Re: [microsound] Re: privilege, boundaries and class

[Peter Price <pprice@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Tobias,

I disagree with almost everything you are saying here which makes it a 
little difficult to know where to start. Part of it is that I think I 
must have a different way of parsing what I read. I am not getting some 
of the readings you are finding in your quotes from Adorno, and feel 
like you are missing (or ignoring) a lot in these quotes that I see as 
significant.

Much of this comes down to , as you have rightly pointed out, a 
question of the meaning of "rhythm." Adorno says he is using the word 
"rhythmical" in the "everyday sense" and the goes on to define this 
usage. He does this so that his meaning will be clear to those who 
might be used to thinking of the term with a broader musicological 
meaning. To make some sense of your comments it is important to note 
that your use of the term "rhythmic" is also of this "everyday sense." 
So we can with your permission include you in a quote like

> To play
> rhythmically means, to these people, to play in such a way that even if
> pseudo-individualizations--counter-accents and other
> "differentiations"-occur, the relation to the ground meter is 
> preserved. To
> be musical means to them to be capable of following given rhythmical
> patterns without being disturbed by "individualizing" aberrations, and 
> to
> fit even the syncopations into the basic time units.

A modern paraphraze of this might be "a music is rhythmic if any 
musically illiterate wanker can nod his head to the beat." Actually 
your understanding of "rhythm" is even more reductive than the 
understanding Adorno was complaining about, because at least back in 
the day popular dance music could be in either duple or triple meter 
over a broad range of tempos. I am willing to bet that when you say 
"rhythm" you mean a steady four on the floor within a tempo range of 
100-160 beats per minute, and likely furthermore a structural 
organization (if one exists at all past the meter unit) emphasizing the 
logical units of binary code: 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64 etc.

Can great music be made within these restrictions? Of course. I am a 
huge fan of....fill in your own blank here.

But if this is what "rhythm" has come to mean than we certainly have 
lost a lot of musical possibilities. That you prefer your music 
structured this way is understandable...it is closely related to the 
functioning of our machines, the rectilinear grids of our cites, and 
yes to the bilateral symetry of our bodies....but not for instance the 
triple meter beating of our heart.

The tendancy to try and naturalize industrialized dance music with 
mythic third world purity and natural "rhythmic" cycles of the planet 
is particularly misguided it seems to me as neither the natural world 
nor remaining pre-literate cultural forms are organized in ways that 
mimic the functioning of our machines.

You complained about Adorno turning aesthetic critic into ethical 
critique. But I feel this much more strongly in your writing...for 
instance below...


> However, when he attempts to turn aesthetics to ethical critique,
> he is not so much generalizing as condemning an essential aspect of
> existence: the rhythm of repetition that, one comes to realise, 
> touches our
> world .. the sun up, the sun down .. we dance, we drink, we sleep, we 
> make
> love .. Adorno's lack of understanding of rhythm-- no, scratch that -- 
> that
> he can't FEEL rhythm worries the shit out of me .. how did Adorno make 
> love
> without rhythm? How did he dance in bed? How did he see the sun 
> everyday?

In your schema here its almost like you are denying the very personhood 
of someone if they don't share your very reductive understanding of 
"rhythm."


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