NetNews Usenet Archive 1992 #31/NN_1992_31.iso/spool/bit/listserv/emusicl/1690

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Date:         Tue, 22 Dec 1992 15:35:46 CST
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From:         Gregory Taylor
              <vme.heurikon.com![e-mail]>
Subject:      Way too much about this comp thing
Comments: To: american.edu![e-mail]
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Just a couple of excerpts before I get wordy, I think this is
his Radio Gnomishness, Andy Wing:

>Is the issue here really Emusic vs traditional notation?  Or should is it
>be more like western classical vs all other music(s).
>
Or, is the question that the introduction of the technologies of recordings
and synthesis have given rise to kinds of musical behaviours that do
not easily map onto the tools and expectations of traditional western
musical behaviour in some of the same ways that non-western musics do?
Have we, in effect, created a culture in the midst of traditional musical
culture which is as problematic as any non-western culture?

>While the notation system used by Bach and Mozart is adequate for
>symphonies, masses, arias, or even gregorian chants, could that notation be
>used to 'put down on paper' anything that doesn't hold to western scales
>and ideas of tempo and tonality?  How do you notate a ney?  a didgeridoo?
>a sitar or a koto... or for that matter a chapman stick or the voice of
>David Hykes?  Can you notate 'Toras Dream' by the Bulgarian Womens Choir?
>
As the estimable Mr. McMahon, I believe, has pointed out, the problems of
"reconstructing" historical performances provide ample examples of the
shortcomings of traditional notations and musical strategies without
going outside of our own culture. The same might be said for choreography
for the same reasons.

>Were any of the following notated before performance/recording:
>Glenn Branca - Music for the first 128 intervals
Yep. Graphs, in some cases. In others [the piece you mention], it
uses a bar line/repeat system and some different symbols.

>Terry Riley - Harp of the New Albion
Fragments are notated [on a Mac, in fact]. Like LaMonte Young [a fellow
pupil of Indian singer Pandit Pran Nath], Riley wouldn't ever notate they
whole performance for the same reason you'd never transcribe a raga. It
doesn't have much to do with what's being done.

>Lou Harrison - La Koro Sutro - Notated the old way. Harrison is, after
all, a published composer. I don't know if he ever got the hang of
ketiphan or any other type of Indonesian notation. There are a number
of 20 century composers for non-western instruments who never bothered
to learn or use the notation systems of the non-western instruments
they used (Peter Schaat, etc.). I do think that Takemitsu's piece for
gagaku orchestra "In an Autumn Garden" *is* written in court notation,
whereas Stockhausen's "Jahreslauf" is not [I'm told he had to hire
someone to transcribe it for gagaku orchestra before it could be played].

>How useful are the written systems of Indian classical, Javanese/Balinese
>Gamelan or Tibetan throat singers to electronic musicians?

To the extent to which Hindustani/Carnatic or Javanese/Balinese traditions
*do* use notation at all, the stuff is of absolutely minimal use unless
you know the practice [these are the only two traditions in which I
really *have* much experience in trying to "read" music, I guess]. They
provide only the vaguest skeleton of what is to be done, and no instruct-
ions beyond the vaguest sort on how to proceed. One derives one's parts
on the basis of familiarity with the instrument rather than a series
of "instructions" by a "composer". Naturally, I find them quite suitable
for my purposes - i even use them whe I *do* write things down.

>I would hope that every composer works with whatever makes them
>comfortable.  Obviously Mike, you're uncomfortable with the tools at hand.
>Newton was uncomfortable with 'traditional' math for his laws of motion so
>he 'invented' calculus to suit himself.  Get the picture?  Humans are tool-
>makers.  And notation is just another tool IMHO, not a dogma.  Clearly its
>time we rethought the toolbox.

But you're assuming a total neutrality of the tool here, and that's not
my experience. The tool of traditional notation is a "gentleman's
agreement" over the period of some centuries about what is and is not
important. It is moreover intimately connected to a collection of
cultural behaviours which some of us may be quite "uncomfortable" with.
By suggesting that the tool is neutral, you can rest safely within the
bosom of a system which bequeathes its power and authority to you without
even thinking about it. Some of us think that the introduction of the
technology is "about" a lot more than just rethinking the "toolbox".
How about the room you store the toolbox in? How about that pit bull
you've got guarding the door? How come you don't have wrenches of some
given size? How come all of the tools are at least 50 years old? And
how about the custodian who sneers at you every time you drop by to
borrow that old, rusty skyhook that some wierdo left in the box after
borrowing it?

The question in its broadest form winds up being "What is history? And
what real use is it to us when we have a technological method at our
disposal which produces the objects [for we have in some cases come to
define the business of making music solely in terms of the production of
musical "objects", be they tape or scores or DATs or charts] without
requiring us to be subject to the power and instrumentalities which
result when any individual human activity becomes a cultural institution
(piano tuners, theory teachers, industry directories, music schools,
instrument rental places, MIDI standards, etc.......)?

