Re: [microsound] |-| Re: // techniques ]]

[wrong john silver <wrongjohn@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Michal Seta wrote:

> And if you don't care about rules governing "traditional" music you need to
> know them all before you start breaking them through experimentation.  That,
> providing that experimentation for you means discovering NEW ways of doing
> things.  It is self evident that in order to discover new ways you need to be
> aware of all the old and present ways.
>

...though I probably came from the same camp as you I don't agree that its always a
benefit or given to study so-called traditional music so you can know what rules
you are breaking...that can be academic game playing: here's a rule, I'll overtly
break it in some contrived way, now it becomes a new accepted way to be
'experimental'... Evolution mostly innovates through random mutation than in the
course of a 'well-thought out experiment.' ...even science itself shifts mostly
because of total outsiders to the system. While I did want to understand the
structure of Mahler's 2nd Symphony or even some Messiaen suite it was as important
to take on Bartok as folk song and Xenakis as nihilistic math theory. Its as easy
to overanalyze a Beatles tune or transcribe a Hendrix track to what fucking end
but feel like you understand it and now can create the same thing yourself...this
is a lie. In fact learning the trade, the 'rules' and mimicking styles only
someday to make some slight variation of it is a waste of everyone's
earspace...unless of course one is some sort of historian or musicologist and
should just be up front about it. All the technique, training and analysis you
could ever do can never give you anything to say and maybe even less because your
music would be about that.....Indeed how did anyone ever make new music before the
age of the phonograph and radio!!!

--
wrongjohn

http://www.FreeNoise.org