Oblique Strategies

Here is the fourth edition of Brian Eno's Oblique Strategies for creativity. Applies as well to art as it does to music composition.

http://www.rtqe.net/ObliqueStrategies/Ed4.html

Book Summary: Anthropology of Music

The book Anthropology of Music talks about a new awareness of ethnomusicology's obligaton and a probling for what it is, does and the purposes toward which it is directed. It's the author's contention that ethnomusicology should focus on concepts about music, how music and behavior are interrelated and the sound of music. The author states that ethnologic behavioral concerns have not received an equal amount of attention by ethnomusicologists.

Performers and the performance context should be more fully at the center of analysis. The mere preservation of music has been overly focused upon,and ethnomusicology's role needs to be wider than that. More fully, ethnomusicology should have technical goals such as determining what music is to the extent possible, how music is made and what it's structure is both from a microscopic view and from the big picture.

Ethnomusicology also should have behavioral concerns relating to physical, conceptual/cultural, social, and learning what it means to be a musician, a listener or a participant in the culture in question. It should also be concerned with showing connections betwen ethnomusicology, the humanities and the social sciences. One of the problems that has been plaguing ethnomusicology has been it's inability to combine the social sciences and the humanties together.

The author states that the social sciences are concerned with the economic, political and social aspects of humanity while the humanities are concerned with art, religion, and philosophy. Social science stems from the needs of the body and the humanities stems from humanitiy's purposes. Social science engages in descriptions of behaviors while the humanities are concerned with human values.

The author believes that the thread connecting them is that they are both interested in what people do and why. The author goes on to say that ethnomusicologists have not consistently and completely applied the scientific method and have placed too much emphasis on the laboratory phase and not enough concerning the proper things to do before going into the field and in the field once they get there.

Ethnomusicologists should institutionalize a field method that is taken from ethnomusicology's base of accepted theory and then create hypothesis', field problems and research designs based upon the theory/theories. Concerning a good research plan there are four points to consider. Is the research possible? Does it have a goal? Has the methodology been recorded and which to employ based on a knowledge of the variety of methods available.

It should also say what the study did and did not accomplish. Musicology's neglected field phase can be broken down further to 6 areas of inquiry. 1 The material culture of music such as where the instruments fit within the taxonomy. 2 Song texts. 3 Categories, 4 The musician. 5 The uses and functions of music. 6 Music as a creative cultural activity.

Ethnomusicology also needs to determine the optimum number of song samples necessary to isolate styles and sub-styles. Lastly, ethnomusicology needs to be able to determine what aspects of structure constitute the determining factors of a certain style such as range, level, direction, countour, interval, interval patterns, ornamentation, melodic devices, melodic meter, duration values, structure, scale, mode, duration tone, subjective tonic, meter, rhythm, and tempo.

About the Music 6

In the Buddhist canon, the Abhidharma says that the only thing that can be said to be inherent is truth which is not conditioned.

On what should everyone in the world concentrate? There are as many answers as there are people. Joseph Campbell and I would have everyone concentrate on what truthfully heals you and makes you happy. Besides an experience of nature and other people, ambassadorship, medicine, literature, music, art, gardening etc... are possible foci.

Concerning relationships with other people, western traditionalists and some conservatives are well networked. They may meet every Sunday in Church, in the board room or at power lunches. Cultural creatives think they're alone and there's nowhere to meet. The Unitarian Universalist church is trying to be everything but they wind up alienating just about everyone.

Many Buddhists and Hindu's want to eliminate all desire for happiness. This is one of the problems of cultural creatives. But if the truth is that gardening makes you happy now, no amount of Buddhist philosophical gynmnastics about it ULTIMATELY not making you happy since it's not eternal is nonsense in my opinion.

What is eternal is this moment we have now which is all there ever is. If what makes you happy changes over time then change. It's not that difficult to do, in fact, its inevitable. Anyway, we don't need to be copying Jesus or Buddha, we just need to live up to our divine nature.