigged among a generation including Luigi Nono, many of whom, while they disagreed on means and even objectives, recognised and acknowledged the implications of subverting the signifiers of "eternal musical truths" for changing people in ways only sacred music with its strictures and rules transgressions had consciously attempted in the past. Tonality, that great structural organising principle evolved from the Renaissance to the early serialists' acknowledgement of it, has shrunk rather to the status of local event or colour in today's postmodernist composer's mindset; one can welcome this as one among many discombobulations of the Western Modernist Narrative - I have mixed feelings about that, rather as I do about Wagner - and one can also recognise how this deconstructionist impulse has served the "music industry", right up to the ratings fetishists wanting advertising on the BBC; but today's threat to copyright, the independent artist's sole guarantor of security, comes not from the kind of communitarian renewal espoused by radicals such as Eisler and Cardew but from downloads, and one fears for the exploitation of that supposedly autonomous seat of autodidacticism - the bedroom computer - as much as the absence of any source of unifying viewpoint in the socially atomised world it represents).

[MrGongGong]

The arts are such subjective fields. It is amazing to analyse and study it, but they are arts. Some of the last ways a human can truly express themselves as individuals (looking at work uniforms, rules and policies everyone had to abide by, everyone drives the same huge car, goes on holiday to the same places etc etc) what does it mean to be now?

You don't have to go along with "normality" you know

[Richard Barrett]

a world of music that has become increasingly divided between genres, and in ways which for structural reasons are complex and difficult to disintangle, involving as they do marketing, career building or basically making a living in music

... to which in my opinion "today's postmodern composer" is capitulating, when the most important thing today's artists have to offer is an expression of the possibility of imaginative freedom - not just the "freedom" one has to choose between preexistent styles which is the freedom of the supermarket - through a music which somehow embodies the idea that "anything is possible" together with the discipline to respond to that infinite potential (rather than wallowing in it).

[The_Student]

You don't have to go along with "normality" you know

ok, so what car do you drive? what brand of coffee do you drink? what do you do that completely un-normal?

[The_Student]

curve-ball coming your way..

So, I took part in the yamaha jazz summer school at Falmouth last week (was quite amazing-first experience of jazz performance for me!)

I had a very interesting discussion with one of the tutors following the Troy Miller Trio concert. Towards the end of the concert (it was already announced that they were running out of time and could only play one more piece). Troy performed a drum solo, this took quite some time to build up-it built to a climax where it was visible that Troy appeared to have "left" the room-he was in a different zone where his rationality and creativity fused-he was empowered in those minutes where he left us. It was quite remarkable what happened when he "returned". the playing suddenly dropped down a notch in intensity and he was back in the room-aware of the time, looking slightly bewildered.

begs the question- is it possible to feel truly empowered when one is constantly aware of time changes? Not necessarily of temporal progressions within the music, but to be (experiencing) the sound in time?

We did a very interesting timbral improvisation experiment. We were given no "timer"-the music that followed, built up was quite immense, as the musicians were allowed to leave the time constraints of everyday life. Once the timer was set to 10 minutes, it completely changed the feel. There was rushing, anxiety, nerves and too much concentration- sounds ironic but this really appeared to constrict the piece.