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culture, aesthetics and books

At 1:32 PM +1100 7/2/02, I wrote:
> 
 and don't bother too much unless you have trouble sleeping... Musicology as
 it stands is a dusty old discipline still trying to grapple with post
 notational musics... How many musicologists do you see at electronic music
 gigs?

> Answer= 0



> Most musicologists don't listen to electronic music, let alone electronic
music from the past ten years. This is somewhat curious situation, given 


At 3:12 AM +0000 6/2/02, <brad@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> replied:


practice comes before theory...

well how long do they need....? Is 60-70 years enough time? In which case we should be starting to see a raft of good critical work on early electronic music appearing in the major musicology journals. I've missed it so far..., but i'd love to be surprised - i honestly would.



i hardly think people understand the
full philsophical, artistic and cultural impact of a particular work of
their own.  while i don't have a problem with people who speak about the
philsophical and aesthetic influences and ideas in their work, i
traditionally let others evaluate and posit what might a more solid or
well formed conception of a work within a greater context.



right, see below..


golo foellmer <golo@xxxxxx> replied:


i am sorry that i have to have to confess to be a musicologist.
so answer = 0 = wrong.
and in fact: i am not the only one, at least not in berlin, koeln, vienna...

while i agree to the center of your comment: musicology doesn't come very
close to electronic musics. even electronic music from the academic branch
coming out of those really, really old, historical studios is mostly
discussed by the composers themselves, not by musicologists. which is
actually ok, because obviously they are the only ones to understand the
technology involved. musicologists usually don't take dsp-classes.


haha... this is a good quote.. I think i should clarify what i meant by my rather dismissive comment. Firstly, I was referring to mainstream musicology, ie the departments that tend to be set up in conservatoria, university music schools etc.. whose research output is published through the major internationally refereed musicological journals. I was not referring to work published in journals like Leonardo Music Journal ,CMJ or media/cultural studies journals and the like... Incidentally, the bulk of the existing writings and those that appear in journals like CMJ/LMJ seem to be generated by practitioners/artists rather than by full time music critics/theorists and the articles more often than not are concerning the work of the writer... as opposed to being third party, arms length critical analyses (Kim's recent CMJ issue being an exception). For these reasons i don't really associate a journal like CMJ with the Musicology discipline. Its a computer music journal which to date has mostly been about technical reporting from composers rather than music criticism. If you look at the editorial boards, they are made up of composers who write occasionally (and mostly not very well IMHO).


If you and your colleagues are doing this stuff, I'd love to read some of it.. if you have anything in english. I can read german, but always need a dictionary!! (which doesn't help with po-mo language, but hey..). OUt of interest, have any of the mainstream musicology journals supported your work by publishing it? Its ok having all these specialist people running around doing stuff, but until it is published in the mainstream, it will not impact on mainstream discourse about music making and the disjuncture between practice an theory will continue to be as wide as it is...



but this branch is covered ok compared to non-academic electronic music.
people writing and talking about the latter mostly don't know too much about
how to dig into formal aspects of music, so they avoid it.


right, because musicologists are ignoring it and cultural theorists/media studies people/art critics are among the only ones who seem to be writing about it. I do think though that most musicologists (your self excepted) are not equipped to discuss this work as you say. There's not a lot of excuse for this in my view. Learning how to do good harmonic analyses of highly chromatic music takes a long time to learn , so assuming a musicologist needs to study/research to carry out their craft, why don't they start learning a little about the workings of electronic music...?

I sense that fear is breeding this ignorance to a large degree.. and secondly that the entire paradigm for western musicology is founded on the conventional notation based matrix which fails dismally in relation to most music after 1945 (neo-tonal/serial works being the exception). Art and media critics are used to inventing their own linguistic and theoretical devices to deal with the materials at hand. This practice has not really occurred in musicology which still often attempts to use outmoded or irrelevant tools to examine contemporary musical practice. There is no language of the world of timbre and spatiality - this poses a few problems for electronic music criticism...

Sorry if i appear too harsh, but i honestly believe the discipline needs a good kick up the pants.


 very often when
music is discussed, the whole talk is about who makes it, why it is made,
which social etc. circumstances influenced it and so on, garnished with some
descriptions of a sound layer or two. again, like in the academic branch,
the makers of this music seem to be the only ones to be able to discuss the
_music_. most other outcome is basically cultural sociology. that is fine,
but not enough. this world would be a better one if more musicologists took
dsp-classes!

my thoughts exactly.... or it would be nice if they learned how to use some software even... there is a plcae for the sociological work in order to understand the condition of music making, but there seems to be a complete absence of work which deals with music at any vaguely empirical level.

enough of this laziness...





--
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j  u  l  i  a  n     k  n  o  w  l  e  s
senior lecturer in music technology
electronic arts co-ordinator
school of contemporary arts (music), university of western sydney
web: http://www.geocities.com/socialinterior