Re: [microsound] Mutek .[3]. - Return, Restoration, Repetition

["tobias c. van Veen" <tobias@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

hi Tad,

I won't go beyond this, as it was a private yet enlightening conversation,
but certainly one can find, even in the official calls for works from the
Canada Council for the Arts, and so on, a coda that specifies certain
parameters of "composed" music, and which often draw a distinction
specifiying "high-art" as non-beat, non-body-movement oriented, and "low
art" (as in ineligible for funding) as beat-oriented. This has been a
longstanding problem, one that is frustrating and, if I may, I think also
culturally dangerous, as I have tried to outline; this frustration has been
expressed time and time again in Canada--notably at least year's panel at
Mutek with members from the Cdn gov't funding agencies of FACTOR, the CCA,
etc. Basically, this is an institutionalized cultural power-structure that
one can see ties itself to racist and colonialist underpinnings
[Afro-American music, essentially, cannot be "high art," in fact, it cannot
be art at all...]. What is worse is that while FACTOR in Canada understands
the way bands operate, they have had a hard time understanding the
intralinked, globalized structure of electronic music, its methods of
recording [they are always surprised when electronic musicians don't need a
grant for studio recording-time], distribution, playback, etc.. Every year
they say: "we are looking into it." A cynical view would be that they've
been "looking into it" since it began -- and we can trace that origin back =
a
good 100 years.=20

As for the CMC, they have been very supportive, I think, and the free CDs a=
t
Mutek and the ad in the Mutek programme speak to this. However, there is
still much work to be done in breaking down the vertical structures of art
that operate in these institutions, the CMC included. A major tenet of this
coda is that of the "composition" in New Music.

best, tV

> On 5/31/03 at 8:28 PM, tobias c. van Veen <tobias@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>=20
>> In fact, after a few conversations today with a representative
>> of the Canadian Music Centre, it was interesting--well,
>> disappointing--to discover that such distinctions still anchor
>> the definition of a "composition" in New Music and
>> electro-acoustic. Beats are bad, not to be taken seriously, etc.
>=20
> Hey Tobias-
>=20
> Thanks for these very lengthy emails!
>=20
> Can you give any more detail to the snippet above? Anything you can
> quote?
>=20
> Best,
>=20
> Tad
>=20
>=20
> <tad@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
>=20
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>=20

tobias c. van Veen -----------
http://www.quadrantcrossing.org
http://www.thisistheonlyart.com
------------- tobias@xxxxxxxxxxx

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