Re: The women of microsound (long ramble)

[Gregory Taylor <gtaylor@xxxxxxxx>]

Thankfully, most folks here have made a clear
distinction from the first about microsound and
gender rather than microsound and sex (although,
for all I know, there's lots of offscreen sniggering).
Questions about that socially constructed gender
stuff are generally complicated for anyone who's
not particularly given to hamfisted generalizations,
especially in light of the notion that it may not be a
matter of general concensus what microsound itself
is; we'd be having problems describing both the
thing in its flight, and the net into which it falls. The
hamfisted approach would probably involve some
sort of sloganeering about how all formal systems
are somehow shadows of the big bad patriarchy
and how microsound, with its perceived formalist
leaning, would therefore be just another tool of
danglers everywhere to dom-dom-dominate and
opress etc. etc. I'm personally not necessarily so
inclined, in part because it seems to me that post
modernisms in general don't have the easy excuse
of claiming that all formalisms are inherently a
Modernist Recovery Enterprise. I can imagine
ways in which one could construct Queer formalism
or any number of epistemic or ideological shades
for a microsound manifesto. Or, alternately, some
view in which the apparent "genre" is actually a
confluence of smaller communities of one aesthetic
sort of another who have negotiated a kind of
public and communal understanding among themselves
that they share respect for or interest in a certain
kind of acoustic object - the "formal" quality of the
work winds us being the mechanism of mediation
between the 0bpm and neoformalist and lowercase
sound and site recording microcultures. That last
one is my working view, by the way.

None of this is much use to those pining for
microsound-loving girls or boys, is it? The more
broadly useful strategy [and I confess that this is
somewhat hypothetical, since I'm one of those
awful people who's been legally wedded to my
best friend in the Old Traditional Fashion for a
*very* long time. I am, thus, hopelessly boring
and have had a long time to try to explain my
interests to a willing and adventurous listener who
*still* sings songs out of the Dutch Reformed
psalmbook she learned as a kid in Dutch gradeschool
really quietly under her breath during long car trips,
although she really seems to like some of the
material] would be to refine your ability to communicate
more generally - to make a broader account of the
things you love and care about and work at, and why.
While one can *never* assume that this will always
result in the increase of an audience, a side effect of it
will be that *you* will have a better idea of it, and that,
in the long run, *you* will be better at communicating
your enthusiasms and affections more generally -
which includes communicating your affections and
enthusiasms for possible micropartners. It's been
my experience that people are generally generous
and open to people who can manage to speak their
hearts, and that anything which develops that is of
broad and general use. Win win. Oops. That's
Patriarchal, isn't it? :-)

Man, I do go on, don't I? Sorry.

gregory

PS> a book which has been extremely helpful in
clarifying my thinking [if you can call it that] on
the subject is Ian Hacking's "The Social Construction
of What?" - a book written in bracingly clear and
common English that goes to some really rareified
places and shines a light.
_
knowledge is not enough/science is not enough/
love is dreaming/this equation/Gregory Taylor/
WORT-FM 89.9/Madison, WI/ http://www.rtqe.net/