About the Music 3

Joseph Campbell said that Christianity is the overinterpreted parochial history and manufactured geneology of a single sub-race of a south-west Asian-semitic people by no means what its own version of the history of the world makes it out to be. What seems reasonable to Christians is nothing more than the sum total of all their prejudices and myopic views. Today there can be no central point on which to concentrate.

Elsewhere, he says, "though empty barrels make the most noise, they are required for new wine and not the uncritically accepted and/or enforced customs of the old wine. Conformity is not now a necessity.

I once read a criticism by a classical music lover's/conservative's criticism of popular music. He said that pop styles were simplistic because they used pentatonic scales whereas classical music had followed a progression to 7 note scales, then to the use of chromaticism in the romatic era and dodecaphony in the postmodern era and used large orchestras of the most difficult to construct instrumnts that could only be played properly by virtuosos.

I submit that a music's worth (or a person's ) is not determined by where it (or they) are placed in a Darwinian evolutionary scale of complexity or by the expense of the instruments but by the philosophical/ spiritual ground from where it grows and therefore by it's usefullness to living people as opposed to meeting the entertainment needs of dead kings and popes as Frank Zappa has said or by carving out an identity for those who are empty and shallow among the rich by attempting to emulate the wealthy aristocracy of a Europe in ages past.

Some of my acquaintances will not like to hear it but the quickest way to make everyone, except the most arrogant of the filthy rich or their wannabe's, feel alienated is to play opera.

Music That Accelerates From 0-60 p.2

The latest events in contemporary music history the way I see it are atonality (innovation away from traditional harmony), serialism (innovation away from traditional melody and tonality.), minimalism (innovation away from preconceptions about instrumentation and form, ambient (innovations away from the traditional purpose of music) and the postmodernism of John Scoffield, Pat Methany etc (innovations away from traditional voicings, progressions and rhythmic approaches).

The serialists thought they were composing the music of the future. Bach knew he was composing the music of his present which is what I believe we need to be doing.

Postmodern art and literature leans decidedly toward an ugliness which I would not want to replicate in music. Its based on a false assumption that in rightfully reacting to the suffocating constraints of traditional forms etc that we should swing toward complete formlessness.

The cut up technique in literature, more often than not, leads to gobbledygook. Nailing a toilet on the wall and calling it art is also nonsense. The postmodern dilemma is how to publish the denial of publishing and mean the absence of meaning. John Cage summed it up well, "I have nothing to say and I'm saying it." The performance of his piece for piano in which the pianist never plays is the height of this wrongheaded philosophy.

My idea is that we don't want ugly formlessness. We want a flexible form. We want enough flexibility for artistic freedom and enough form to have a place to exist.

There is room in the music for a place where, like in abstract art, the motif only has meaning to the composer and whatever meaning the audience derives from it is O.K. and not wrong also, but it can't be the whole thing because art really isn't self expression in a vacuum. Its a dialogue with an audience and other musicians.

Also, when art doesn't have a frame, this can lead to non-art but it can also lead to an art that is not complete without audience participation which can be a good thing. This is one direction which I think music can profitably go now and in the future.

Another idea is using non-traditional media. The expanded definition of what constitutes a musical instrument or music lets a cool breeze into a stuffy room but we still need the room. We shouldn't say that anything is music.

We can use techniques like cut up to suggest new directions without being a robotic slave to the technique, allowing it to make every artistic decision for us. If so, then we are not musicians, artists or writers but dispensable automatons.

The movement away from traditional tonality can free up the strangle hold tonality has had on melody. Utilizing harmony in service of the melody is the challenge of the day. Indian and middle eastern melody far outpaces western melodic practice by leaps and bounds precisely because its making up for the lack of harmony. Modal jazz and free jazz artists were going there but took a left turn at the last minute and free jazz was having too much of the undesirable open ended formlessness. It would be nice to hear more inclusion of Indian embellishments in western music.

Music That Accelerates From 0-60

It has been said that one of the merits of getting a music education is to be able to communicate about music in a clear and concise manner. I'm sure I've mastered the first point but perhaps I have not mastered the second. In any event, this article delineates, in as concise a manner (in a field as complex as music) as I am capable of at this point in time, what contemporary composers could be doing and why.

In talking about it I will attempt to show how to balance competing forces that transmodern composers are faced with. The competing forces I see are to a) be different, b) be likeable, c) be accessible to performers, d) be flexible, e) be inclusive of the community,

First of all, the contemporary mature audience requires something they can sink their teeth into. The music can be different enough to sound fresh, keeping up with modern developments such as additive techniques and self-retrograding rhythms as in one of the most recent developments, the downtown school of postminimalist music which has also been titled Totalism. Its better if composers don not talk in terms of their influences.

That usually means a composer might be openminded but doesn't prove originality or anything else. Originality is also over rated. It will become clear why I think so. I prefer to talk in terms of ideas especially the ones based on philosophical considerations whether they're unique or not.

It has been suggested that one way innovation occurs is from contributions made by fields tangential to the one in question, in this case music. If a person trained in car design is asked to make a radically new design, they usually can't do it. They can't think out of the car design box in which they were trained.

But if someone trained in hydraulics is asked ,they come up with a car that accelerates from 0-60 without even turning on the motor by storing the normally wasted energy, the last time the car came to a stop, as hydraulic pressure. This is what innovative composers do with music. I aspire to be innovative in the same way. Architecture, geometry, developments in art and literature to name a few can and do influence music in the transmodern era.

So, that's where a composer can look for inspiration. For example, some postmodern architecture goes through different detail elaborations as a person walks through a building. This can be translated into music.

Techno is similar in this respect. Geometry has made gains in recent years with the development of fractal geometry. Music usually isn't very fractal but some aspects of self similarity can be used in music composition.

Gamelan music is more fractal than western music. Post-postmodern art is putting the frame back on the canvas while still incorporating some process oriented and audience participatory elements. Musically this means, that chance and serialist procedures can be a tool in the compositional arsenal but not the whole deal.

Experimental music is for working out compositional ideas and not for holding up to the world saying this is the best art on offer. Only the ideas that work are published. Recent innovations in art were impressionism (innovation which
moved away from well defined lines), abstract (innovation away from traditional subject matter) and postmodernism (innovation away from preconceptions about art having a frame where the art stops and the media used to create it).

They are sweeping simplifications, to be sure, but not without their usefulness.

In literature, a fairly recent innovation is the cut up technique. A piece of text can be permutated at the level of paragraph, sentence, words or syllables to achieve unique interesting juxtapositions. It helps achieve a unique approach to self expression and can even create new words.

This really works well to break out of the stranglehold of convention. It has been applied to music also in various ways but the ramifications for it have not been fully explored or explored down sonic dead ends. Tony Williams, Bill Bruford and Allan Holdsworth to name a few postmodern performers used the technique in the studio after recording.

They would cut up pieces of music and rearrange them with other pieces they recorded for the albums. Allan didn't like it that much because he had to relearn all the songs for performance in their new arrangements but the music is really good because Tony's ears have a good aesthetic sense.