linuxaudio.org

On Mon, Aug 30, 2010 at 4:39 PM,   wrote:
> But yes, the early 20th century was surely a turning point in Western science

quoted text
> and culture - mathematics and physics went through a crisis and came out

> stronger than ever, and in the arts - not only music - everything was turned

> over and the outcome of this is still unsure.

but mathematics and science's forward path is presumably in the

direction of some kind of "truth", whether one believes in a platonic

universe or not. in both cases, even if we cannot define "truth", we

can establish metrics by which to judge the motion of math and

science, the most obvious one being the simplistic test of "does it

work better as a support for our manipulation of the physical world?"

....
its not clear whether the arts have any forward trajectory at all, so

trying to identify a particular period or a particular outcome as

"ahead", "backwards", etc. seems a little odd. is the american

minimalism of the late 1960s onwards progress compared to baroque

counterpoint? is wagner progress compared to perotin?
to me the most obvious thing that has happened to "music" since the

mid-twentieth century is the fetishization of *sound* itself. adorno

has quite a responsibility there, but his philosophical musings on

this were supported and extended by composers across europe and the

US, and have found a fertile breeding ground even within the context

of modern popular music. most of the great art of humanity seems to me

to have emerged from a dynamic in which chaos and control interact in

very complex ways; the "serious art" of the late twentieth century

seemed keen to see what would happen with more chaos and less control.

but the "serious art" world is, thankfully, just one of many we have

to choose from; as xenakis was messing around with stochastic music,

cage with indeterminism, lots of people with serialism, stockhausen

with whatever we want to call stockhausen's work and so forth, we had

the jazz world, the world of carnatic music from india, african

polyrhythmic music and many other traditions engaged in a continuation

of the fine balance between chaos and control. we ended up with some

absolutely awesome art, and it had very, very little to do with

anything going on in the serious/academic world of "western art

music", and very little to do with with fetishization of sound itself

that seems to have been the hallmark of the western art music of the

last 50-60 years. if i hear one more piece that wants me to marvel at

the *SHEER JUXTAPOSITION* of this versus that, i think i'm going to

scream.
thankfully, we've got a generation fo composers now who haven't even

read adorno, and feel free to draw their influences from an enormous,

global selection. is this an eclectism that has "little power to

survive", or a vibrant source of compost and nutrition for a field

that would otherwise be on the verge of a monoculture die-off ?

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