[no subject]

> ...

> 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

there is my online essay *Soft Music* at http://crossfade.walkerart.org
while it is not glitchy, but netty. the other things i wrote (mainly about
sound art and networked music) are in german. i send pdfs on request.

and in fact, there have been several fine books on sound art during the last
five or more years. then there is a german journal especially worth
mentioning: *Positionen*
they had thematic issues on subjects like *visuals/sounds/clubs*,
*material*, *places*, *internet*, *record playing*, and the most recent was
*remix*. and since stylistically they move between musicologically
acknowledged art music (acoustic + electronic alike) and branches coming
from club music (not acknowledged) they do for some degree reach the
conservative basis of musicology: at least some people realize topics like
these exist. 

but you are very right that these things don't appear in the reviewed
journals, the ones that build the body of musicological power.
at a conference of the big german musicological society in halle 3 years
ago, a researcher showed videos from techno parties and talked about their
visitors like about fascinating insects. there was some insight, like in
scratching or filtering techniques, but for the rest it was incredibly far
from the subject. that is amazing.

and i think it is pretty clear that this all _still_ has to do with old
ideas of perfection, that there once was an incredibly wise knowledge, and
don't try to go beyond that today, you will fail!
there is this nice story when kids who got told about 20th century composers
said: *oh, i didn't know that there are composers who are not dead.*
that is the our modern humanistic education. prosit!

> 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...

maybe you are even very right about asking this the way you do. it seems i
got used to the fact that of course the major journals never print these
subjects. but then, considering all those many note counting and date
comparing nerds, i get the clear feeling that my subconscious played me a
sublime trick by making me avoid to even think about publishing in there.

i think these journals are mainly about a completely different idea of art,
and maybe this is where kims remark about Carl Dahlhaus' article on
*Absolute Musik* was meant to come in: according to Dahlhaus, the paradigm
of absolute music shapes all of our judgements, although its success was in
parts a reaction against bourgeoise sentimentality... however, it took over.

> 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). 

that is what i mean above: there is this idea of a perfect art piece,
autonomous from the never perfect RL. who would want to give up such a
promising idea, such a relieving belief? so basically it's a religious
question! (like the one between pc users and macintosh users ;-)

> 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...

do you know any examples which have successfully tried to do better?
you don't win too much with sonographic analyses, imho. so what is left?
i do my analyses basically by the description of underlying concepts. that
is in fact pretty far from music, from the aesthetic perception.
but empirical studies seem to show that the traditional instrument of
musicological explanantions, the formal analysis, does not really explain
very much of what is perceived, very much less than assumed for a long time.
so?
 
so i agree to kick musicology's pants very lively. but i have no idea where
we are then. 

muso-greets.
golo