"Educated" Musicians

[pissmachine]

If we begin to think of musical notation in the same terms that we do with written language, certain problems arise. First; Do a series of 'floating signifiers' adequately represent sound? Basically, is there any 'real' tangible connection between the line/circle figure of the quarter note and a vibration in air produced when playing that quarter note.
Second; are those able to interpret the web of musical symbolism more adept at the 'art' of playing music? Are trained musicians more worthy of our esteem because they know what the difference between sixteenth notes and sixteenth note triplets are?

Consider this; the entire system of musical notation is like training wheels when learning to ride a bike, or like colorful flashcards for teaching a child to speak. The offer suggestions and reminders of what is possible. The real 'art' is in manipulating the codes and expanding the general vocabulary.

[raven]

Comparing musical notation to a written language has nothing to do with how circles with stems relate to vibrations. It's how the message gets across to the reader. In that way music is far superior to written language because it not only gives the words (notes) and phrases like language, but also gives length and volume, as well as other instructions. Remember sound is something that has and will always exist, putting it into order in a pleasing way is a human achievement and notation is a way for humans to explain it.

Comparing vibration to a floating circle is like comparing a colour to a spot on a paint by number. When you are done you have something you can enjoy looking at or hearing but the ability of the person doing it will influence how much. There is a connection because humans have created one.

I have absolutely no doubt that trained musicians are more worthy. They know the difference between sixteenth notes and sixteenth note triplets because they have taken the time to learn the difference. For that alone they deserve out esteem.

I have considered your final thought and i disagree with the first part because you would not use Shakespeare to teach a child to read and a Bach fugue is not meant for the beginner musician to learn where the notes on their instrument are. The biggest problem with written music is it in no way teaches the musician to listen and that is a very difficult skill to master. it is a life long development because most teachers don't really know how to teach listening. They often don't know how to properly listen themselves.

If what you meant by the "real art" is the ability to take something and make it enjoyable or maybe even somewhat original then i completely agree. If not i am sorry i misunderstood.

[bleh]

I think there needs to be some kind of agreed upon definition of "art" before we continue to blabber about yet another thing that we pretend to know. To say that "art" is taking something and making it enjoyable restricts the activity of "art" to what is enjoyable. I wonder, do you mean to say that if something is not enjoyable then it's not art?
How far are you willing to take the issue of subjectivity?

[rapscallion]

interesting point, though i don't necessarily believe all art should be 'enjoyable' per se, we should at least admit that 'art' has some kind of mesmeric or hypnotic effect, which though not always pleasurable, induces some kind of subjective state in the perceiver/beholder....defining 'art' however is tricky business...especially with all this pomo going around....

[bleh]

Indeed, a "good" definition for "art" is tricky to find, and we must be careful not confuse the definition with an example. We must also be careful that we do not refer to mass produced "replicas" as peices of art. A poster of Salvador Dali's "Dream Caused by a Bee Flight" is hardly a peice of art...unleeeessss

[rapscallion]

ah but you see this is the dilema, as pointed by benjamin, baudrillard and others....does, or can, art exist inthe era of mechanical (or digital) reproduction...that is does art rely on a particular, and unique, 'aura' (authenticity) or is art a function of the effect (or affect) it has on the perceiver....

[bleh]

can't it be both? a peice of "art" usually involves an activity of some kind, that puts together form and content. (stuff in your mind and stuff from the physical world) without getting too caught up in the duality of mind/body (we can save that for anothe thread perhaps) there has to be some kind of thought behind a peice of music, a painting, sculpture, play, a book etc. printing and reprinting a picture or mass producing a lovely britney spears cd doesn't seem to involve much "creative thought" i.e. form and content.
If the perceiver says anything about a thing being a "peice of art" they are presupposing a some kind of definition or "essence" for art, which for various reasons we COULD get into, it seems very difficult to pin down an "essence" for anything through the use of words.

[rapscallion]

bleh said:

Indeed, a "good" definition for "art" is tricky to find, and we must be careful not confuse the definition with an example. We must also be careful that we do not refer to mass produced "replicas" as peices of art. A poster of Salvador Dali's "Dream Caused by a Bee Flight" is hardly a peice of art...unleeeessss

but here you make reference to an artistic essence which does not exist in a replica? is this not an essence, absent from the poster? thus difference between a piece of art and a replica...?

