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Re: [microsound] memory and melody
dbuchwald wrote:
>But what about other cultures? I think Deleuze and Guattari also made the point that the territorializing effect of refrain and the hegemony and imperialist character of western cultures somehow go together. I simply can't imagine imperialism together with gamelan music. Gregory Bateson made the observation -- also in Bali if I remember correctly -- that there are cultures not driving towards climaxes but aiming for a continuous balance of dispersive forces, surfing so to speak the wave between chaos and order; while melody and compositions striving for a development and culminating with a climax are much more interested in creating a strong difference between inside and outside of a system:
>inside the song and the identity -- outside 'other', 'nature', 'not-me'.
>
I think that's true of Bali for the most part, but one has be careful
about reducing Balinese culture to the gamelan, as if the Balinese
simply live in that tradition only. Or as if the gamelan operates the
same in Bali as it does in Yogyakarta. These days, the Balinese trot
out their traditional music for tourists and turn their radios on to
Javanese pop. One can caution against ignoring other cultures; but one
can also make the mistake of speaking for them. Things are complicated
in Bali as they are everywhere else.
Someone else was mentioning the dissonance employed in gamelan music in
order, apparently, to counter the claims for a western avant-garde of
progress. This claim is nothing new nor does it capture the essence of
what the avant-garde was. I could point to any number of other
"dissonant" musics, including pansori. Big deal. So-called
"traditional" musics, whether they live on in reality or are simply
trotted out to satisfy the commodified versions of "otherness" desired
by tourists are not really much in direct relation to the western
avant-garde practice of what someone here called the "bleeding" outside.
It's a different strain altogether and one where the rhetoric of
progress carries some meaning--even if the postmodern rhetoric of
exhausted possibilities has finally won the day.
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