Gerald Graff, in his recent and extremely interesting "Beyond the Culture
Wars", suggests something which may be of some interest to this discussion.
Although the book itself is really a broad critique of the current
Conservative fascination with "Political Correctness" and the "Canon"
with respect to the study and teaching of literature, Graff winds up
with an interesting notion: that a better way to involve students in
the study of literature is *not* to merely expose them to the "works"
of great literature that all dead, white, northern-European beneficiaries
of the Patriarchy decided upon, but to also teach them in terms of the
arguments *about* the texts themselves. My wife Jolanda (who is, herself,
a teacher of language and literature - Dutch) calls the traditional approach
the "secret code" theory of literature, in which a text has a single,
fixed meaning which the student reader is supposed to extract by virtue
of personal cleverness. The problem of course, is that this view of
the rules as a "code" involves a kind of aesthetic coercion; the student
is inclined to see the acquisition of the tools as being the *only*
way to "read" a text. Does this begin to sound a bit like the traditional-
ist argument now?

Seen in this way, the traditional arguments about pen/paper and the
vast amount of "knowledge base" descried as under seige by the more
extreme Luddite wing of the music establishment (or perhaps more
correctly, the "academic" wing or any group who derive their rank and
status by virtue of their ability to wield the traditional tools in
the context of their traditional uses) might look different; the advent
of new technologies allows for a near-complete end run around  the very
means by which one is "integrated" into the system. To the extent that
one focuses one's attention upon the *results* of one's activity, it
could be argued that technology is engaged in redefining (or destroying
in the more extreme argument) an entire kind of "musical" work in the
same way that 18/19th century automation displaced certain kinds of,
say, textile work.

Notice that I'm according the act of producing objects of utility the
same status as writing music. That's an assumption that a number of you
may disagree with as strongly as I do with the "music is more than *mere*
communication" school of Platonic thought. I want to be clear about that
in the interests of fairness. The baggage of Romanticism does very little
for me in terms of aesthetics, and I note more than a little latent
Romanticism strewn amongst the arguments; I'll bet that the problems of
maintaining an essentially Romantic aesthetic along with a view of
technology whose philosophical roots may well be anti-Romantic might be
at the root of at least some of the differences here (C.P. Snow was
right?).

But there's also this strain occurring in the followups/discussion
wherein folks discover that by personal investigation they've invented
the French 6th or "intuited" the reasons why parallel fifths aren't
cool [a pernicious doctrine, as any Sacred Harp singer or Georgian
of good breeding will tell you] as opposed to being taught and accepting
said cultural doctrine. Graff's argument is, as I read it, that by
teaching the "arguments" about an approach rather than it's "correctness"
one allows the student/reader/whatever to weigh for themselves the
reasons for inclusion: kinds of work [reading, composing] become
extensions of larger questions of meaning and activity. Parenthetically,
one also posits a world large enough to hold all the arguments. That
seems most convenient. The other advantage is that such a view of looking
at a doctrine or philosophy in terms of the collection of other assumptions
that surround it is that it's easier to spot versions of the argument
whose utility will be limited when transferred across different social
or cultural or temporal or technological boundaries. Most good Carnatic
singers probably don't care a rat's arse for "notation" along the lines
of *any* traditional argument for its primacy. The practice isn't rooted
in any of the activities that a notation-oriented approach would be
set up to enshrine. One could argue that issues of tuning/intonation,
timbre, or the more ritualized aspects of performance might also be
sadly deponent when parsed using notation, or that, say, "swing" would
also not map properly in terms of timing [come on, how many of you use
dotted triplets as much as you should?]. The scary part of this argument
for traditional musicians is, I think, the notion that the advent of
the technologies of recording/sequencing/synthesis have radically relocated
some of the traditional culture "markers" used to judge "musical" output
and, in effect, created another culture in the midst of the current one
where [like jazz] the "rules" are either different or don't apply or are
an explicitly anacronistic way of doing things [i.e. one only uses the
notation to honor the old ways or to build up valuable cultural karma
points to be traded in later]; in some way, it threatens the cultural
hegemony of traditional musical practice.

So, how might one profitably look at the philosophical splits in compos-
ition *outside* of the tradition of dead/white/northern yurrupean 19th
century/write it down and interpret the genuis of the composer thing?
Well, I'd perhaps suggest that an easy way would be to locate the roots
of the argument soundly within our own tradition as manipulators of
electronic media: the split between musique concrete and the early German
electronic work of Stockhausen and the Cologne radio boys. They're about
the earliest way I can think of where electronic folk begin with the
same basic kit of assumptions [the transfer of music to the physical
domain of tape, the use of the process of recording as a part of the
compositional enterprise, the availability of new resources as a result
of the process of creation] and proceed in different directions [the
French being the folks who opt for timbre, and the Germans who opt
for control and formalisms based on process. Could we thus talk about
why these two approaches are different *this* way without resorting to
the suggestion that the "post-literate" musician isn't a slacker
(note, of course, the subtle chauvinism of the word "post"; it implies
that one necessarily becomes a musician by dealing with the notation
*first*, as does our "history". Cute, but hopelessly ethnocentric.),
and also by avoid the "burn the elite" mode of backlash?

Of course, one could point out that the roots of this split are merely
rehashes of the arguments between Frech and German music itself: Ravel
and Schoenberg going at it with diodes. It would seem to me that we can
omit a fair amount of this and lose only the kind of authority that
we get from citing "historical" sources and looking cool and smarter
than poor Nancy with just her sequencer and her Kraftwerk albums. Besides,
we can discuss the split in terms of how it interacts with the technology
itself.

This is getting entirely too long and a little wordier than I'd have
liked, so I'll leave the issue of how a universe composed of persons
free to reinvent the rules of notation-based music is connected to
the Romantic or Scientistic notions of "progress" for those who are
wiser or come after me. You can also completely ignore this whole
morass of stuff, as well - another of Pluralism's blessed doctrines.