[bleh]

I don't know if we can refer to the difference between a "peice of art" and a replica as the essence of art. But even if we could, it does not seem to me that we can get very far by attempting to grasp that "essence" through language. So what can it be? a movement? The possibility for art (in a Derridian sense) ? maybe form and content represent the possibility for art...I do see where you're trying to go with the difference between a peice of art (involving creative activity using form and content) but can we ever pin that down? again, maybe not through language...but if not through language, then what?

[raven]

maybe art can be defined as something that inspires...and possibly add something that hasn't been done before. john cages family sued a rock group for writing a song that is just silence for 2 minutes because john cage did it first for just over 4. i have seen a jar filled with urine that was poohed in called art. because it was never done before. i have seen a performance artist drown himself. inspired by another performance artist who shot himself in the arm. because it hasn't been done before in the name of art. when thinking about what "Bleh" very intelligently posted after my previous post, i realize that art doesn't have to be good to get the label of art

[rapscallion]

along these lines, here are some notes i took from this book i'm currently readin "Unthinking Modernity: Innis, McLuhan, and the Frankfurt school", good stuff, and relevant to our current discussion, what do you guys think...


-Qualitative judgment concerns the type of life experience we wish to preserve or nurture. tree farms are not ancient stands of wilderness growth, and concrete buildings serviced by hydro-electric dams are not valleys capable of supporting native culture. As guides to questions raised by these contrasts-fundamentally, questions of competing values-modern materialism fails us absolutely. It provides no grounds for choosing between values. collections of data will tell us nothing about how to value the objects they describe. Indeed, the very act of of dwelling on them pushes the concern with values to the margins of consciousness.
More than this, the very attempt to understand value differences requires a historical temperament which, as we saw above, is antithetical to modern science. One comes to value a particular way of life through a process that takes place over time. Values are temporal or historical things. by extension, conflicting sets of values represent different and distinctive historical developments and thus, distinctive cultures. Since the confrontation between modernity and other traditional cultures is fundamentally a conflict of histories, it invites a response grounded in a historical overview of the practices at issue. the battle over data, however, can serve to fix our attentions only, to borrow siegfried giedion’ phrase, on an ‘eternal present.’ As such, it co-creates the stagnation in the media debates over trees and their cultural implications. production, communication, and epistemology here move into a deadly gridlock, resulting in general failure to perceive the historical dimensions of what is at stake. 14
the overall result is deepening incomprehension, which turns differences in expert opinion into an endless series of non-dialogues. this is a failure so profound that few of us who have followed it seriously can have entirely avoided the plummet from hope to resigned cynicism. And if the burgeoning stocks of commercial products bearing the images of endangered species and industrial wastelands are any indication, the economies that thrive so well on the issue to a set of items from the catalogue. In the world of the catalogue, the difference between systemic destruction and the new politics of protest shades off into the difference between the plain coffee mug and the one depicting a stand of pines. 15

-For those who would move beyond this level of engagement, language itself poses a problem of the first order. the catalogue is the condensed and congealed expression of the failure to grasp the historical dimensions of the global issues at hand. it is Hobbes in thought and action today. From inside the catalogue, there are no histories and there are no cultures. the shapes, sizes, weights, localities, and prices of its contents are its meaning. they are its culture. to the degree that they express our everyday lives, they are ours as well. In a key sense, the catalogue is the cultural text of modernity. It is the modern language primer. to speak a different language in this stagnant world poses difficulties not to be underestimated. 15

-Economistic readings of Marx were so common early in this century that it took a groundbreaking Hegelian interpretation of capital to illuminate the broader, cultural aspects of his work. the interpretation came from georg lukacs’s History and Class Consciousness, published in 1922. this study demonstrated that Marx had addressed the spatial bias in modern life and had linked it both to mechanized labour and to an obsession with commodity consumption, which he called ‘commodity fetishism.” 27

-for Marx, commodity fetishism was the psychological outcome of this transformation (time transformed into space through mechanized labour]. It was the failure to see commodities as end-products of a historically evolved set of relations. employers and workers possessed by fetishism became mesmerized by the immediate physical appearance of machine-made products-so much so that they mentally screened out the exploitation behind these products and saw only their market-value relations. 28

