Re: [microsound] physical filter

[billashline@xxxxxxxxxxxx (Bill Ashline)]

Kenric McDowell <kenricm@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

>Thanks for clearing that up. I get it now: The precise execution of 
>musical ideas without dramatic presentation fails to meet the 
>expectations of an audience accustomed to theatricality.

That's part of it, Kenric.  The other part has to do with the relationship between one's ideas and one's tools.

>
>My contention is that the physical relationship to an instrument is not 
>completely motivated by theatricality and that it does in fact have a 
>lot to do with the creation of sonic concepts. These are two assumptions 
>that deprive us of an area of potential thought and exploration in music 
>making.

The issue had to do with proficient motor skills.  Certainly one needs motor skills to use a computer.  That's obvious.  But when it comes to making music a computer allows a more "immediate" relation to the ideas.  Until the computer came around, the only thing that approximated such a concept would have been the analogue experiments in electronic music that came earlier.  Before both of these things, if you could not play a musical instrument with some facility, you had, ipso facto, no musically productive life.  And if you could play with some facility, your concepts were always mediated by the sound of your instrument of proficiency.

>The presumed removal of the body from the process of creation is in 
>itself a filter.

Who's trying to remove the body?  We're trying to remove aural limits to perception of new aural concepts and the limits that the body imposes to the delivery of such concepts.  It's not the body that's the problem; it's the container--the one that said that if you couldn't "play" conventionally, you had nothing whatsoever to say.
-- 
His face is turned towards the past.  Where we preceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet.  The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed.  But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them.  This storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward.  This storm is what we call progress.
--Walter Benjamin on the Angel of History

You can always rely on America to do the right thing, once it has exhausted the alternatives.
--Winston Churchill

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