Re: [microsound] State of Music

[pprice@xxxxxxxxxxxxx]

Dear Tobias,

I will not respond to the first 3/4 of your post because frankly I don't understand it. You are obviously a more erudite individual than I am. I will respond to the following however...


> .....HOLA! Disco as 'western'? What, Africa just jumped into Germany? That's
> later--that's post-Detroit AfroGermanic. The EVENT of sound might require
> not a reduction to disco, but an opening to jazz and disco's isomorphic
> descent from the experience of transatlantic displacement, the diaspora and
> memorialized slavery.

If disco is not western, what is it. I think your idea of "isomorphic descent from the experience of transatlantic displacement," etc. is perhaps a racialist romantic fantasy. Can you honestly deny that Motown is immeasurably closer to Mozart than to ANY traditional african music. I am not an ethnomusicologist but I know of no traditional  african culture that uses equal tempered major and minor scales. I know of no traditional  african culture that uses the "functional harmony" of western classical musics "common practice period." And one could continue looking at melodic patterning and structure, etc.

I was trying in earlier posts to make a distinction between style and actual significant structural change. I think that your "isomorphic descent" issue is if anything a question of style. I wonder if you are being influenced by a kind of Metaphysics of funk, where the true, the absolute, the good, streams from mother africa to shake the booty of the white man.

Furthermore I am not sure why "blackness" should be more associated with disco than say "gayness," or cocaine consumption for that matter.


well, thats enough for now.

peter




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