-Adrono and Benjamin began by realizing that perceiving the world ina static or timeless way had its basis not only in production but in sensory experience. it was founded on a sensibility that suppressed hearing in favour of seeing, and a fluid sense of time in favour of a mechanical one. Taking marx’s theory of fetishism as their starting point, they noted that this visual bias was partly a product of how modern commodities struck the eye. As industrialism had gained momentum in the modern era, grand trade fairs began to appear in the large centres of Europe. Set in the new and magnificent passages and crystal palaces, themselves products of the grand age of iron and steel, these exhibitions gave commodities a level of visibility they ad never attained before. there, as they glistened in their display cases for all t he world to see, they cast a visual spell on the society that had produced them. By the late 19th century, the sheer number of commodities was enough to draw the European public into a prolonged hypnotic gaze. In his own day, Marx had recognized this effect implicitly when he had used the German adjective ‘phantasmagorisch’ to capture the essence of commodities....these quasi-images, Marx wrote, were optical stimulations that gave seers little sense of their role in the act of seeing.30

-More explicit awareness of this bias appeared in Adorno’s writings as early as 1938. In an essay of that year that concentrated on the North American music industry, he contrasted the cognitive and aesthetic experiences of seeing and hearing. he wanted to show that there had been general regression in western world’s capacity for listening. For Adorno, this decline was the sensual counterpart to what Marx had described as the decline of a fluid sense of time. it expressed itself as growing inability to hear, listen for, and so appreciate thematic development in music. the principal evidence for this decline was the quality of music being produced for mass consumption. Written according to formula, Adorno wrote, it displayed a deadly, debased sameness that was matched only by a mass of listeners no longer able to tolerate anything new. this was ‘fetishized music’- a mass product designed to capture its public’s sensual life. Whatever its market title, it was, at its core, reification for the senses.
Moreover, this development affected more than the capacity for music appreciation. It had an equally insidious effect on conversation. if in popular music it repressed tolerance for the new, in dialogue it reduced the innovative speaker to silence. For Adorno, the reason was clear. In a world dominated by phantasmagoria, the rhetoric of uniqueness or individuation becomes mere window dressing for mass-produced sameness. where sameness becomes the unspoken rule, the capacity for meaningful individual expression atrophies and, with it, the capacity for communication. ..... the regression of listening thus spells the death of dialogue and, in the process, the death of sound as an interactive medium...31

-At the same time, it spells the dominion of the eye over the ear. vision, Adorno wrote, is the sense best suited to the so-called rational order of modernity. the eye is more capable than the ear of perceiving in a static, identitarian manner. it can be turned on and off by a simple movement of the eyelids, and it can be directed easily. As such, it is more readily harnessed to the technological world run by the factory clock and more susceptible to the influence of commodities. by contrast, the ear always retains something of the archaic. unlike the eye (or the machine), it cannot be turned on or off, and it cannot be directed easily. Consequently, it cannot be forced into a narrow and exclusive focus. this resistance gives it a natural laziness, a relaxed quality tabooed in the puritanical society dominated by labour markets. But this very quality gives it a special role in maintaining the health of a society. As Adorno put it, music is potentially society’s most important weapon in outwitting such a taboo. Properly nurtured, it may keep alive the fluid, developmental sense of time required to understand qualitative social change. 31

[bleh]

