good instruments vs good music

[Kim Cascone <kim@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

> I'm saying what makes something good is the way it's used.  If we have
> an easy to use tool, but nobody ever uses it to make something good,
> doesn't that mean it's really a bad tool?
no...it just means that no-one has made good art with it yet...you have to
first ask: "easy to use" for who? and then what makes a "good" tool

>  Stradivarius designed his
> violins for music that had already been written and was already accepted
> at the time as good.  Because there was already a definition of what is
> good, he knew how to design the instrument.
yes, but he was also a notoriously bad violinist...so by your logic if only
he played his violins (badly) then his violins could be considered "bad"
tools...

> A stradivarius violin would never have been considered history if they were
> designed to make it easy to play avante garde squeeks but were used to
> play bach.  It wouldn't work.
your confusing traditional->conventional repertoire with extended
techniques...one is an extension of the other and different qualities of
instruments will yield different results...see: Tom Waits, Keith Rowe, Fred
Frith, Derek Bailey etc

> Notice the direction I'm moving in; good instruments come from good
> music, not necessarily the other way around.
"good" is not the same as conventional...pianos came about because previous
keyboard instruments couldn't be heard by all people in larger groups
(people in the rear of the audience had a hear time hearing harpsichord
music for example)...instruments are invented/improved/developed for a
variety of reasons...and most instruments don't have a repertoire until
after they are invented...so how could "good" instruments be derived from
"good" music if the music for that instrument hasn't been written yet?

>  If we don't ever have good
> music there is no way to define an instrument as good...I would venture
> to say that if no good music is ever made on an instrument than we can
> define that instrument as bad.
sorry, but this is starting to sound like "chicken or the egg" to me... ;)

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