That's some good blatherin there boy but what kind of audience are you trying to reach with all that philosophical jibbah jabbah? if the only people who are going to be able to understand this are the few "learned", then I think it would be restricted from the masses. No wonder the masses have no clue, first they cannot understand the language, and second they are not as fortunate as some of us to have that kind of education. The problem with Adorno is just that, he's an elitist f**k just like Hegel, Derrida and all those other f**kers. It seems like he needs to dumb it down a bit so the rest of us ignorant f**ks have some kind of an idea of how to respond. Reason (as Adorno would have it) is restricted to those who can afford it, and to those who are lucky enough to live somewhere where they can express it without having the mouths sliced up. Maybe I may have missed something with what you were trying to say, but I've been toiling with it for the past couple of days. What exactly is Adorno suggesting? Or is he simply spouting things off because he can? How would one be able to communicate ART to the masses, whether Adorno likes it or not there are masses, and REASON (just like art) is something relative, yet Adorno does not seem to entertain that, and thus it's restricted to all those f**ks in the frankfurt school. It's nice for him to point out all those things, but with Adorno's negative dalectics (apparent through pretty much ALL his writings) you can't seem to get anywhere, why? Because it's N-E-G-A-T-I-V-E, what does that mean? well you can's seem to just ask anyone now can you, only a few would be able to tell you what they THINK Adorno is yammerin about, and once you pin that down, it's too late because it's gone, why? you guessed it, because it's N-E-G-A-T-I-V-E. That is not to say that what Adorno has to say about art is meaningless per se, but it's meaning extends only so far, Art does not seem to be something that can be described through "Reason", or if it does, then reason can only go so far in describing art before realizing "hey wait a minute, there's the issue of subjectivity that -no matter how hard we seem to try- we cannot get over it, ask PissMachine about that, his experience made me realize that it doesn't matter what you or I think and reason, Britney Spears, Christina Aguilera and all those other post-modern f**ks are "good artists", and no amount of "reason" and argument is going to convince people otherwise. So where does Art lie? It might be in experience, it might be in the expansion of human experience which includes THE SENSES. If you look closely it seems to be the classical case of bifuricating or splitting reason and emotion, mind and body, physical and mental, which seems to be paramount among some human beings; feminists say it's the typical male behaviour preferring reason over the senses (rampant throughout the ages, "They call it good reason...I'm callin it treason"
So it seems to me that what we need here is a closer look at our definition of ART, and we might realize that there is NONE, maybe it is simply an activity without definition, but one thing seems clear to me: The art world only exists for knowers, without knowers there is no art. Art is there to be known, and if a person locks themself up in a room and write poems or songs or music or paint or whatever, they are not doing art...but here's a little thought experiment: Would a person who was born mute, deaf and blind, have any concept of Art? What about a person who was able to for some concept of art but by age 35 they suffer a terrible accident which turns them deaf, mute and blind; would their concept of art be diminished, limited, or stalled in anyway?

[rapscallion]

the point of the aformentioned post (as you say 'philosophical jib jabbering') is to point out that art, is not some abstract entity, that it relies on a medium for its transmission, and not all mediums are equal, each medium has a 'bias' that is, it has certain capacities which allow it to communicate certain 'truths, knowledge, emotions' etc... Now if we look at the rise of modernity, or this bifurcation that you mentioned, its particular 'regime of truth' namely, scientific, or logocentric, knowledge (identitarian) creates an cultural system (including art) which reflects those particular 'values' 'truths' etc... to use a brief example we can think of photography as one such 'artistic system', which has the capacity to 'capture' certain elements of reality, while leaving others out, the rise of the photographic medium coincides with capitalism consumer based culture which favours the 'reproducibilty' of art for mass consumption, one could make similar claims about film, digital photography. anyway the point is, and the point of the above post was to at least point to the fact that each 'civilization' (in our case late capitalism) creates the means for its own cultural expression, and thereby chooses (lets sayin the darwinian sense for now...) the mediums which best capture and express those values. This would at least point to some kind of essence (though not fully in the sense of continental philosophy ie. hegel) but more of a political-economy of art, that is, art embodies/reflects society not only through the content/experiential (ie. subjective) but also through the medium onto which it is inscribed, which destroys the subjective/objective analytic so commonly practiced by post-moderns...hope that clarifies...

[kevingggggggg]

as a drummer, i think pissmachine should be quite aware of the astounding benefits of being adept at reading notation. great instructors through the past century have produced a wealth of instructional books containing lifetimes of excersizes to make one a better player (independence, complex polyrhythms, advanced improvisation, etc). of course, none of this has any worth at all to a player who has no natural groove or improvisation ("jamming" skills of his own. a combination of the two usually produces the best all around musician.

on the other hand, it should be noted that Buddy Rich could not read music in any way shape or form... so maybe i'm full of nuts.

[kevin]

and sorry to break up the metaphysical and practically irrelevent discussion with a dose of real life application